Spices

I recently had the pleasure of home-made chai tea: Tea with cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and fennel seeds. It was delicious, but it was also the first time I'd used cinnamon sticks, and it was pretty obvious it was...tree bark. That got me reading about other spices, and some interesting facts:

• A spice is a dried seed, fruit, root, bark, or vegetative substance primarily used for flavouring, colouring or preserving food.  (Herbs are the leaves.)
• The spice trade was always lucrative, and made many port cities (such as Venice and Alexandria) exceedingly rich.  In the 15th century, the Europeans sought to circumvent the normal land routes, driving the trans-global sailings (and incidentally, the discovery of the New World).
• The Maluku (or "Spice") islands in Indonesia originally accounted for all nutmeg and clove trees in the world.  In Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries, cloves were worth their weight in gold.
• So valuable was nutmeg during the 16th century, the Dutch traded their interest in the New World with one of the Spice Islands from the British, to gain a monopoly on nutmeg trees. (The British promptly renamed "New Amsterdam" to "New York.")
• In the 17th century, The French and British both smuggled nutmeg seeds from the Spice Islands to their colonies in Mauritius and Granada and started successful plantations, bringing prices down significantly.
  
• Like most nut tress, the nutmeg fruit consists of a casing (or "rind") which encloses the nutmeg seed.  In addition, the seed has a reddish lave covering, which is mace. (See photo.)
• Cloves are the dried flower buds of an evergreen tree.
  
• Apiaceae is a group of aromatic plants with hollow stems, and includes anise, caraway, carrot, celery, chervil, coriander/cilantro, cumin, dill, fennel, hemlock, parsley, and parsnip.
• In the UK, coriander refers to the leaves or seeds of Coriandrum sativum. Cilantro is the Spanish word for coriander. However, the US has confused the two, and refers to the leaves as cilantro and the seeds as coriander.  The plant is native to the Near East and southern Europe.
• The ancient Greeks kept ground cumin at the dining table, much like pepper is today
• Caraway "seeds" are actually its fruit.
• Licorice (UK "liquorice")  is the root of Glycyrrhiza glabra plant, which is a legume (related to beans and peas). In the US, only "black licorice" is made from licorice extract; red licorice isn't licorice at all.
• Cinnamon is obtained from the inner bark of several trees. "True cinnamon" is native to Sri Lanka; however, the more common cinnamon is from the cassia tree, also known as "Chinese cinnamon."  Cinnamon bark is one of the few spices that can be consumed directly.
• Allspice is the dried unripe berries of Pimenta dioica, . The English thought it combined the flavour of cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.
• Chocolate is produced from the fermented seed of the cacao tree, native to Mexico, and has been cultivated since 1100 BC. (Unfortunately the Aztecs didn't know about sugar.)  Today Western Africa produces almost two-thirds of the world's cocoa, with the Ivory Coast growing almost half of it.
• In the 19th century, John Cadbury developed an emulsification process to make solid chocolate, creating the modern chocolate bar.
• Vanilla is derived from an orchid, primarily from Mexica, which the Aztecs also cultivated.
• Saffron is a spice derived from the flower of Crocus sativus. Each crocus bears up to four flowers, and each flower has three stigmas, which are then dried. Today, Iran accounts for 90% of the world production of saffron. Saffron is the most expensive spice in the world.
• Coffee is made from the roasted seeds of the Coffea plant. Coffee's energizing effect was probably first discovered in Ethiopia, but coffee cultivation first took place in southern Arabia.  The first evidence of coffee drinking in the 15th century.
• Fenugreek seeds are often used in Indian food, but also for flavoring artificial maple syrup.
  

Diamond Jubilee city

Last year I mentioned Reading (pop 370,000) was a town, not a city. That's because in the UK, the title of 'city' is an honorific given by the Crown, and has nothing to do with population size. In fact, one city has less than 2,000 residents! For the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, 3 towns were given city status, one in England, Wales, and Scotland. Sadly, Reading was not selected; Chelmsford (pop. 120,000), in Essex, was. It will likely be many years before the opportunity comes up again; the last time was in 2002 for the Queen's Golden Jubilee.

By the way, London is not a city, but it contains two of them: the City of London (pop. 7,000) and City of Westminster (pop.108,000)
If you want to understand more about this bizarre situation, watch this fantastic video:

-our

As you know, words like colour, flavour, harbour, honour, humour, labour, neighbour, rumour are spelled differently in the US and the UK.  Oddly, most of these words were spelled -or or -ur until 1066, at which point the French Normans changed the spelling to -our.  Of course, that was 500 years before Columbus re-discovered the Americas, so it is only coincidence that Americans switched back to the "original" spelling, and primarily due to Noah Webster whose 1828 dictionary was less a reflection of current spelling and more a political statement about becoming distinct from the English empire.

Of course, it isn't so simple.  Words like contour, velour, paramour and troubadour retain the u in the US, while words like chancellor, ambassador, emperor, governor, inferior, error, horror, mirror, tenor, terror, and tremor have lost the u in the UK.  America keeps the u in glamour but not in glamorous. Saviour is common in the US. Space Shuttle Endeavour has a u in it as it was named after Captain Cook's ship, HMS Endeavour. 

In the UK, the u is kept in neighbourhood, favourite, and honourable but dropped in honorary, invigorate, and laborious. The u is kept in  humourless but dropped in humorous.  Pearl Harbor is spelled without a u in Britain. "Savory" is an herb similar to sage, and is spelled the same in the US and UK, but the adjective savoury and verb savour have a u in the UK. An arbor (tree) is different than arbour (shelter).

Most interesting of all, though, is that honor is used at the end of the United States Declaration of Independence, even though the US was a colony and long before Webster had his say:

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

However, it seems to be a typo--in Jefferson's original draft it is spelled honour!

(Thanks, Wikipedia -- or is it Wikipædia?)

More English expressions

I haven't done this for awhile, although I should--Even four years on, I still hear new phrases, and if I don't write them down I will forget them.  So new phrases I've heard in the past week:

"Good innings" (as in "he had a good innings") -- a long and good life.  (In cricket, as in baseball, an "innings" is the time one team is at bat.)

"Hang fire" (as in "hang fire until tomorrow") -- the delay between pulling the trigger and the bullet firing.  Generally, this delay is not noticeable, but if there is a problem with the powder then it might be a few seconds -- just long enough for someone to open the gun and get a shattered bullet to the face.  This expression just means to wait for a while.

damp squib (as in, "Well that was a damp squib") -- a squib is a small explosive, similar to dynamite, that miners used to break coal from the rock.  If it got wet, it wouldn't ignite--hence a "damp squib" is anything that doesn't meet expectations. More interestingly, however, is that the film industry started using squibs to simulate explosions, and then switched to compressed gas as it was safer -- but referred to that as a "squib" as well.  Now squib is  a term for anything that expels gas quickly -- including the mechanism is an air bag. :-)

In a fug -- almost self-explanatory, a "fug" is a hot, stale, or suffocating atmosphere, and "in a fug" is feeling poorly.

totally chocka -- from the term "chock-a-block" meaning completely full.  (I love when idioms give rise to other idioms.)  While its origins are unclear, "chock" seems to come from the term "choke" and was used to indicate when a port was so full, nobody could move. The "block" refers to block and tackle, when a sail was raised to its fullest extent there was no more free rope and the blocks would jam tightly together.

Compassion fatigue -- Not an British expression at all, I first heard this one from Aung San Suu Kyi, and means "a gradual lessening of compassion over time." It was first diagnosed in nurses in the 1950s.

Guy Clark

I've been a big fan of Guy Clark ever since I heard his song, "LA Freeway" on (of all things) NPR.
... Adios to all this concrete.
Gonna get me some dirt road back street
If I can just get off of this LA freeway
Without getting killed or caught....

Another song of his, "Desperados waitin' for a train," started to resonate as my uncle got older, and now I have a hard time listening to it:

... I played the Red River Valley 
He'd sit in the kitchen and cry 
Run his fingers through seventy years of livin'...

I was 25 and my uncle was 69 the first time I went to see him. He was living in a small apartment with my aunt and a large dog named Jacque, had $11,000 in credit card debt, a part-time job as a security guard, and was almost completely deaf, but he was family.

... We were friends, me and this old man 
He's an old school man of the world 
And our lives was like some old Western movie 
Like desperados waitin' for a train...

Ok, so Guy Clark is not grammatically correct, but my uncle and I became good friends. After I got him a computer, I think I got an email every day for 10 years, and when he learned how to play Scrabble online he became a monster. Between visiting Dawn's mom and my uncle, that was our two weeks of vacation every year.
 
... One day I looked up and he's pushin' eighty 
He's got brown tobacco stains all down his chin 
Well to me he was a hero of this country 
So why's he all dressed up like them old men...

Thankfully, my uncle stopped smoking before I met him, and he was much too sophisticated to ever chew tobacco. He never dressed like an old man, although his shoes did become more 'comfortable' as the years progressed. He also had a (reasonably) full head of hair when he died, which gives me some hope. He liked to wear shirts that said things like, "In dog years, I'm dead" but since I gave him the shirt, I couldn't complain.

... The day 'fore he died I went to see him 
I was grown and he was almost gone.
So we just closed our eyes and dreamed us up a kitchen 
And sang one more verse to that old song...

I loved my uncle more than I could ever express, but I had to live my own life. After I got divorced, he often suggested I come live with him, and I probably would have if he lived anywhere other than the American South. I wanted him to move to California to be closer to my family, but of course he was too old to change. (In the end, I didn't give him a choice, but he didn't stay very long.)

There are many things that remind me of my uncle, not least of which are four pictures I took from his home and hung in mine; a hat and raincoat he gave me when I moved to England; any jazz music (especially Chris Barber); his WWII medals; Scrabble. But the Guy Clark song seems to sum it up perfectly: 16 years of two people, separated by time and distance, like desperados waiting for a train...

Wheat is delicious

That's it, that's all I had to say. Until you stop eating it--or try substituting for it--you don't really appreciate it. I always assumed people started eating it because it was easy to store, not because it tasted good, but it really does. Plus the gluten makes it so incredibly flexible, no wonder why--5,000 years later--it's still a staple crop! Amazing.

Of course none of that means it's actually fit for human consumption, so I am still avoiding it, though I'm not freaking out if it's the only thing available. ("Better wheat than meat" is my motto.)

Now the next step is to start a fasting diet, eating less than 500 calories two days per week and normally on the other five. Having just enjoyed (?) a 25-hour fast over Yom Kippur, I know I can handle it, especially as you're allowed to drink and eat small portions. It's just a question of getting started and sticking to it, two things I've always found challenging.

Day of atonement

Today is Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, when you are to 'afflict' yourself by not eating or drinking, bathing or anointing, or wearing leather. More importantly, you are to recognize the wrongs you've created over the past year, and try to make them right. And lastly, many Jews spend the entire day in synagogue, some praying, some just socializing, most just being in the company of people as miserable as themselves. If you can imagine a room full of people who haven't showered or eaten in 24 hours, some would say that was atonement enough.

Looking back over the past 12 months, I have wronged some of the women I've dated, usually by ending the conversation without any explanation. I've often ignored the Sabbath, even though it was one of the most compelling reasons for converting.

But what I'm really sorry for is neglecting my mom, my whole family, and all of my friends. This is what I need to atone for.

Shana tova

Rosh Hashana is always celebrated on the first day of the seventh month of the Jewish calendar.  Why, then, did it occur on September 28 last year, and September 16 this year?  That's because the Jewish year is a modified lunar calendar, with each month corresponding to a lunar cycle, and every 2-3 years a "leap month" is added to adjust for the solar cycle. 

Now, even back then a clever clog could have calculated when the "leap month" would need to be included, and they could have planned for it, but of course that's not the way they did it.  Instead, they waited until Adar was finished, and then checked the ripeness of barley, fruits of trees, and the equinox.  If two of these were lacking (i,e. it wasn't spring yet) then the month of Adar became a "do over."  I'm not kidding--Adar becomes Adar I (with 30 days) and Adar II (with 29 days)!  That keeps the holidays in approximately the right season.

Now that I've told you all that, I should mention it has nothing to do with Judaism -- it was developed in Mesopotamia, and the Jews inherited it from the Babylonians.

Last October I mentioned Rosh Hashanah was defined in the bible as a day to rest and listen to horn blasts.  Somehow along the way that became defined as the new year for vegetables (as opposed to the new year for kings, animals, or trees) which then became defined as the day to advance the year; in other words, the new year for people (sort of).  Rosh Hashanah literally means, "head of the year" and it wlll be 5773 on Sunday evening.

And like every Jewish holiday, it involves community, prayer, and a meal.  We will eat apple dipped in honey (to symbolize a sweet year), greet each other with "shana tova" (literally, "good year"), and cast our sins into the water (actually, we throw bread into the river, but it's the symbolism that's important). 

And as with every major Jewish holiday, we shall light candles, drink wine, and eat bread before the meal. If that sounds familiar, it's because it is done every Friday night; the weekly shabbat meal is just as important (if not more so) in Jewish life as the once-a-year celebrations.  And I think that's beautiful.

So I wish you all shana tova -- or more specifically, Le'shana Tova Tikoteiv Vetichoteim which means "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year." It is believed that on Rosh Hashanah God starts to compile a "naughty" and "nice" list (where have you heard this before?) but leaves the books open for ten days until Yom Kippur, at which time they (and your fate for the year) are sealed.  It is a time for reflection, for apologizing, and for rectifying the wrongs of the year.

My regrets, as always, are not spending more time with the people I love.

Fireworks

If you don't mind sitting through a 10 minute video, the Thames festival fireworks were quite spectacular:

Radio silence

My aunt passed away June 15, and my uncle July 20.  It's been over a month now, and I really haven't been able to deal with it.  Of course I've carried on, as one does, but my heart hasn't been in it.  I sleep a lot, eat too much, and rarely go out.  Work has suffered, my social life has died, and I really haven't spoken with anyone.  I know at some point I'll snap out of it; I just didn't expect it to last so long.

Possibly it's because I haven't marked my uncle's death. My mother held a small service in California, but finances precluded me from attending.  My cousin plans to scatter their ashes in autumn, so hopefully I'll be able to be there and find some closure, but I don't know when that will happen. 

A lot has happened in the past two months, not least of which was the Olympics, but also Edinburgh, Liverpool, my friends Ellen and Jim, Derren Brown, Paul Simon, my new phone, security at the synagogue, etc. and I know I should at least acknowledge them, but I just don't have anything left in me. I did write about my uncle, but even that took such tremendous effort, and took me days to finish.

I'll end this with something my uncle said near the end: "I've been around a long time and I've learned that the only affairs that matter are affairs of the heart."  My uncle and I took completely different routes through life, so it's amazing we both arrived at the same conclusion.