From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Mar 21 2003 - 17:35:35 MST
--- Amara Graps <amara@amara.com> wrote:
> > House restaurants have renamed french fries "freedom fries."
>
> I confess I don't understand these actions. I doubt that 'french
> fries' have anything to do with the French people. I suspect that it
> is an American invention, like 'french toast' is probably an
> American invention. (French people don't have french toast in their
> recipe books.) This sort of cultural naming of food is not limited to
> Americans, Hawaiians don't have Hawaiian toast, either, which you can
> find on many German menus!
Actually, "French Toast" was once known as "German Toast" or "Bavarian
Toast" in many locales, up until WWI, when Woodrow Wilson's propaganda
machine proposed changing the names of such things, which included
nationwide dropping of umlauts from family names, the closing or
renaming of Germanic businesses, and the changing of "Hamburger" to
"Salisbury Steak", a term which continues to be used by some upper
crust Americans who are too snooty to have pedestrian tastes for ground
chuck.
A pundit proposed the other day that since we don't want to change
French Toast back to German, that it now become Bulgarian Toast... ;)
=====
Mike Lorrey
"Live Free or Die, Death is not the Worst of Evils."
- Gen. John Stark
"Pacifists are Objectively Pro-Fascist." - George Orwell
"Treason doth never Prosper. What is the Reason?
For if it Prosper, none Dare call it Treason..." - Ovid
__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop!
http://platinum.yahoo.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Mar 21 2003 - 17:45:15 MST