Comment by solatic
9 hours ago
> “There were pictures of huge mountains of ‘earth apples’,” she recalled, using the word Erdäpfel, an affectionate term for the potato sometimes used by Berliners
Fun fact: the Hebrew translation of potato, תפוח אדמה, is the portmanteau of "earth" (אדמה) and "apple" (תפוח).
If you should ever be so fortunate as to have too many potatoes, see if you can shred them with a food processor and combine with onion, egg, salt, and pepper to make potato kugel, which freezes exceptionally well.
The French term for potatoes is also ‘earth apple’: pomme de terre
I'm fairly sure that is the origin of Erdäpfel. We certainly thought this was a funny name for potato when we learned French in Scotland :-)
When I learned German the word for potato was Kartoffel.
Kartoffel is the standard German word.
Erdäpfel is used in many dialects and has plenty of variants.
Actually the various different words for potatoe and their distribution across Germany, Swiss and Austria is linguistically quite interesting (see this map [1]).
The legend is in German and roughly translates to (from top to bottom):
- Potatoes
- Ground pears
- Earth apples
- Earth pears
- Hearth apples
[1]: http://stepbysteplingue.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/karto...
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I suppose this "earth apple" formulation coming up in several languages is partly because potatoes are from the New World, and Old World languages won't have a "traditional" word for them. Whereas in English it's basically a loanword.
It also makes more sense when you realize that 1) pomme in older French meant fruit generally, not apples specifically, and 2) sweet potatoes were introduced to Europe well before white potatoes were. So "earth fruit" seems fitting.
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In Chinese one word for potato is "earth bean" 土豆 (the other word is "horse bell tuber" 马铃薯)
Diverging but funny: "pommes de route" is a french-canadian colloquialism for horse droppings (on the street - "road apples")
Polish is ziemniaki, where ziemia is earth.
So just “of the earth”?
french fries are pommes frites. the french term is also used in germany (though sometimes shortened to pommes or fritten).
Dutch is aardappel. Fun fact: there's a programming language called Aardappel: https://strlen.com/aardappel-language/
Potatoes originated from the Americas, so I suppose that word was created in the past 500 years. But even for modern computer names, I would thing old languages would just use amalgamations like that.
Checks
Wiktionary says it was in Old High German a thousand years ago, but defines that word as "pumpkin, squash, melon", which is strange since pumpkins are New World too.
Squashes are New World, but gourds and melons were grown in the Old World (Wikipedia says brought to Europe during the Roman era).
>make potato kugel,
This seems very similar to a hash brown breakfast casserole in the US.
the same in many languages, french pomme de terre, greek geomilo,