Opinion – Cozinha Grossa: Long live the king’s sausage!

After Elizabeth II’s death, the world’s attention turned to the firstborn Charles. More specifically, to the peculiar hands of the new King of England – with a dozen turgid, plump, reddened fingers.

This is what is jokingly called, in English-speaking countries, “sausage fingers”. The Brazilian press, this Sheet even speculated on His Majesty’s reasons for sporting “sausage fingers.” It’s not the best translation.

The English word “sausage” applies to both sausage and sausage. For Anglophones, the two belong to the same category of sausages.

In Brazilian Portuguese, “sausage” refers to cooked sausage, made with a mass of processed meat until it becomes a smooth, uniform paste. The rest is all sausage.

When an Englishman or American just says “sausage”, he is usually referring to sausage. Sausages are the “little fingers” that a New Zealand butcher put up for sale to honor Charles III.

To speak specifically of sausages, outsiders often use the expressions “hot-dog”, “wiener” or “frankfurter”.

The difference between sausage and sausage goes beyond semantic perfumery. It is a false cognate –a word that leads to mistranslation– that created a unique habit in Brazil.

All over the country, tourist and business hotels serve sausages in tomato sauce at the breakfast buffet. They think this is the custom of the gringos. They try to please foreign guests with a children’s party hot dog.

But the “sausage” that Americans eat for breakfast is sausage or something more or less similar – because the seasoning is nothing like the Tuscany of barbecue.

Tourists are confused by our morning hot dog. They eat, they like it, but they don’t understand shit. Brazilians fill their plates and think they are international as hell.

This lapse in translation is reasonably common when one wants to reproduce a foreign recipe without knowing its origin.

One night many years ago, a colleague and I walked into the last open bar in the old hull from Seville. Just us and the owner of the bodega – which in Spanish means “winery”, but in Portuguese it’s a real birosca.

The bar had a bottle of cachaça, something unusual outside of Brazil in those days. We approach the tavern. He awoke from his lethargy to enthusiastically serve unexpected outsiders.

“I make an excellent caipirinha,” said the Spaniard. We mumbled and punched the mahogany counter: “Send two.”

We were given two glasses of dark brown liquid and some lemon wedges. What the hell was that cabrón? The Andalusian had read somewhere that the caipirinha was made with cane sugar – and the only cane sugar he found was brown.

Returning to real little hands: despite the imprecise translation, the word “sausage” also describes Charles III’s fingers well. Someone, in the old west of social networks, stuck “mandioquinha fingers”. evil.

(Follow and like Cozinha Bruta on social networks. Follow the posts on Instagram and twitter.)