The Vorschmack and Finnish phonetics
I am looking for a good Vorschmack (Vorsmack) recipe from the Swedish-speaking Finland or Baltic German recipe vault. The one that combines beef, herring and cognac.
I haven’t yet found what I’ve been looking for — and I think that I might post some photos if I do and decide to go ahead and make the proper Aryan Vorschmack (also misspelled as forschmack, forshmak, forshmack, though not yet forechemaque, though why eigentlich not?) but for now, instead of Vorschmack, I discovered a trilingual Finnish food blog. By the way, the blog is excellent, dishes are on the fancy side, but modern urban Finnish cooking, though not yet cuisine, tends to be sophisticated, “fancy,” and wholesome at the same time.
The Vorschmack recipe lacks the key ingredient, herring. It’s like bœuf bourguignon sans the beef. So I’d let it go. Oh, wait, it has anchovies. I am quite sure though that they mean Brisling sardines, not the proper mediterranean anchovies. So maybe, just maybe, I’d give it a try one day. Though I usually feel sorry for the lamb (I also feel sorry for calves, and so I avoid veal).
What grabbed my attention was the fact that the lamp error was not a simple misspelling or a “typo” (the letters “b” and “a” are quite far apart on the keyboard) or a slip, Freudian or otherwise, but a phonetic mishap. Finns don’t really differentiate between certain consosants, and corresponding letters which represent those consonants, namely p and b, z and s, sh and je. Pankki in Finnish is not a pan key or a punk but a bank. Hence the lamp vs lamb mishap is natural although substituting a lamp for lamb in a recipe may be not.
By the way, inspired by the Finnish recipe, I made some Vorschmack yesterday though I used mature beef instead of lamb. You see I feel sorry for (the lamb). And coincidentally I don’t have a strong lamp in my kitchen so I couldn’t take photos. I’ll do that today though because I still have some leftover Vorschmack. I had a small company over here and we’d shared some Vorschmack canapés along with a selection of vodka shots.
The Vorschmack came out really good.
A promise that a recipe will eventually follow. Along with some photos.
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