Comment by alephnerd
17 hours ago
The recipe is also similar to Hamedh [0], a delicacy in Iraqi and Baghdadi Jewish households. The only major difference is the addition of tomatoes thanks to the Columbian Exchange, and rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet.
On that note, in Arabic, Farsi, and Hindustani the word for Tomato is essentially shared (tumatar/tamatimu) with the English word "tomato".
But anyhow, a lot of home cooking and traditional meals actually have a pretty long history.
[0] - https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2000/12/12/hamad-iraqi-b...
> rice - which would have not been cultivated or traded in West Asia yet
Surprisingly it was still imported in surprising quantities nearly 1000 years before it started to be cultivated. Not significant enough quantities for it to be a common staple, but still an interesting tidbit
One day, someone - someone like you, maybe, someone with the Hacker Nature - was looking at the rice they'd bought and thought "You know what, it just *cannot* be all that difficult to just grow this stuff here, it costs a fortune to import. How hard can it possibly be?"
So they set to digging irrigation trenches, and had a go at it, and maybe a couple of shitty harvests later they'd got the trick nailed.
And here we are.
Actually, in Persian, tomato is literally translated as “western plum”. This is common in our language as we usually say “western” or “foreign” as a prefix to many things that were introduced to Iran (strawberries, sit-style toilets, etc)
As an aside, tomatoes are golden apples (pomodoro), and oranges are Chinese apples (Apfelsin) in some languages.
A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples or, in GP’s context, stone fruit as “reference” points.
Everything is an apple, it seems. You also have earth apples (pomme de terre in French, aardappel in Dutch) for potatoes, grenade apples (pomegranate in English, granatäpple in Swedish, ...), pineapple, ...
Wait 'till you hear about melon - "μήλον" i.e. "apple" in Greek.
Melon, watermelon, pomelo, etc. The ancient Greeks themselves started that with the "golden apples of the Hesperides" a.k.a. oranges.
I guess any fruit people didn't know how to call was ... some kind of apple.
Wow, апельсин - apelsin(Russian) makes total sense now
Potatoes are called "earth apples" in french (pomme de terre) and a bunch of other european languages
Thank you for this. Knowing both those words, i could never work out the original/history of the terms.
>A lot of cultures appear to name botanicals using apples
don't know if it makes the point or upends it, but the fruit in the Garden of Eden wasn't specifically an apple.
Chinese does the same thing, using prefixes like 西 (western), 番 (foreign), and 洋 (foreign) for introduced items.
For tomatoes, interestingly, it has two common names that follow this pattern: 西紅柿, literally translated as "Western Red Persimmon", and 番茄, literally translated as "Foreign Eggplant".
Other produce examples include 番薯 (Foreign Yam) for sweet potato, 西瓜 (Western Melon) for watermelon, 洋蔥 (Foreign Onion) for bulb onion etc.
The recorded English-language etymology for "ketchup" suggests that the word comes from one of the Chinese dialect's word for tomato. Do you have any idea which Chinese word sounds like ketchup?
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Interesting, in various European languages those tend to be "Turkish": turkey hens (the bird called turkey now), Turkish corn (maize), Turkish beans (long beans).
Again, trade routes.
> Turkish corn (maize)
And in Turkish maize is called "Mısır", which comes from the country name Egypt (which is also Mısır in Turkish).
When Arabs conquered Egypt, they called it "Mishr" (مصر) which literally translates to "country" or "borderland". Maize was originally imported from the Americas, but because the trade route was through Egypt, Turkish people initially called it Egypt Wheat or Egypt Millet. In time, it is started to be called only Mısır/Egypt.
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In Panama they say Chino for foreign versions and in Cambodia they say barang which literally means Frankish (via farang from Thailand).
> maize
Which, in turn, originated in Mexico and didn't make its way to Europe until the 1500s.
Austrians call tomatoes Paradeiser, from an older word for Paradise.
There is a bird native to the Americas which in English is called the turkey, from its original name "Turkey fowl", because it was thought to come from "the east" of which Türkiye is the country with which most Europeans were familiar (due to being the closest). In Turkish, the bird's name references India ("hindi"); the same is true of other languages such as French ("dinde", from "poule d'inde", chicken of India).
Appreciate the clarification!
My pleasure! I also find languages very interesting and have had the opportunity to grow up in a bilingual home and learn French and German.
One more fun fact is that potato is a direct translation of the French “Pomme de terre” (“sib zamani” or “ground apple”).
Back to the actual topic, this is a recipe that’s definitely worth trying. Persian shallots are actually more garlicky than oniony. A great addition to lamb dishes and yogurt.
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It is not a “clarification”. You are wrong and are spreading misinformation. In Farsi, the word for tomato is gojeh farangi.
In the Levant we use the word بندورا "bindora" in Arabic for tomato.
Huh. Like Pomodoro. That makes sense.
Very likely from Pomodoro. In Arabic P is pronounced B or F.
In Russian we use tomat and pomidor interchangeably.
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