American Readers(and others too)

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Up until quite recently, the Sixties (and among traditionalists the Eighties), no Englishmen who considered himself or aspired to be a gentleman would be without his handkerchief. This was separate from the one carefully folded in the jacket breast pocket, which was just for show;* the functional hanky was kept in another pocket out of sight, or tucked into the sleeve.

Although I'm not English and few things are further from my mind than aspiring to be a gentleman I use handkerchiefs to this very day (often washed together with my trousers because I forgot to take them out of the pocket). Paper tissues are reserved for periods of extreme runniness, hankies take care of everyday business.

As for the question of cakes vs biscuits (not to mention cookies), I've come to understand that this is a matter of severe contention between the English and the denizens of their renegade colonies. Here in Germany we distinguish between kuchen and torten; kuchen are usually dry (except for fruitcakes and cheese cakes), whereas torten are topped with some sort of cream. A birthday cake in English (the kind of thing with candles on top) would in most cases be a torte in German.

Now Bilbo's cumin cake is translated as kümmelkuchen in my German Hobbit, which does sound strange. Spontaneously I would have said it's probably a kind of cracker (ha! another category!), but it could also be something akin to Alsatian flammkuchen (flatbread usually topped with sour cream + other ingredients, all baked together, similar to pizza) or zwiebelkuchen (a kind of quiche topped with onions and usually flavoured with caraway seeds, which is not the same as cumin but related, I believe).

Trust a culinary topic to draw me out of Entishness (Ent-ity?)!

[Galadriel55]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

As for the question of cakes vs biscuits (not to mention cookies), I've come to understand that this is a matter of severe contention between the English and the denizens of their renegade colonies. Here in Germany we distinguish between kuchen and torten; kuchen are usually dry (except for fruitcakes and cheese cakes), whereas torten are topped with some sort of cream. A birthday cake in English (the kind of thing with candles on top) would in most cases be a torte in German.

Pitchwife, I love you. You have just opened my eyes on why the Russian words for "pie" and "cake" don't really match up to "pie" and "cake" - a phenomenon which confused me for years. That is because the word for "cake" migrated there via Italian and German torte and has nearly the same sound and meaning, leaving the likes of fruit cake and carrot cake and other un-creamed cakes for "pie". You have just enlightened me to an etymological discovery, and that pretty much made my day.