Fallback to the Camino and menus

This photo is just a shameless teaser to try to get you to read the post, which is about food, which everyone loves. At least scroll to the end of the post to see a less attractive food item.

I’m in the middle of a multipart post where I’m discussing how learning Spanish has anything to do with reading menus in Spain, something my sister said I had to do.

But I plunged in, trying to decode menus without knowing any Spanish and had reasonable success and a lot of posts years ago.

Then I got persuaded to actually try to learn Spanish (not the easiest thing for a septuagenarian with little aptitude for languages but now after 1592 consecutive days (4.3 years, wow, it’s been that long) of lessons (including some actual classes) I at least know enough to comment on how much it matters for reading menus. BUT, I haven’t actually done any menu reading, at least for Spain, along the Camino, for nearly all that time I’ve been focused on the language.

So, right in the middle of this multipart post I thought I should try my old techniques and look at some menus. So I picked one of my favorite foodie places, Logroño, that by virtue of its connection to La Rioja (the Napa of Spain although I’d never say that there) and its Basque heritage (often viewed as best food influence in Spain) it was bound to have a good menu to study. AND, by luck, I picked one that also happened to have an English translation, so that gives me a chance to compare to the Google Translation, which is helpful but also, as per many previous posts, makes some amusing mistakes.

So the restaurant is La Cocina de Ramón, which is in the Michelin guide to Logroño as well as being ranked #6 by TripAdvisor. It’s a quite quaint place and I’m sure they won’t mind be posting one of their photos

which is a bit more glamorous photo than their Google Streetview

But it’s clearly a nice restaurant with a fairly interesting menu. Now like many you can find photos of the menu in various review sites, such as:

but fortunately you can scape the text of the menus off their website here (Spanish) and here (English) and then create my usual (but now with human English) side-by-side study format, say for example the Entrantes (Starters) (and knowing Spanish I don’t even have to look that up or use GT, but in this case, it’s awfully easy to figure it without knowing any Spanish.

Website Spanish	GT of Spanish	Website English
Entrantes	starters	STARTERS
JAMÓN IBÉRICO DE BELLOTA gran reserva “D.O. Guijuelo” 23,00 €	ACORN-FED IBERIAN HAM Gran Reserva “D.O. Guijuelo” €23.00	ACORN-FED IBERIAN HAM PDO Guijuelo 23.00 €
QUESUCO FRESCO infusionado con hierbas de montaña semillas, caviar de chocolate amargo y crujiente de orégano 12,50 €	FRESH QUESUCO infused with mountain herbs, seeds, dark chocolate caviar and crunchy oregano €12.50	QUESUCO FRESH CHEESE fresh cheese infused with mountain herbs, seeds dark chocolate caviar and crunchy oregano 12.50 €
ANCHOAS DE SANTOÑA a punto de sal, sobre pan de maíz tostado y crema de ajo negro 6 uds. / 20,00 €	ANCHOVIES OF SANTOÑA about to salt, on toasted cornbread and cream of black garlic 6 units. / €20.00	ANCHOVIES FROM SANTOÑA with a pinch of salt, over toasted cornbread and black garlic creme 6 units 20.00 €
BUÑUELOS DE MORCILLA RIOJANA en masa Orly pimientos asados a leña y su compota 6 uds. / 12,50 €	RIOJANA SAUSAGE FRITTERS in Orly dough, wood-roasted peppers and compote 6 units. / €12.50	BLOOD SAUSAGE FRITTER covered in Orly batter roasted peppers and pepper compote 6 units 12.50 €
NUESTRAS CROQUETAS de jamón 6 uds. / 12,50 €	OUR CROQUETTES of ham 6 units. / €12.50	OUR HAM CROQUETTES 6 units 12.50 €
GYOZAS DE CORDERO CHAMARITO y champiñones de La Rioja cocinadas al vapor 6 uds. / 22,00 €	CHAMARITO LAMB GYOZAS and steamed mushrooms from La Rioja 6 units. / €22.00	LAMB GYOZAS (dumplings) with mushrooms from La Rioja steamed with shredded chili

Now just for fun I’ve looked up a few specific terms, not any words anyone would learn in any level of Spanish class and I’ll discuss a few of these.

Now let’s assume you’re from Colombia and completely fluent in Spanish, as is my favorite online teacher Maria, but you don’t know anything about Spain or Spanish food or even cooking for that matter. How much of the menu can Maria read?

So let’s start with the first item: JAMÓN IBÉRICO DE BELLOTA gran reserva “D.O. Guijuelo”

JAMÓN = ham, check. IBÉRICO = Iberian (and we’ll assume Maria knows enough world geography to know that’s the name of the peninsula Spain sits on, so, IOW, Spanish Ham, okey-dokey. Now DE is used to indicate a possession, like de Juan to indicate Juan’s or made of something, e.g. pan de maíz (above), of bread of corn, or, cornbread in less clumsy English, check, so Spanish ham made of BELLOTA (acorn), and now hit, HUH! (or as Maria would say qué dijiste!). Yep ham made out of acorns makes a whole lot of sense but that is the Spanish translation.

Now before I ever started doing any research on food in Spain I would have used a dictionary and gotten to exactly the same place, nowhere – this is nonsense (and my dear sister, RIP, except she’d been in Spain many times and was a foodie, but as merely a semi-fluent speaker would have also been stumped).

Now I’ll go on a, for me, a fun digression. After I learned that really the IBÉRICO refers a breed of pig (part wild believed to originate in Iberian peninsula) I happened to go on a wonderful daytrip sponsored via the Dept of Agriculture in Nebraska (via invitation of mi esposa, una maestra jardinera) that showcases some of the specialty food producers (encouraged by the local or farm-to-table movement) and a fantastic boutique butcher (shameless plug, CURE in Ft. Calhoun). On that trip the people at CURE had mentioned one of their suppliers which we just happened to visit and saw a large litter of piglets happily munching whatever they could find in the woods, sometimes ACORNS fallen from the wild oak trees. IOW, the USA foodie term would be “free range”. In Spain the pata negra pigs (aka ibéricos) graze in wild forests anchored by oaks and thus acorns, while not all of their food supply, a characteristic bit to indicate these pigs have fed on wild food, not the prepared soymeal Iowa industrial-farmed pigs get. And if you do a little searching online you can purchase some of this extremely expensive ham (at one point over $1000 for a 6lb leg).

So a completely fluent Spanish speaker, unaware of foodie stuff in Spain, would probably never figure out these are free-range pigs used to make the ham.

But what about the rest of it, the gran reserva “D.O. Guijuelo” ? As I quickly discovered and mentioned in some of my earliest posts about reading menus they tend to be loaded with non-word words, i.e. brands, regional references, and in this case, D.O., which we’ll get to. But what about gran reserva, that’s just Spanish for, great reserve, which is another HUH? Now reserva has a ton of translations in spanishdict.com most of which a fluent Spanish speaker would know but which of those meanings is applicable here, how is a ham, a reserve, or a reservation, or a stock, or as we go down the list, actually without probably guessing it ‘vintage’ is the clue. And gran is most often large but also can be grand, so, given Maria might know a lot of wine comes from La Rioja, guess “great vintage”, which actually is pretty close. But does that mean this ham is somehow cured in a grand wine or cooked with it and has a wine sauce.

So we need to move on to D.O. For that I’ll use my new best friend the Bing Chatbot. I won’t digress on how I had a graduate school course from the guy who created the first ever chatbot so my exposure to such things is over 50 years old, BUT, I will say, until very recently, I was a skeptic of such things, plus I’m a pretty hardcore Google fan and not so much of Bing. BUT, WOW, I am really impressed, esp. since Bing, unlike the just now generally available Bard from Google, is quite fluent in Spanish and can even know whether the use of subjunctive conjugation in a particular sentence is correct (not easy for B1/B2 level Spanish students). So here’s what Bing says:

D.O. stands for “Denominación de Origen” which is a Spanish term denoting quality wine from a designated area

Now actually, while correct it is a bit broader and here’s where the fortunately available human English translation helps us as they call this: PDO Guijuelo, which we look up with Bing again and find

PDO stands for “Protected Designation of Origin” which is a type of geographical indication of the European Union and the United Kingdom aimed at preserving the designations of origin of food-related products

which is real handy, because if Maria has now learned something beyond just total Spanish fluency and something about food designations in Europe, this is not a Spanish word per se, but something else, which is going to take some searches and we find

PDO Guijuelo is a Spanish certification that guarantees the quality of cured ham produced in the town of Guijuelo and its surrounding areas. The certification ensures that the ham is made from Iberian pigs that have been raised on a diet of acorns and other natural foods and that the ham has been cured for at least 24 months.

And Google search came up with this useful link, which I added to my side-by-side text that I pasted here.

Whew!

Yes I know this is a long explanation, but even dragging it out this much is part of my point – fluency in Spanish tells you almost nothing about this menu item and only way you’d know is the wordy (not exactly a translation) description I eventually found, which, btw, doesn’t really tell you very much about this ham and why you’d pay so much money for it – that takes tasting.

And there are three more examples of this, just in the starters part of the menu: QUESUCO FRESCO, ANCHOAS DE SANTOÑA, and CORDERO CHAMARITO, and all the Spanish fluency Maria has can’t explain what these items are (and I won’t spend even more TL;DR on it, as I did put links to info if you’re really interested). In contrast, Maria probably would figure out, MORCILLA RIOJANA, that RIOJANA is a reference to the La Rioja regional and morcilla is just an icky blood sausage (lots of rice in the version in Spain), but even muddling through the words, without actually knowing the food itself, wouldn’t give you much of clue whether you wanted to order this or not.

But the en masa Orly which is part of BUÑUELOS DE MORCILLA RIOJANA en masa Orly pimientos asados a leña y su compota, what might this mean? A fluent Spanish speaker, not even a foodie, could mostly figure out pimientos asados a leña y su compota and would probably know what buñuelos are (yes, Bing tells me they’re quite popular in Colombia), but the en masa Orly is tougher. But with some searching I eventually found this link which solved it. But of course this is just a receta (recipe) for this dough, all written in Spanish, where being able to read it is seriously use for. Well, I can’t read it all (1592 days in Duolingo doesn’t give you much to be about to read cookbooks) but I can notice the critical ingredients are 100 ml de cerveza o agua con gas and 2 claras de huevo, which really means this is just a batter (not a dough (masa), really, definitely not the masa of México) that will be kinda light and fluffy compared to normal batter. SO, if you’re going to learn Spanish, in order to read menus, muddle through lots of cookbooks (or websites) written in Spanish and don’t waste your time on the bulk of vocabulary taught in most Spanish course.

And this kind of menu item is where you have to go beyond Spanish fluency, BUT, you need Spanish to answer it. Not long after I began to learn some very simple Spanish I quickly learned I get a very different response from Google searches with the query ‘que son buñuelos’ than ‘what are buñuelos’ because Google now assumes I’m a Spanish speaker and uses different sources to get it search results, often including the handy-dandy, la enciclopedia libre, which has the answer that then requires being able to read that answer in Spanish.

And, I also now have a specific example of how having a fluent bilingual person give me a better answer than Google can, as per this example

Website Spanish	GT of Spanish	Website English
Pescados	Fish	FISH
RODABALLO SALVAJE asado en su propio jugo con patatas panaderas (Mínimo 2 raciones) 25,00 € / ración	WILD Turbot roasted in its own juices with baked potatoes (Minimum 2 portions) €25.00 / portion	Wild turbot grilled with its own juice with boulangère potatoes (minimum of 2 servings) 25.00 € (per serving)

patatas panaderas makes sense in the Google translation of baked potatoes, but it turns out the English gives an entirely different clue. Now what in the world are boulangère potatoes? I did take a bit of French at very early age and remember a surprising bit of it, but the clue is the è instead of the é used in Spanish. Time to head to a French dictionary (useless), but at least a French recipe. You can follow the link but these are a bit more kicked-up (as the once great Emeril used to say) and nothing like the conventional USA ‘baked potato’ or even any kind of a baker (panadero) doing something to a potato.

Now buñuelos is not very hard, but what about this mystery (from a different restaurant in Logroño)?

Crujiente de careta de cerdo

which Google translate, not helpfully, translates as:

Crispy pork mask

MASK? What could that mean. Various searches along the lines like, ‘what is careta de cerdo’ got an indefinite answer, that satisfied me for a while, of ‘pork cheeks’. OK, cheek/mask, I guess, but then I found carrilleras de cerdo, directly translated by Google as ‘pork cheeks’ and with spanishdict.com agreeing that carrillera = cheeks (btw, despite being somewhat of a foodie, until I began to study Spain menus I didn’t really know what was meant by ‘cheeks’ (first seen referring to fish), but a little more paying attention to various FoodTV chefs finally made that clear). But to this point, why call ‘cheek’ carrillera one place and careta another?

BECAUSE my searches in English and results in English were wrong (not unusual on the Net, but even more likely in this case).

So while I started this post with an attractive food picture to seduce, how about an ugly to repel you.

Well, actually I might call that a “mask”, but it’s certainly going to give me nightmares.

Yep, that’s right, for this item, crujiente de careta de cerdo, they literally pull the skin off the skull of the pig and cut it up and they fry it up to crispy bits, getting something, I suppose a bit like chicharrones (and not a fan of those either, but even though I know those are pig skin, I don’t have that face staring at me).

And, actually, to close, this was one of my points of wanting an app to translate menus in Spain. I’m not that adventurous eater, so even though I’ve had some strange things in Japan and especially China, I’m not crazy about eating strange animals or even strange bits of animals I do know. So while this menu item, CALLOS DE TERNERA cocinados al estilo tradicional, is an easy translation for a fluent Spanish speaker I might have stupidly chosen it from a menu (and perhaps liked it as long as I didn’t know what it is, but frankly, it’s pretty repulsive looking to me.

And, so there you have it. Knowing Spanish comes in handy, but: a) it’s not enough, you need to know about food and cooking and recipes, b) word-by-word translation (either doing it yourself with spanishdict.com or Google Translate, which is very literal) is most of what you need to study a menu, and, c) learning how to search (sometimes in Spanish) to find out words in menu that are not actually words in RAE DLE (the official dictionary of Spanish) is essential (even lots of cooking knowledge is not enough).

SO, I think my initial notion, a smartphone app that could (a real challenge getting it concise enough) see a menu, like La Cocina de Ramón or La Tavina, and tell you enough so you could avoid something awful (to your taste) and find what you’re most likely to like would still be a fantastic thing to have, so I think I’ll keep working on it.

AND, bear in my mind, this is the menu you might be trying to read (from La Cocina de Ramón as you might see walking down the street). And so, Ms. Non-Spanish Speaking Non-Foodie, what does all this mean? In a few more years you can buy my app and point your phone at it and I’ll not only explain the line items, but what MENÚ actually means (not what you think, Mr. USA)