FOOD TERMS

Food, glorious food
Mind Our English by DR LIM CHIN LAM

WE Malaysians seem to eat all the time. There are eateries all over the place, some open at any hour of the day or night.

When it comes to food, we use some words and terms that depart from standard English. We should be aware of such departures which can cause confusion or amusement when we talk to visitors and friends from other countries.

I have written about such quirks in various other contexts. This article purports to bring together our quirky (i.e. Malaysian) usage of some food-related words and terms.

Bananas. Consider the terms used in the English of international trade. As harvested from the plant — which, botanically, is not a tree as commonly called but a pseudostem formed from the sheaths of the leaves rolled round one another from below — bananas come in a bunch (local term tandan “bunch”). Clusters of the fruits are arranged around and down the length of the stout stalk. These clusters are called hands (local term sikat or sisir “comb”), and the individual fruits are called — what else? — fingers. The Malaysian English equivalent for bunch is tandan or big bunch, that for hand is comb or bunch (specifically small bunch), and that for finger is banana (He bought the smaller bunch with 11 bananas).

Tapioca or cassava or manioc. That which we locally call tapioca or ubi kayu (ubi “tuber”, kayu “wood”) is the edible root tuber from the tree-like plant, Manihot utilissima. We may as well know that our tapioca is known as manioc or cassava in other countries.

Yam or taro? What we locally call ubi keladi and commonly know in English as yam is the edible, root tuber from plants with leaves arising rosette-like from the soil. They are of the genera Alocasia and Colocasia, from the family Araceae and is known as taro in other countries. In Malaysia, we do have the real yam, which is a large, ill-shaped root tuber from a climbing plant, Dioscorea spp. of the family Dioscoreaceae. Locally it is also called keladi, but a more specific name would be keladi gadong or ubi gadong.

Yam-bean or turnip? Neither name is appropriate. The edible root tuber that we know as sengkuang in Malay, bangkuang in Hokkien, and sah kok in Cantonese, is locally called turnip in English. The latter name is incorrect — we do not have turnip in Malaysia, although the turnip, Brassica rapa, of the Cruciferae family, does resemble the sengkuang in shape and size.

The sengkuang has the botanical name Pachyrhizus erosus, of the bean family Leguminosae. Its name in English is yambean — no doubt because it is of the bean family and because we eat the root tuber, the yam.

Properly, the name should be inverted to become bean-yam because we eat the tuber, not the bean — in the same way that we have oil palm plantations (oil palm, the crop) and not palm oil plantations (palm oil, the pro­duct). Even then the inverted name is inappropriate because the name in question denotes a tuber which is not a yam.

Without splitting more hairs, it is better that we just call the tuber by the Spanish-derived name, “jicama” (pronounced “hicama”), which is commonly used in the United States and other countries. (The word can be found in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 2004.)

Padi and rice. The word padi is a Malay word which, as spelt, has not been admitted into the English dictionaries. If at all used in English in the real sense of rice in the husk, or rough rice, the word would be deemed a foreign one and therefore would be italicised. Locally, we use the word “padi”, not italicised, to mean “rice in the husk”, and “rice” to mean “dehulled rice”. Standard English uses the word “paddy” (derived from Malay padi) where we use the word “padi” in the sense of rice in the husk.

“To make confusion worse confounded”, where we speak of padi-field (our sawah, an embanked area, flooded for most of the growing season, in which wet padi — as distinguished from dry padi or hill padi — is grown), standard English says paddy, or even rice-paddy. Don’t despair. We may be at odds with the dictionaries, but our special usage of padi and rice is unambiguous. We even distinguish between uncooked rice (beras) and cooked rice (nasi)! Furthermore, we distinguish between non-glutinous rice (beras) and glutinous rice (pulut). What’s more, the word “glutinous” in this application is not appropriate because the so-called glutinous rice does not contain gluten.

Hawk, hawker, and hawker food. The verb hawk means (1) to make a noisy effort to clear the throat of phlegm (a disgusting habit not often seen nowadays, thank goodness!), and (2) to peddle goods, including food, by going from door to door or street to street. (In the olden days, hawkers would also shout their wares, but nowadays they sound a bell or other contrivance — remember, for example, our tok-tok mi seller; also recall the street cries of London as depicted in one scene from the film Oliver.)

Those whom we now call hawkers are associated with cooked food, but they almost never hawk around in the sense of moving from place to place. (Note: The etymologists among us may be interested to know that the word “hawker” was not derived from “hawk”; rather, “hawk” is a back-formation of “hawker”.)

So the hawkers stay put in one place — a contradiction in terms. They may have their push-carts screwed onto platforms bolted in place. They may operate stalls in a coffee-shop or in a hawker centre (what? A hawker centre — another contradiction in terms). They may sell food in an up-market food court (a rather posh term for “hawker centre”). What about food sold by the hawkers? “Hawker food”, of course. In standard English, it is called “street food”. (Foreign visitors please note: Do not look down on our so-called hawker food. It is our hawker food that makes Malaysia a gastronomic paradise!)

I’m done now. Are you game for hawker food?