How the Tulip got its Name

In my previous post I talked about the Spalding Tulip Festival and it reminded me of one of my favourite Tulip stories…

… This is not a botanical story but one of linguistic misunderstanding…

The name Tulip was first applied to the plant by a man called Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq who was a Dutch ambassador in Turkey in the sixteenth century and was also a great floral enthusiast.  One day he was talking to a sultan and he noticed that he was wearing an attractive flower in his head wear.

When I say talking what I mean is that they were communicating with each other in the way that people do when they can’t speak each other’s language with lots of funny faces and wild gesticulations and misunderstandings.

I digress here and give an example from my own experience…

Now, I know that like most English people my grasp of foreign languages is not that good but this experience in the Spanish city of Palencia was quite bizarre.

“Catedral?” I enquired and the poor man (victim) that I had selected just stared back at me with an expressionless face as though I was a visitor from another planet.   So I tried again but this time, remembering that upside down question mark thing at the beginning of the sentence I tried to sound a bit more Spanish, “¿Catedral?” but his face went so blank that I though rigor mortis had set in.  I have to say that Catedral sounds a bit like Cathedral to me so I don’t know why this was so difficult but his solution was to call someone else over who was an obviously educated man who spoke excellent English and with optimism I tried again “¿Catedral?”

To my astonishment he immediately adopted exactly the same blank face as the first man so I tried again in various different accents and voice inflections. “¿Catedral?”  “¿Catedral?”  “¿Catedral?”  Nothing, Nothing, Nothing.  I really cannot understand why this should be so difficult.  If a Spanish man came up to me in Lincoln and asked for directions to the Cathedral – however he might pronounce it, I am fairly sure that I could make out what he was asking for.   Eventually I gave up, added the h sound and just asked in English for directions to the Cathedral and amazingly I immediately made myself understood and the man smiled and said “Ah, Catedral!” which, I am fairly certain is exactly what I said in the first place.

To continue…

Busbecq was curious about the flower and pointed to it and enquired its name.  In Turkey the name of the flower was a Lale (prounced lalay) but the Sultan thought he meant what is the name of his hat so he told him it was a Tulipan or turban and Busbeqc, who completely misunderstood, acquired some bulbs and sent them back to Europe with the information that they were called Tulipa.

A good job that he wasn’t wearing a pork pie hat or tulips would be porkies!

Now, this is important information in case we have another vegetable supply crisis.

All parts of tulips are edible and the bulb can be substituted for onions (although they are a little more expensive and less flavourful). The Dutch ate tulip bulbs in the hard times of World War Two even though the petals have little taste but could be used to garnish a dish, chop a few petals and throw them in a salad, sugar them to decorate a cake or use the entire flower for a fruit bowl, pinching out the pistil and stamen in the middle.

Incidentally the tulip is the national flower of Iran and Turkey where it is still called the Lale.

Greek A to Ω – P (Rho) is for Ρόδος or Rhodes

The island of Rhodes is one of the most interesting and has been inhabited for six thousand years and due to its geographical position on the major Mediterranean Sea trade routes is situated at a natural crossroads between Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and this has given the city and the island many different identities, cultures, architectures, and languages over its long and varied history.

Read the full story Here….

Festival Days – National Paella Day in Spain

27th March is National Paella Day in Spain.  I am a big fan of Paella so although I am not Spanish I thought it appropriate to join in.

Paella has come to be regarded as the national dish of Spain but  it originated in Valencia in the north-east of the country.  When the Moors reached Alicante in 718 they discovered a pleasant climate perfect for growing crops that wouldn’t grow in Africa and set about turning this part of the peninsula into an Arab centre of horticultural excellence.

They developed a system of irrigation and exploited the wetlands that were created to grow the rice.  Not just any rice however, not your supermarket economy rice, not Uncle Ben’s ‘boil in a bag’ rice, but ‘arroz bomba’ introduced from the east which has the perfect constituency to produce the dish.

A lot of people make the mistake of assuming Paella is full of fish but this is not the case.  I rarely make a Paella with fish.  I prefer fish and shellfish in a pasta rather than rice..

These days people will add almost any ingredient to a paella but the true Valencian meal is always made of chicken, rabbit and white beans.  Most things work but I have a friend who adds liver and that doesn’t work at all  but then again I have strong culinary views on liver – avoid it at all costs – it tastes offal.

Paella originated, as many traditional dishes do, as peasant food, a lunchtime rice dish prepared by workers in the fields over an open fire.. Always cooked in a round, flat bottomed pan with handles, the dish most likely takes its name from the Latin term ‘patella’,  a flat plate on which offerings were made to the gods. The open flame is essential, as it creates the layer of toasted rice at the bottom of the pan called ‘socarrat’ that is essential and unique to paella. Delicious!

The best Paella that I have ever had was in a restaurant in the hills above Benidorm in a village called ‘Rincon de Pepe’ where they really nailed the  ‘socarrat’, close behind that was in an artisan bar in Barcelona called ‘Petit Xaica’ located just off the busy ‘Las Ramblas’ where the Paella was so good we ate there three nights on the trot, a meat Paella, a fish Paella and a black Paella coloured with squid ink which you really don’t want to spill down your ‘going out‘ shirt.

The worst Paella that I ever had was my friend’s liver Paella but after that was a very disappointing one in a restaurant in Madrid where the chef had tried to be too  clever with it and serve a modern variation of the Valencian classic.  It just didn’t work for me.  Best to keep it simple in my opinion.

Anyway, enough of that, here is mine…

I always start with a good chicken stock, after a Sunday roast I boil up the carcass, add vegetables and seasoning and a saffron packet mix of course and then strip every last piece of meat from the carcass.  Every time I do this I wonder just how much good meat is thrown away after a chicken dinner has been finished.  Scandalous waste in my opinion.  As a rule I leave that overnight to infuse the flavours.

Ingredients – chicken, chorizo and bacon.  Onion, tomato and pepper.  Chicken stock.  Paella rice – no other rice will do.

I haven’t got a proper Paella paellera so I just use a flat bottomed frying pan.  I had one once but it went rusty and it wasn’t so good for use on a ceramic hob.  A bit too aggressive.

When it comes to cooking I start with onions and chorizo, set these aside and then start with the rice, first in olive oil and then the stock, one ladle at a time so that the rice swells evenly.  As it cooks I add the meat, the chicken, the chorizo, bacon and some frozen peas instead of white beans.  Never liver. Never, ever liver.

I would like to try and get the burnt ‘socarrat’ base but that makes a mess in the bottom of the pan and that’s not fair on Kim who has to wash up later so even though you are not supposed to I do give mine a stir now and again.

Just before it is cooked I add sliced red tomatoes and yellow peppers as a topping to recreate the colours of the flag of Spain.  Let it rest for a few minutes and then serve.

I give you my Paella…

March 27th is also the day that my dad Ivan was born.  He would have been ninety-one today.  I am fairly certain that he wouldn’t have liked Paella, he liked traditional food and only had rice in a rice pudding.

I wrote a post about Ivan Here…

National Baguette Day (USA)

An interesting one this one, a French baguette is way off being the most popular bread in the USA  but they still give it a celebration day.  Bread in the USA has a lot of sugar (insane amounts of sugar) and preservatives (insane amounts of preservatives)  but a traditional French baguette will only last about a day before it goes stale and hard and needs to go in the bin.

Some say Napoleon Bonaparte created the French baguette to allow soldiers to more easily carry bread with them. Since the round shape of other breads took up a lot of space, Bonaparte requested they be made into the skinny stick shape with specific measurements to slide into the soldiers’ uniform.

Maybe true, maybe not…

Read the full story Here…

Festival Days – March 8th, International Women’s Day

It all started in New York when in 1908 fifteen thousand women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

Then, in 1917, with two million soldiers dead in the war, Russian women chose the last Sunday in February to strike for ‘bread and peace’. This turned out to be hugely significant and a contribution to the overthrow of the Romanovs and four days later the Tsar was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote.

Read the full story Here…

In 2016 we visited the Greek island of Amorgos.  As we wandered around an old lady dressed all in black asked for help negotiating some difficult steps and we naturally obliged and in return for our assistance she treated us to her life story and tales of Amorgian life.

Her name was Limonique and she told us that after sixty-five years of marriage she was now a widow so I guessed her age to be somewhere around eighty-five or so.

Festival Days – March 1st

 

March 1^st  is often regarded as the first day of Spring and to celebrate this it has some interesting (Mad March) festival days.

In Wales it is St David’s Day and mostly everyone wanders around with a daffodil in their lapel. Apparently it used to be a leek and in Henry V, Shakespeare had his Welsh soldier Fluellen wearing one in his cap to celebrate the day.  I suspect the daffodil has replaced the leek because it is a lot more attractive and smells a whole lot better too!

In the USA March 1st is National Pig Day. I’ll say it again in case you don’t believe me – National Pig Day.

“The purpose of National Pig Day is allegedly “to accord the pig a rightful, though generally unrecognized, place as one of man’s most intellectual and domesticated animals”.  The question of whether the holiday is a time to honour pigs by ‘giving them a break’ or to appreciate their offerings (spare ribs, bacon and ham) is an open question.” (Wiki)

I can’t help thinking that this is a bit insensitive towards the feelings of 3.3 million Muslims who live in the U.S.A.

“And the pig, because it has a split hoof, but does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you. You shall neither eat of their flesh nor touch their carcass.” Deuteronomy 14:8*

My favourite 1st March Festival Day however just has to be National Beer Day in Iceland…

Read the full story Here…

Won’t Be Doing That Again (1)

In June 2012 we travelled to Russia for a two centre holiday in St Petersburg and Moscow.  Given the state of east/west relationships this is not something that I expect ever to do again.

Read part of the story Here…

Sicily – An Art Exhibition and a Religious Procession

Our final afternoon in Ortigia and we had by now made our way around the island and and I am certain about this, walked  every street but there remained one last thing to do.  To visit the World Heritage site, fortified castle situated at the very southern end of the island promontory.

To get there we walked along the seafront which I found all rather odd, surely this was one of the best spots in the town with sweeping views over the sea to the west.  This was the place for big fine hotels, tourist apartments and swanky bars but not a bit of it.  The buildings along this stretch were all run down, many abandoned and boarded up and most in a state of serious disrepair.  I came to the conclusion that there must surely be plans for them and someone somewhere was preparing for  a programme of restoration and renewal.  Quite possibly restrictive planning and development rules are slowing down the process, this is after all a UNESCO World Heritage Site. 

This is what happens when regulation kicks in.  

After passing the neglected buildings and crossing a curious piece of wasteland (curious because almost everywhere else in Ortigia is developed and built on) we came to the entrance to the fortress. 

The entrance fee was €8 and I have been known to walk away from an €8 entrance fee.  I might have done so today especially as we had already walked through the museum before arriving at the pay desk so there was an opportunity there to walk back out, but on this occasion decided to splash the cash.  

The inside was quite interesting if you like castles but parts of the interior were closed which is often an issue when visiting historical sites out of main season which is a more convenient time to carry out maintenance so we walked the walls and eventually came across an art exhibition in the castle vaults.

Here was a stroke of luck because Italian sculpture and Italian artist Davide Dall’Osso had an interesting exhibition display. Dall’Osso experiments with light and shade and the exhibition consisted of a number of transparent polycarbonate studies which certainly made best use of the location and the sunlight through the windows.

I am no art expert so I rely on this passage from his website which seeks to explain his work…

“Light, which shapes the transparent matter of his works and continuously redefines forms and emotional boundaries. The circular economy with the reuse of industrial waste of polycarbonate and plexiglas for the realisation of his works. Transparency, allowing oneself to be crossed and modified by light, metamorphosis, are the main colours of Dall’Osso’s sculptural language, which he expresses more through the fusion of polycarbonates.”

I liked it and we stayed around for sometime watching the shifting light and shadows as the sun moved around the castle building.

Click on an image to scroll through the Gallery…

Walking back to the apartment we couldn’t help noticing that there was a lot more activity than usual, litter bins were being emptied for a second time today, the streets were being swept again and a gang of men were filling holes in the roads with tarmac.  There were more police than usual and temporary signs warning motorists not to park or risk having their cars towed away.  Clearly something was taking place and this was the preparation. stage. 

I asked a policeman what was going on and he seemed surprised that we didn’t know that today was The Feast of The Immaculate Conception and that early in the evening there was to be a big procession.  As it turned out today was a holiday all over Italy and other Catholic countries too in celebration of the Virgin Mary.  So that explained why the streets had been busier than usual all day long.

Festa dell’Immacolata is celebrated throughout Italy on 8th December. The day recognises that the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, was conceived without original sin – something with which, in Catholic dogma, every person is considered to have been born.  Most of us have been making up for it ever since of course.

By Pontifical decree, it is the Patronal feast day of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Korea, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, Spain, the United States, and Uruguay. By royal decree of King John IV (1640-56), it is designated as the day honouring the patroness of Portugal.

The feast of the Immaculate Conception in Syracuse takes place in the Giudecca district where the Church of San Filippo Apostolo is located right where we were staying and after further enquiries we established that it would pass directly below our balcony.  How lucky was that, we were going to miss the Feast of Saint Lucy in three days time but tonight we were going to see the big one.

So we opened a bottle of wine and took up our front row seats and waited.  Bang on time the drumming started and the band began to play.  The Church was less than a hundred yards away so the procession soon reached the corner of our street and the statue of Virgin Mary came into view carried on the broad shoulders of a dozen or so strong men.  Even so the statue is so heavy (250 kilo or thereabouts) they have to stop every twenty yards or so, set it down on stout stakes whilst they draw breath.  On account of these frequent stops the parade took twenty minutes or so to pass by and we enjoyed every minute of it.

It was a wonderful way to finish the holiday.

Sicily – Garibaldi in Syracuse

“Garibaldi is the only wholly admirable figure in modern history.” –  A.J.P. Taylor (English Historian)

Have I mentioned before my personal challenge to find as many statues of Giuseppe Garibaldi that I can? Probably.

It is an easy sort of challenge because almost every town and city in Italy has a statue of the national hero.  It is not like trying to find the Holy Grail or discover the benefits of BREXIT.

After the creation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861 the country worked hard at making sure that  Garibaldi would remembered in perpetuity and the number of streets, piazzas and statues named after him makes him probably the most commemorated secular figure in history.

Interestingly however in a TV poll of 20110 Il più grande italiano di tutti i tempi  (“The greatest Italian of all times”) Garibaldi didn’t even make the top ten, the top three were Leonardo da Vinci, Giuseppe Verdi and two Sicilian judges Giovanni Falcone  and Paolo Borsellino who challenged the power of the Mafia in Sicily and were murdered for their trouble.

When I visit Italy it has become a sort of challenge for me to find the statue of Garibaldi.  If I went more regularly to Germany then I am sure that I would look for statues of Otto Von Bismarck.

I was especially pleased to find this very fine example in some commemorative gardens in Ortigia.

A few years ago I wrote a post in which I speculated on whether Giuseppe Garibaldi may indeed be the most celebrated secular man ever to be recreated in statue form across the World and survived.

You can read the post here.

Other Garibaldi Statues in Italy…

Sicily – Trouble With Traffic

“To an American, Italian traffic is at first just down-right nonsense. It seems hysterical, it follows no rule. You cannot figure what the driver ahead or behind or beside you is going to do next and he usually does it!”  –  John Steinbeck

By the third day we had used up the breakfast supplies that we had bought on day one in the street market so we needed more.  Having convinced ourselves that we had paid a premium price at the market and having identified a LIDL supermarket barely two miles away we walked there instead.

This involved crossing the bridge over the water again and venturing once more into the untidy side of the city which involved a very dangerous walk along an abandoned industrial site with crumbling buildings and potholed streets.  An area which once provided employment but now nothing, not even hope.

Road construction in Sicily it seems makes little or no provision for pedestrians and there is an almost complete absence of pavements which requires those on foot to take their chances at the side of the road or in the intermittent cycle lanes which provides little help at all because motorists just drive along them regardless.

In Italy, traffic regulations currently in force were approved by the Legislative Decree number 285 of 30th April 1992 and are contained in the Italian Highway Code called the Codice della Strada, but anyone visiting a busy Italian city or town would be certain to dispute that there is such a thing as traffic regulations or a highway code in Italy.

Crossing the road is especially dangerous, there are pedestrian crossings but they haven’t been repainted since Mussolini was in charge and car drivers just ignore them.  Local people seem to have the hang of it, they just step boldly out into the road, look straight ahead and ignore the obvious danger

“The only exception to this is nun’s.  Italian drivers will not hit a nun – you see groups of them breezing across eight lane highways with amazing impunity, so if you wish to cross some busy place your only hope is to wait for some nuns to come along and stick to them…” – Bill Bryson

Italy it has to be said has some insanely different driving rules to the rest of Europe and the traffic was murderously busy and dangerously hectic along this stretch of road.

Here is a general speed limit of fifty kilometres an hour but Italians generally ignore that and this is the second problem – the drivers –  because, in my opinion,  one of the biggest mistakes in the development of the modern world was to introduce the Italians to the motor car.

Italian drivers obey no rules and have no self-control, no manners or tolerance; junction priorities mean nothing because show a moment of hesitation and this is interpreted as a sign of weakness and an opportunity to pull-out, cut you up or just simply push in.  They are impatient and, show a split-second of indecision and they go for their car horn like a trigger-happy wild-west gunslinger.  At a junction or a roundabout the Italian driver narrows his eyes and flashes a ‘do you feel lucky punk’ sort of glare while his right foot hovers menacingly over the accelerator pedal.

Traffic lights are another good example of these different rules because each one resembles the starting grid of a formula one grand prix. 

At an Italian traffic junction there is an intolerant confusion of cars all impatiently throbbing with engines growling, exhaust pipes fuming and clutch plates sizzling whilst behind the wheel the drivers blood pressure reaches somewhere beyond boiling point. 

A regard for the normal habits of road safety is curiously absent so although the traffic light colours are the same as elsewhere they mean completely different things.  Red means slow down, amber means go and green means ‘pedal to the metal‘  At a junction an Italian driver simply points his car at the exit he is aiming for and five seconds before the lights go green he shuts his eyes, presses the accelerator to the floor then races forward and may God have mercy on anything or anyone in his way.

If the normal rules of driving do not apply here then the normal rules associated with parking definitely are completely irrelevant.  But it does look like great fun.  Sometimes there is a small and hopelessly inadequate car park full of impatient drivers looking for non-existing parking spaces, blowing their horns, waving their arms and shouting at each other in that classic Italian driving style.  

More from Bill Bryson…

“I love the way Italians park… it looks like a parking competition for blind people.  Cars are pointed in every direction, half on the pavements and half off, facing in, facing sideways… fitted into spaces so tight that the only way out would be through the sun roof.  Italians park their cars the way I would park if I had just spilled a beaker of hydrochloric acid on my lap.” 

So, we completed our shopping and as we suspected it was a whole lot cheaper than the street market by as much as 40% in our estimation and we had the bonus of sensibly priced bottles of wine.

But now we had to carefully negotiate our return journey, this time with shopping bags.  We were so glad to cross the bridge and get back to relatively normal traffic conditions and as we passed the cathedral we said a quiet thank you to whoever it was that had been watching over and taking care of us…