Лисички

These are my favorite mushrooms - лисички (lee-SEECH-kee, chanterelles). We have found baskets and baskets of them in the mountains east of Seattle and I always buy them at the market when we're in Russia.

I saute them in butter until all the liquid is gone, and then I add sauteed onion (from a separate pan) and salt to taste. Some people add sour cream, but I don't thinkit's necessary when you have meaty лисички. Serve with steamed or boiled potatoes.

We love mushroom-hunting in the late summer. Funny, but there is a fair amount of disagreement in Russian and U.S. mushroom books on which ones are edible. To be on the safe side, I stick to hunting the supermarket varieties.

Here is a list I put together of the Russian and English names for some common mushrooms and the Latin names linking them.

Russian common name	Scientific name	English common name
Шампиньон	Agaricus silvaticus	Button mushroom
Шампиньон тонкий, Шампиньон желтокожий	Agaricus xanthoderma	Poison yellow meadow mushroom
Лисичка	Cantharellus cibarius	Chanterelle
Лисичка ложная	Hygrophoropsis aurantiaca	False chanterelle
Лисичка серая	Craterellus sinuosus	Chanterelle
Белый гриб	Boletus edulis	Porcini, king bolete
Бледная поганка	Amanita phalloides	Death cap
Мухомор красный	Amanita muscaria	Fly agaric
Мухомор поганковидный	Amanita citrina	False death cap
Подберезовик белый	Leccinum aurantiacum	Brick cap, red cap bolete
Подберезовик обыковенный	Leccinum scabrum	Birch bolete
Масленок поздний	Suillus luteus	Slippery Jack
Масленок зернистый	Suillus granulatus	Weeping Bolete, granulated slippery jack
Моховик пестрый	Xerocomus chrysenteron	Red Cracking Bolete
Моховик зеленый	Xerocomus subtomentosus	Suede Bolete
Навозник серый	Coprinus atramentarius	Tippler’s bane
Навозник белый	Coprinus comatus	Shaggy ink cap
Навозник рассеянный	Coprinus disseminatus	Fairy ink cap
Навозник мерцающий	Coprinus micaceus	Glistening ink cap
Навозник складчатый	Coprinus plicatilis	Pleated ink cap
Вешенка устричная	Pleurotus ostreatus	Oyster mushroom
Вешенка беловатая	Pleurotus pulmonaris	Pale oyster
Сыроежка пищевая	Russula vesca	Bare-toothed russula
Сыроежка зеленая	Russula aerguinea	Tacky green russula
Сыроежка сине-зеленая	Russula cyanoxantha	Charcoal burner
Сыроежка сереющая	Russula decolorans	Graying Russula
Подгруздок белый	Russula delica	Short-stemmed russula
Подгруздок черный	Russula adusta	Wine-cork brittlegill
Опенок осенний	Armillaria mellea	Honey or oak mushroom
Опенок луговой	Marasmius oreades	Fairy-ring mushroom
Опенок зимний	Flammulina velutipes	Velvet foot (Enokitake)
Опенок серно-желтый	Hypholoma fasciculare	Sulfer tuft
Опенок летний	Kuehneromyces mutabilis	Sheathed wood tuft
Опенок Кандоля	Psathyrella candolleana	Pale brittlestem
Опенок темный	Armillaria ostoyae	Honey mushroom
Рядовка	Tricholoma caligatum	Booted tricholoma
Рядовка белая	Tricholoma album	White knight
Рядовка буро-желтая	Tricholoma fulvum	Birch knight
Свинушка тонкая	Paxillus involutus	Brown roll rim, poison pax
Головач продолговатый	Calvatia excipuliformis	Pestle puffball
Дождевик	Calvatia gigantea	Giant puffball
Дождевик шиповатый	Lycoperdon perlatum	Common puffball
Сморчок высокий	Morchella elata	Black morel, fire morel
Сморчок обыкновенный, настоящий	Morchella esculenta	Yellow morel, white morel
Сморчковая шапочка	Verpa bohemica	False early morel, spring verpa
Ежовик желтый	Hydnum repandum	Hedgehog mushroom
Майтаке, грифола курчавая, гриб-баран	Grifola frondosa	Sheep’s Head (Maitake)
Строчок обыкновенный	Gyromitra esculenta	False morel, brain mushroom
Строчок гигантский	Gyromitra gigas	Snowbank false morel
Рогатик гребенчатый, клавулина гребенчатая, коралл гребешковый	Clavulina cristata	Crested coral fungus
Свиное ухо	Gomphus clavatus	Pig’s ear gomphus
Рыжик	Lactarius deliciosus	Delicious milk cap
Трутовик настоящий	Fomes fomentarius	Hardwood conk

Trash Setters

I've never paid any attention to Ksenia Sobchak. I'm aware she's out there, but that's about it... I ran across her column in the Russian Sex and the City magazine today and I may start following it - she's actually kind of witty and she has such great material to work with.

Here are some fun things I picked out:

Трэш-сеттеры - setting the bar for trashy

Трэш-находка - trashy yet original

Трогательный - touching and sweet, but also twee, pitiful

Скукситься - to sulk, droop

Юбка-брюки (юбка-шорты) - the skort

Икра

Did you think I was talking about the pricey stuff from Astrakhan?

This is eggplant caviar, or баклажановая икра (ee-KRA). Supposedly Russians call the dish "caviar" because the eggplant seeds look like fish roe. My mother-in-law makes tons of eggplant икра in the summer. On the evening before a cookout we always have the same discussion: will she make the икра at home in the morning, or wait and do it on the campfire? She is generally inclined to do the messy work at home and produce a clean, shiny bowl of roasted veggies when the guests arrive. Us youngsters always want her to roast the vegetables over the campfire. Done that way, the eggplant икра is smoky and smooth without being oily at all. When you make it on the stove, you have to add a lot of oil. It's still very good, but not transporting.

Here's how we make it at home with less oil. A little smoky, not hard:

Put whole eggplants (skins on) in a heavy skillet and roast on high heat, turning only when each side is totally charred and soft.

Peel the eggplants once they are cool enough to handle.

Put the soft eggplant goop back in the skillet. Add chopped tomatoes, bell peppers and onion. We usually use a ratio of 2:2:1:1 (eggplant, tomatoes, peppers, onion). Add a little oil (olive, sunflower, you name it).

Cook on low heat for two or three hours, stirring every now and then, until the икра is a smooth paste.

The tomatoes will give off a lot of liquid at first. You have to let that liquid cook off.

Add salt and sliced garlic to taste. Once the икра is room temperature, add chopped cilantro and refrigerate!

On a linguistic note, the Japanese call salmon roe ikura, but apparently the Russian word икра (meaning any kind of fish roe) comes from good old Indo-European.

More Word Fun

Очень забавный список надоевших слов и выражений из области дизайна и интерьера.

http://decorno.blogspot.com/2009/07/word-funeral.html

Good People

Когда я была дома в Техасе этой весной, я услышала замечательное местное выражение - "He's good people."

Объясню:

Мой сын болеет дорожной техникой - пройти мимо просто не в силах. Одно теплое, влажное утро работники подогнали экскаватор прямо к нашему дому, чтобы асфальт раскопать и менять какие-то трубы водоснабжения. Когда сын вышел смотреть (а как же!), водитель пригласил его в кабину и дал ему ковш поднимать-отпускать пару раз. Потом серезная работа началась и сына вежливо прогнали. Мы с бабушкой ему подсказали, чтобы он поблагодарил дядю-экскаваторщика и все этим и кончилось.

Через неделю, мы с сыном рассматривали призовых буренок и лощадей на выставке во время местного родео. Нас узнал один из товарищей зкскаваторщика, подошел и поздоровался с сыном. Когда я опять выразила свою благодарность за то, что бригада сына побаловала, он засмеялся и сказал про экскаваторщика - "Yeah, Jimmy's good people. Real good people."

Чем отличается от знакомой всем фразы "He's a good person"? Могу только сказать, что кандидат в good people должен быть добродушный, простой, без особых замашек, любим и уважаем своими соседями. И объязательно должен был родиться в Техасе!

Hooliganism

Хулиганство (hoo-lee-GAN-stvo, "hooliganism") is another interesting word in Russian.

"In the Anglo-American world hooliganism is a popular journalistic expression to describe public disorder at sporting events or other public gatherings. It is not a legal term. In Soviet law and now Russian Law the term 'hooliganism' is a particular administrative and criminal offense... The term is believed to have entered the Russian language late in the nineteenth century."
Russian Law, W.E. Butler

"The term 'hooliganism'... had become popular among Russian legal scholars before the revolution as a characterization of lawless, disorderly and purposeless misconduct. It was only introduced into legislation, however, by the 1922 Criminal Code."
Soviet Criminal Law and Procedure, Harold Joseph Berman

The OED gives 1898 as the earliest published use of hooliganism in English, so the word must have been moving fast!

The photo above is of a very vivid wall near our home. It looks even better in the snow. And yes, graffiti is considered хулиганство in Russia.

Кабак

I like to follow a wonderful blog on Turkish cuisine that features enticing closeups and simple recipes. A recent entry was on stuffed squash - Etli Kabak Dolmasi.

In Russian, squash is кабак or кабачок (ka-ba-CHOK), the Turkish word with a Russian ending. But кабак has another meaning in Russian that has always mystified me. A кабак is a loud tavern-style restaurant. As in the immortal "Если б я был матрос, я б уплыл по тебе, как по морю / В чужеземном порту пропивать башмаки в кабаке" ("If I were a sailor, I would sail away over you like the sea, / to a кабак in a foreign port where I'd sell my shoes for a drink").

I've lived here for years assuming that squash and taverns had somehow cross-pollinated in the Russian mind, but now I see I was wrong. Vasmer mentions theories that the term might come from a similar-sounding Turkish word for a boxing match (where the spectators would drink?), from Arabic, or even from German. A wee bit disappointing...

Bing and Translators

I'm not looking to trade search engines, but I decided to kick Bing's tires after reading a New York Times review of it by David Pogue. In short, he says Bing is better at providing you with concierge-type information. So if you search for a particular camera model, it gives you a nifty chart of features and prices at different sellers. Movie times, driving directions, etc.

Because I'm not the concierge in my family, that's not how I use the internet most days. The gold mine for me is a digital, searchable, real book or a relevant online trade journal. So I decided to follow the columnist's advice and pop over to http://bing-vs-google.com/ to run my recent search for information on земляника in comparison mode.

Bing handed me an excerpt from the book "The Strawberry: History, Breeding and Physiology" by G.M. Darrow. When I looked up from reading, half an hour had gone by. This was good stuff. Then Google reminded me about Jane Grigson's Fruit Book, and when I looked up from reading that another half an hour was gone (and I've read this one before!).

A tie.

Then I searched for information on Russia+arbitrazh.

Bing came back with a long list of Russian sites that mention the word арбитраж in Russian. I intentionally searched for the transcripted word because I was looking for English-language commentary, but Bing ignored that. I also noticed that most of the sites were law firms offering to represent you in an arbitrazh court. Is that a symptom of the concierge focus Pogue mentioned? Does Bing assume that if you're searching for something it's because you want to buy it (or buy your way out of it)?

Google brought back a number of articles written by US/UK lawyers and NGOs about the state of Russia's arbitrazh courts. That's more the kind of thing I'm usually looking for.

To get a better picture of their differences, I kept the Bing v. Google site open to do all my searching during a normal day of work. Time and again, Bing handed me results that: 1) ignored aspects of my search query (like quotation marks!) or 2) were links to spammy sites where my search term appeared to be a random entry.

For now, I'm sticking with Google.

Земляника

My sister-in-law is a forestry major here where we live in Russia. When it's the season for земляника (zem-lya-NEE-ka, tiny wild strawberries) she spends several hours a day picking in the woods. Sometimes she takes people with her, but not often. The berries are microscopic and hide under the leaves of larger, taller plants, so you basically have to crawl around on hands and knees until you find a bunch of them in one spot. To get a sense of how small they are, the spoon in the picture is a small teaspoon. Masha mediates while she picks and chain-smokes to keep the mosquitoes away. After about an hour I've had enough. We're lucky she shares with us.

Земляника season is short. I love the anticipation. Friends come back from walks in the woods saying "Almost. The flowers are out." "Just another week. We saw green berries." Now they're here.

Apparently земляника and plain old strawberries are different species of the same genus. I know for a fact that земляника has a much more pronounced aroma and flavor.

One winter several years ago when my son was an infant, I found myself translating letters written by Soviet soldiers during WWII. The work was hard - hard to read and hard to translate. One man called his baby "my little dandelion," and I could see the baby's halo of fuzzy, blond hair.

Another writer said "The земляника is ripe, and I’ve been treated to 'Victoria' in some of the Lithuanian villages. If it weren’t for the war, life would be terrific."

I thought that maybe Victoria was a kind of wine or dessert made from земляника, but some other Russian translators told me it is a cultivar of strawberry. A couple of Russian gardening and botany sites claim that Victoria was the first cultivated strawberry to be introduced in Russia and that it was named after Queen Victoria.

Mors

We drink a lot of mors around here. We buy it in boxes at the store, but my sources say that true mors is made by adding water to an almost-empty jar of jelly and shaking vigorously.

The good old Domostroy (16th century) contradicts this, giving the following recipe:

"О морсе ягодном. Готовить простой морс ягодный можно из любых ягод. Сложить ягоды с водой в котел так, чтобы проняло их, но к котлу бы не пригорели, да варить в котле ягоды с водою долго, пока не разварятся ягоды, и на ночь их ставить, чтоб отстоялся морс ягодный от гущи начисто, затем слить тот морс ягодный с гущи и разлить его по бочкам, в которых не было дрожжей."

My translation:

"On berry mors. Simple mors may be made from any type of berry. Put the berries in a pot with enough water to keep them from sticking and simmer until the berries fall apart. Leave the pot overnight for the sediment to settle. Filter off the berry mors and pour it into barrels that have never held any yeast."

That recipe would make a mors that is much less sweet than either jelly-jar water or the mors you can buy at the store. Sounds pretty good if you drink it cold.

What about the word itself?

Vasmer says mors probably comes from the Romanian word múrsă, which he says meant "honey water, juice or liquid." My paper etymological dictionary goes further, stating that the Romanian word can be traced to the Latin mulsa, "honey drink." It also offers the German word for cranberry, moosbeere, as a possible source.

I noticed that Domostroy classifies mors along with medovukha and other drinks made from honey.

As a culinary-legal aside, GOST 51398-99 defines mors as a juice drink containing less than 25% juice. I read that in the July 2009 issue of Gastronom, and I have the strangest sense of translator's deja-vu that I have translated that GOST at some point in my life.

EDGAR

The U.S. SEC online databse of filings, EDGAR, is a treasure trove for translators. I picked up this tip from Ken Adams (not a relative) and use it all the time. Searching EDGAR is different from using Google to comb the SEC site because it lets you search for terms and phrases in actual forms filed by companies, not just in SEC publications and instructions.

Keep in mind that EDGAR is a conceptual search engine. That means that when you type in a key word, it will show you results that, while related, do not necessarily contain the actual search term. So EDGAR is a good place to do some real reading, but you can't do a quick "Google poll" to choose between two possible translations for a term.

If you want to search all historical filings, EDGAR limits you to searching for key words in the filings' header information. If you choose to do a full text search, you are limited to the last four years.

Have fun!

Word Fun

Если время есть, рекомендую заглянуть на сайт Urban Dictionary. Там очень много полезного материала, и каждая статья в словаре получает рейтинг +/- от пользователей, что позволяет оценить популярность той или иной фразы. Поиск работает довольно примитивно (если задать слово texting, то получаешь только статьи, где слово texting фигурирует в заголовке статьи), но можно нажать Browse и перелистать сразу много статей.