The Linguist

@CIOL_Linguists WINTER 2023 The Linguist 33 OPINION & COMMENT From Moravian sparrows to executor's whips, reflections on the quirks in food names with a trip to Czechia MARTINA KLAPKOVA I will not deny it – I love food. Anything to do with food. Whether it's talking about it, reading about it or buying it. I even enjoy organising and labelling it – so much so that some of my disorganised friends have asked me to sort their larders and spice racks. I grew up in (what was then) Czechoslovakia in the 1980s. I'm one of 'Husak's children' – the generation born during the baby boom of the early 1970s under the rule of the Communist leader Gustav Husak. The choices in restaurants were somewhat limited back then and the names of foods were often ambiguous. In some cases, even born-and- bred Czechoslovaks wouldn't know what exactly the names on the menu meant. Cmunda po Kaplicku anyone? Unless you'd previously encountered this potato pancake filled with smoked meat and sauerkraut (also called bramborák), you wouldn't be able to work out what it is from the word cmunda. Confusing menus I didn't think much about the origins of such names until I took my husband and his friends to restaurants back home having lived in other countries for several years. In my experience, menus abroad are translated into English quite accurately nowadays. 'Broth with kidney balls' might not appeal to everyone, but it does tell you what it is. However, if I rewind to the year 2000, it was a different story. Many restaurants in Slaný, my hometown, were still serving traditional meals from the Communist era. The staff had little or no English; fair play to them for trying to translate the names at all! Translations were done literally and that's when it got confusing. One of the funniest was the 'executor's whip' (Katův šleh). What sounds like a threatening dish is actually an inexpensive meal of meat and vegetables. When our Irish friends visited, they panicked when the waiter brought an English menu with the peculiar sounding 'Moravian sparrow' on it. They couldn't believe that it had nothing to do with a cooked bird. In fact, the dish consists of roast pork with cabbage and dumplings. According to etymologists, it got its name in 1908 because cooked meat was thought to resemble small birds. Similarly Španělský ptáček (lit. 'Spanish bird'; Rinderroulade in German) is a beef roulade containing smoked sausage, mustard, gherkin, onion and a boiled egg. Eaten with gravy and dumplings or rice, it was apparently created by the Spanish chefs of Rudolf II, King of Bohemia (now Czechia) in the early 1600s. Today I would translate these meals descriptively – just as you would translate 'toad in the hole'. Drowned men and coffins No visit to Czechia is complete without a trip to the pub, where you may be offered a snack called utopenec (lit. 'drowned man'). There is no need to panic: this typical pub staple is a thick cured sausage pickled in vinegar. Served with a fresh slab of Czech sourdough, it's well worth trying. And a final tip for your pub visit: Czechs call 'chips' hranolky, while čipsy (pronounced 'chips') are crisps. In this case the translator would have to be aware of the conventions to be able to translate accurately. On to the sweet course, and perhaps the trickiest food to translate is the Czech classic rakvičky se šlehačkou or 'sweet coffins with whipped cream'. Shaped like coffins and served with whipped cream, these sweet hollow biscuits are perhaps so called because an excess of them might land you in a coffin of your own! Rakvičky are made with egg yolks and a lot of sugar – delicious with a hot cup of coffee as an afternoon pick-me-up. When I go back home, I am a bit sad to see that the majority of restaurants in Prague now serve international cuisine, and names like 'poke bowls', 'sushi' and 'tacos' are the norm. But more curious or epicurian tourists can still find places where time has stopped and you can order Spanish bird or Moravian sparrow. On the menu Martina Klapkova MCIL is a community outreach and support worker, and a former food scientist. TL © SHUTTERSTOCK

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