Apparently their beets looked the same as ours:
> The kind of beets used in such an ancient recipe should not be different from the beets we use today, even in name. We read in Dictionary of Assyrian Botany (by Campbell Thompson, 1948) that in the ancient Mesopotamian region it was called ‘shumundar,’ it was as red as blood, and has a spinning-top shape (pp. 49, 51).
In arabic they are called "Shamandar"
If it's any consolation, their lambs were nothing like ours.
This period is early enough that sheep weren't yet sheared.
Oh! So were sheep just for meat back then?
Maybe also for leather?
And in nature sheep drop their coats without shearing.
do they? there are reports of lost sheep which when found had a very thick fur or whatever the shepherds call it
Sorry, when I said in nature, I meant undomesticated sheep.
Domesticated sheep that get lost for a while don't magically learn how to shed their coat, yes.
Pretty much all domesticated sheep will cast their fleeces.
There are some breeds that don't, and obviously due to random genetics you'll get individuals that don't.
Sheep that don't cast their fleeces are damn near impossible to shear and are mostly kept for meat. Likewise, sheep that don't have much of a "rise" (see my other comment) and are difficult to shear quite often, uh, don't have a particularly long career, as it were.
Man shearing this one is a pain in the a$$. Hand me the sticking knife ...
No, the sheep were harvested for wool, but not by shearing. When they shed, we picked the shed wool from them.
Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.
> Modern sheep grow their wool continuously, but that took a while to breed in.
No they don't.
In the summer their wool starts to grow out much thinner, like maybe a quarter as thick - it's really noticeable. This gives what's called a "rise", a gap between the sheep's skin and the thicker coarser wool. Once that's high enough to get shears (or these days, machine clippers which are like a big beard trimmer) into you can shear the fleece off.
If there's no rise you haven't a hope in hell of cutting it.
If there's a good rise it practically falls off.
If you leave them long enough or if the rise starts growing in too soon, they'll start "casting" where their wool just falls off in big chunks. This is actually quite dangerous for them because it's itchy and they roll on their backs to scratch, and get stuck upside down with their legs in the air and suffocate.
And you thought sheep farming was easy and fun ;-)
I thought animal farming in general is an arcane science.
My friends have goats but they aren't farmers and they haven't got a clue how to care for them. The females sometimes are left with milk in their breasts after their young are weaned and one of my friends will get anxious about that and ask us to help her milk them. It's impossible. You can't milk a goat that doesn't want to be milked. If you push them too hard they lie down so you can't reach their teats and that's that unless you want to have three people lifting the goat up and another one trying to milk her while she squirms and kicks. I don't trust the milk either. Once in a while they succeed in milking a goat and when I tried the milk (after boiling it) it was sort of gritty, like it was mixed with sand. It was not impurities from the environment because I filtered it through a muslin so I think the animal may have had some infection like a mastitis or something that affected the milk's texture.
I bet farmers know exactly what to do about all that or probably they know how to get the animals used to milking when they're still young so that the won't resist it that much. I've watched videos of goats being milked and it looks almost effortless when a pump is used. The goats just line up in their feeding trays and then someone walks up to them from behind, pumps out their tits and moves to the next one, bish bash bosh. My friends don't even have a dedicated structure to feed the goats, we just throw hay for them on the ground so they end up fighting.
My friends really have no idea how to care for the goats, it's rather sad. The owner of the farm has even said he wants to get "wild" goats that don't need to be cared for. By that he means a herd of goats that have gone feral and roam the hills in a village nearby. He thinks because nobody actively cares for them and the herd persists that must mean the goats are somehow self-sufficient. I think that's a big misunderstanding. Domesticated animals need a lot of care one way or another.
I think I'd prefer to have sheep though, if I had animals. Sheep look much nicer than goats.
Intresting. In Hindi/urdu it’s called “chukandar”
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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, ...
It helps that Latin has the word pomus for fruit.
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?
My personal theory based on nothing more than the vibe of the thing is that it comes from the Malay/Indonesian word ‘kecap’ (which is pronounced almost identically to “ketchup”), the word for sweet soy sauce. This is soy sauce that is thickened and sweetened with palm sugar, and I could see European cooks attempting to replicate it based on the vague descriptions given by sailors, and ending up with ketchup.
Interesting, thank you.
It came from the Malay word, but the Malay word comes from Hokkien.
茄ke2 汁zap1, but if I remember it correctly, Dan Jurafsky believes it is from 喼git1 汁zap1, worcestershire sauce
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9iYwUh1Hdho
Not exactly a Chinese dialect, but Vietnamese calls tomatoes "cà chua": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/c%C3%A0_chua .
Are the Vietnamese and Chinese languages related? Or perhaps one of the two cultures was introduced to that fruit by the other, and thus preserved the name?
Not related at all in recent history and I have no insight on the etymology links but Vietnamese used to be written in a mix of original Vietnamese Chinese-style characters before they changed to a Latin alphabet with Colonialism and Communism so there was definitely contact.
Thank you
possibly Hokkien 膎汁 (kê-chiap, “fish sauce”) via Malay kecap ~ kicap “any dark clear sauce from soy, fish etc”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup#Etymology
In Chinese the use of 西 (western) often really means from the West compared to China so India/Central Asia/Middle East, which can be a little confusing at first if you are used to the word meaning "Western World".
For instance, watermelons come from Sudan/Egypt and thus arrived in China from the West long before Europeans visited.
Another example is The Journey to the West (Monkey King) novel which is also about travelling to India.
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.
I wonder what they call maize in Egypt then?
According to Kagi Translate, a term for maize that's specific to Egypt is "الذرة الشامية" (al-dhura ash-shāmiyyah) which could be directly translated to "Levantine sorghum". Can anyone with actual knowledge of Egytian Arabic confirm?
Also I had the idea that "Maize" might have come from "Mısır", but etymonline claims it comes from the native (Arawakan) name for the plant: mahiz.
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.
Thank you! In Hebrew we literally call the potato תפוח אדמה which is "ground apple". Now I know where the idea comes from.
It is not a “clarification”. You are wrong and are spreading misinformation. In Farsi, the word for tomato is gojeh farangi.
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.
Meanwhile English speakers joke about disagreements over the pronunciation of tomato
My favourite take on this. https://youtu.be/kcHKm0cm-jI?is=fqjBSNiJ2jYEXuq1