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)

It´s been a long time…

Note: This post got too long (big surprise if you know me) so I split it into two parts, after publishing an initial version with the huge table.

… since doing any post, but over 1.5 years since I’ve done a menu post, which was the original purpose of this blog. So here goes, but there is a back story of why now.

As I’ve mentioned I’ve gotten “distracted” from my original goal (developing a menu translation app) by actually trying to learn Spanish, which I didn’t (and don’t) believe is a requirement to actually build a translation app. But lately my chosen learning method (Duolingo) is having diminishing returns, that is, I was learning rapidly at the beginning and now have slowed down. In particular vocabulary is a big issue. Even diligent use of Duolingo is only adding about 5 words a day to my (mostly remembered) vocabulary. And only a fraction of that is vocabulary related to food, cooking and restaurants. So I’m up to about 12,000 “words” (this is raw count, i.e. each conjugation of a verb counts as a word) and in 82 online news articles I’ve analyzed over a couple of months I’ve found 15,000 unknown words or only about 3000 words I know.

So I’ve been looking at other ways to acquire more vocabulary faster and as an adult most advice I find is to read a lot (a child adds vocabulary by listening a lot), especially what is called “extensive” reading (not trying to get every word, but just get the gist). I’ve been doing the work to prepare several posts about this idea, but not now.

So one way I’ve been doing this is to read online sources that have human translations of the Spanish. There are several recipe sites that do this (more on these later, I’ve done the research for numerous posts I just haven’t gotten around to writing). But my almost daily activity is the Spanish language section of the New York Times. These articles are less than ideal in that (I deduce) most are originally written in English and then translated to Spanish which means the Spanish isn’t as “natural” as articles written directly in Spanish by fluent speakers, i.e. like articles in El País which doesn’t have English but I can tell (from what I achieved to about B2 level in Duolingo) are different than the articles in the Times.

So, long story short, I recently encountered an article in the Times that triggered this post. The links below are this article.

NYTimes article about Urueña

In Spanish

In English

In case you don’t read the story (I think it is interesting) my summary is that a small town in Spain is trying to keep itself alive by having a lot of bookstores (more than students in their school) to attract tourism. Naturally I took a look, while reading the article, via Google Maps to do a virtual tour. And so of course, I found the few restaurants, in particular Mesón Villa de Urueña, (no link, have to access through search in maps) and, of course, it has some menus (just images, which means I have to type them myself to feed to Google Translate).

So that’s how I got to my work below, my traditional tearing apart of a menu and finding interesting tidbits. But before launching into that I have another observation. Given I did gain some fluency in Spanish I quickly learned that entering search queries into Google entirely in Spanish gets different (and often, better) results. So qué es revuelto gets very different results than What is revuelto. And pure Spanish queries are more likely to get Spanish language results, often recipes when I enter the names of dishes. So, in fact, some of my links below are to Spanish web pages.

Now on with the show. This is an example of the prix fixe menu common in many restaurants in Spain, in this case, the weekend menu. Anyone trying to order would have to understand this concept to even understand anything in the menu, BUT, one explanation is good enough for all menus like this. In fact, the word menú itself, in Spain, usually implies this and an English speaker (or maybe just American) would have to learn that menú is not what we think of as ‘menu’ in an American restaurant. The English is what I typed from the image and the Spanish is the Google Translate, which, btw, after lots of use I’ve found is often better than human translation, at least for the narrow purpose of learning vocabulary, since Google is very literal. BTW, WordPress is awful for precisely controlling layout so the English and Spanish only approximately align, but are always in the same overall order.

https://lacocinadivertida.com/2011/10/21/alubias-pintas-con-costillas/ https://thecookwaregeek.com/sopa-de-ajo-castellana-spanish-garlic-soup/ https://recetaland.com/revuelto-de-morcilla-con-pinones/	MENU FIN DE SEMANA 15.50€   ENTRANTES   Alubias pintas con costilla y chorizo Sopa castellana con jamón y huevo Revuelto de morcilla con piñones Ensalada templada con gulas y gambas	WEEKEND MENU €15.50   STARTERS   Pinto beans with rib and chorizo Castilian soup with ham and egg Scrambled eggs with black pudding with pine nuts Warm salad with eels and prawns

 

Observation #1: While castellana can found in a dictionary, just translating it to ‘Castilian’ doesn’t tell you much. This is a challenge to my app idea, i.e. translating words isn’t that helpful. So this means looking up, either Castilian soup or sopa castellana, and basically all pages I find usually adds de ajo (this restaurant didn’t because they probably assume any customer already knows this). And I will tell you just adding de ajo or somehow knowing this is garlic soup is IMPORTANT!

So funny personal story that reading this recalled. In my first year of college I drove down from Boston to New York City, mostly to go to bars (since at the time NY had lowest drinking age in USA). But I also meet my hermana mayor (older sister) and her “sophisticated” boyfriend so we went to a Spanish theme restaurant, completely with flamenco dancer on the piano. AND, we just got the house soup, i.e. garlic soup. AND, guess what, to a midwestern boy used to meat and potatoes it was awful. So I’d want to know more than just the English translation of the Spanish item on the menu before ordering.

Observation #2: I’ve seen enough Google Translates, plus lots of studying of food in Spain to know morcilla is just morcilla (blood pudding is approximately correct). It’s just a very common sausage and particularly popular in this part of Spain. So how would any app really explain this item to you?

Observation #3: Google is being very helpful to add ‘eggs’ to its translation of revuelto whose primary dictionary entry is ‘messy’. Understanding revuelto IS a situation where learning Spanish helps. revuelto is the past participle (-ed in English; and it’s irregular in Spanish) for the verb revolver (not a gun, but ‘to stir’). If you didn’t know any of this you might think it’s related to ‘revolting’ (not its cognate) but knowing Spanish you quickly find many adjectives are derived from verbs.

Observation #4: I’ll get to gulas below this menu analysis.

Observation #5: The links I provide are for recipes for these dishes (two are in Spanish but generally Google Translate works fairly well on recipes, yet more posts in the future). And while popular/common dishes in Spain often have recipes in English, probably the recipes in Spanish are the best.

Observation #6: I would translate the Spanish only slightly differently than Google did AND a translation (by anybody) would only be marginally useful to choose what to order. This, rather than knowing Spanish or not, is the biggest challenge in creating any menu “translator”. So what is need to help a traveler decide what to order?

Vocabulary from 1000 days

As I mentioned in my previous post I recently completed 1000 consecutive days of study with Duolingo to learn Spanish. Given my goal of this project is to develop a menu translation tool obtaining a substantial vocabulary of food and cooking related terms is essential.

So how did I do? Here I’ve extracted most relevant vocabulary from 162 “skills” (Duolingo’s term for a unit of study).

Si estas interesado en vocabulario de Duolingo …

aceite (oil) agua (water) aguacate (avocado) ajo (garlic) alcohol (alcohol) almuerzo (lunch) arroz (rice) asado (roasted) asiento (seat) atún(tuna) azúcar (sugar) banana (banana) bebida (beverage) bistec (steak) bol (bowl) botella (bottle) brócoli(brocolli) cacahuete(peanut) café (coffee) cafetería (coffee shop) caliente (hot) camarero (waiter) carne(meat) casa (house) cebolla (onion) cena (dinner) cerdo (pig) cereal (grain) cereza(cherry) cerveza (beer) champán(champagne) champiñón (mushroom) chef (chef) chocolate(chocolate) chorizo (sausage) cocina (cooking/kitchen) cocinero (cook) comedor(dining room) comida (food/meal) comido (eaten) comiendo (eating) conejo (rabbit) copa (glass/drink) corazón (heart) crema (cream) crudo(uncooked) cuchara (spoon) cuchillo (knife) cuenta (check) desayuno (breakfast) dulce (sweet) durazno(peach) ensalada(salad) entrada (starter) especia(spice) fresa(strawberry) fresco (fresh) frijol (bean) frío (cold) frito (fried) fruta (fruit) galleta (cookie) hamburguesa(burger) helado(ice cream) hielo (ice) huevo (egg) ingrediente(ingredients) jalea (jelly) jamón (ham) jugo(juice) leche (milk) lechuga(lettuce) limón (lemon) limonada (lemonade) maíz (corn) mango (mango) maní (peanut) mantequilla (butter) manzana (apple) mayonesa(mayonnaise) melón (melon) menú (menu) mermelada (jam) mesa (table) mesero (waiter) mezcla(mixture) miel (honey) mostaza(mustard) naranja(orange) oveja (sheep) pagar (pay) pan (bread) papa (potato) parrilla (grill) pasta (pasta) pastel (cake) patata (potato) pato (duck) pepino(cucumber) pera (pear) pescado(fish) pez (fish) picando (snacking) picante (spicy) pimienta(pepper<spice>) pimiento (pepper) piña (pineapple) pizza (pizza) planta (plant) plátano (banana) plato (dish/plate) plato principal(main course) pollo(chicken) postre (dessert) precio (price) propina (tip) queso(cheese) receta(recipe) refresco (soda) restaurante(restaurant) sabor(taste) sabroso(tasty) sal(salt) salchicha (sausage) salmón(salmon) salsa (sauce) sándwich(sandwich) sangre (blood) silla (chair) silvestre (wild) sopa (soup) taza(cup) tazón (mug) té (tea) tenedor (fork) tiburón(shark) tinto (red<wine>) tomate(tomato) tortilla (omelet) tostada (toast) uva (grape) vaca (cow) vainilla(vanilla) vaso(glass) vegano(vegan) vegetal (vegetable) vegetariano (vegetarian) verdura (vegetable) vinagre(vinegar) vino (wine) yogur (yogurt) zanahoria (carrot)

Not bad, definitely some useful stuff in there. But if you compare this to some of my previous posts analyzing menus you’ll notice a great deal is missing. So my conclusion, walking the Camino with 1000 days of Duolingo Spanish won’t explain many menus.

And without even mentioning words that are very specific types of ingredients or geographical references here’s just a few words from my glossary that would be really important in Spain and were totally missed by Duolingo (the biggies in bold):

aceituna (olive) agridulce (sweet and sour) ajillo (garlic sauce) albondiga (meatball) almeja (clam) almendra (almond) alubia (bean) amargo (sour) anchoa (anchovy) anguila (eel) angula (baby eels) ave (bird <to eat>) azafrán (saffron) bacalao (cod) bellota (acorn) besugo (sea bream) bocadillo (sandwich <aka sub>) buey (beef) buñuelo (fritter) cabra (goat) callos (tripe ) camarón (baby prawns) cangrejo (crab) carta (a la carte menu, Duo has this but just as ‘letter’) casero (homemade) cazuela (casserole ) ccecina (jerky) chuleta (chop) chuletón (T-bone steak) cochinillo (suckling pig) codorniz (quail) cogollo (bud) cordero (lamb) costilla (ribs) degustación (tasting) dorada (gilt-head bream) elaboración (preparation) embutido (sausage) empanado (breaded) entrante (starter) entrecot (entrecote) especias (spices) estilo (style) estofado (stewed) festivo (holiday) gallina (hen) gamba (prawn ) guisante (peas) huerto (vegetable garden) hueso (bone) judías (beans) lechal (unweaned) lengua (tongue) lomo (loin ) lubina (sea bass) mejillón (mussel) membrillo (quince) miga (fried bread crumb ) mollejas (gizzards; sweetbreads) nata (cream) nuez (nut; walnut) pato (duck) pavo (turkey) percebe (barnacles ) piel (skin) pimentón (paprika) pulpo (octopus) ración (portion) receta (recipe) remolacha (beet) revuelto (scrambled egg dish ) sardina (sardine) sidra (cider) solomillo (tenderloin) surtido (assorted) ternera (veal ) tocino (bacon) unidad (unit ) uva (grape) ventresca (belly < tuna>) yema (egg yolk) zamburiña (scallop) zumo (juice)

And hundreds more, so again, good luck ordering while walking the Camino with just Duolingo Spanish.

Finding verbs related to cooking

As you can see on the tabs above this post I have a list of verbs used in cooking, recipes, food and restaurants. Like many such lists I create these from all the lists I can find that other people make, consolidating many sources, some often wrong (spelling, definitions) and then looking words up in dictionaries, including the most authoritative until I think I have an accurate and comprehensive list. Needless to say this is a lot of work so if you look at my list you’ll see it’s mostly unfinished, but has a large number of verbs as candidates.

But is my list even complete? Even after combining all the sources I can find?

So in this post I’ll describe another way to find cooking verbs from original source textual material.

But first:

So I’ve wanted to get back and do more work on this blog, but alas for 898 days I’ve been almost totally occupied with trying to learn Spanish and it’s amazing that I never seem to have time to work on this blog, which, actually is more fun and potentially of benefit to others (my list of verbs is the third most referenced page on this blog; gradually my accumulated lists are being found by other people).

When I started this blog, with plan to build a portable app to decode menus in Spain, my sister said I couldn’t do that without learning Spanish. I was kinda sure that wasn’t the case (after all it is just solving a puzzle, don’t have to be able to speak or listen to do that). But I fell for her pitch and so got trapped in an almost endless cycle of all available time (really mental energy) going into learning Spanish. I won’t bore you with all that (or see other posts), but it is a trap, in that the more you learn, the more you forget and therefore have to do more drills to refresh your memory. Soon that becomes all consuming and thus other things fall to wayside.

Well, at least, as this exercise will show I got something from 898 days and over 200,000 individual drills. While my speaking is horrible and I can only understand clear and slow speech (and then only 70% of the words) my reading is not too bad. So I figure let’s use that a bit more to help with this blog.

I also realized, in previous tries at decoding menus, that actually one needs to know about the cuisine itself, the dishes, the ingredients, and how they are prepared. Even with words on a menu accurately translated there is more one needs to know in order to be able to order what you really want. And, duh, guess what the best way to do that is?

Read recipes in Spanish from Spain!

Now there is a trick to finding recipes in Spanish (as original language) but also for Spain (since food terminology in Latin America can be quite different). So don’t search with English queries! After a bit of experimenting I found

comida recetas en linea de espana

gets some good results (food recipes online from Spain, without the comida you get some strange results). So I’m going to spend a while with the results I’m getting from this but I want to start with a simple example.

Aguacates rellenos de pollo mechado (otherwise known as Avocados stuffed with shredded chicken). With simple word-for-word dictionary lookups of each word you might come close title (mechado as we’ll discuss is tough to understand) and this might sound good to try. (Question, are you eating some avocado or just using their skins as a bowl for the chicken? It there anything mixed with the chicken? Would you really want to order it?)

This just happens to be the first receta I picked (from RTVE’s recipe site (the public TV in Spain). So here is the preparation part of the recipe in original Spanish and with a Google translation I added.

Cocinamos la pechuga de pollo como más nos guste; al horno, a la plancha o cocida, y la mechamos con ayuda de dos tenedores.	We cook the chicken breast as we like best; Baked, grilled or cooked, and we mix it with the help of two forks.
Abrimos los aguacates por la mitad, retiramos el hueso y, con ayuda de una cuchara, vaciamos parte de su pulpa para poder rellenarlos con facilidad.	We open the avocados in half, remove the bone and, with the help of a spoon, empty part of its pulp to be able to fill them easily.
En un bol, machacamos la pulpa del aguacate que hemos retirado.	In a bowl, we mash the pulp of the avocado that we have removed.
Picamos las hortalizas en brunoise y las mezclamos con el pollo mechado, la pulpa del aguacate, el cilantro, el maíz y la mayonesa.	We chop the vegetables in brunoise and mix them with the shredded chicken, the avocado pulp, the coriander, the corn and the mayonnaise.
Para hacer la mayonesa, en un vaso de batidora disponemos los ingredientes. Introducimos la batidora de mano y comenzamos a batir sin mover la batidora, pegada al fondo.	To make the mayonnaise, put the ingredients in a blender glass. We introduce the hand mixer and begin to beat without moving the mixer, glued to the bottom.
Cuando observemos que la emulsión comienza a crearse, comenzamos a hacer movimientos suaves hacia arriba y hacia abajo con la batidora de mano.	When we observe that the emulsion begins to create, we begin to make smooth movements up and down with the hand mixer.
Rellenamos los aguacates con esta mezcla y ¡disfrutamos!	We stuff the avocados with this mixture and we enjoy!

Now since it turns I can “read” (at least parse the sentences and know enough vocabulary) I’ve marked all the verbs, which is the point of this post, i.e. how to find verbs related to cooking. I think you should be able to do what I just did when you reach about the A2 level (basically one year of high school Spanish). To skip to the chase here are all the verbs (infinitive) that can be extracted from this receta:

abrir batir cocinar comenzar crear disfrutar disponer gustar hacer haber introducir machacar mechar mezclar mover observar pegar picar poder rellenar retirar vaciar

Of these verbs the ones marked would be likely in cooking prose and many of the others are either common verbs in Spanish (hacer, gustar, haber, poder) or used in many contexts other than cooking. IOW, if one is trying to accumulate a list using this approach (analyzing an appropriate corpus) you need to apply some human intelligence, which, thus as my sister claimed, requires some amount of fluency in the language. Of the verbs I marked, all are in my list at this blog, but finding them used in context can be helpful to focus on the translation most relative to comida.

In fact picar is a good example as the primary dictionary definitions are to sting, to itch, but in culinary context it is to chop, or as I have mentioned in previous posts in a restaurant setting the to peck (like a chicken) fits because this describes basically snacking finger-food appetizers. So context matters and dictionary lookups can be misleading (or what you learn in Spanish course that might be more likely to teach the more common meaning)

The Google translation is pretty good (given my ability to read the Spanish and compare) with just a couple of bad choices: while hueso has bone as primary translation, it is also pit which fits the context, The other two, pegada (stuck) and crearse (create) are a bit more subtle and I’ll cover those later. And vaso de batidora (blender glass) really takes some analysis as GT translation is very literal and not very helpful (we’ll cover this later as well)

Now I also marked a couple of words that are either not verbs or being used as verb in the context: for instance, in the first line ” con ayuda de dos tenedores” ayuda is a noun (help), but it is also the third person singular present conjugation of ayudar (to help). Given subject pronouns are often omitted in Spanish, he helps would be translated just as ayuda. So how do you know whether it’s help the noun or help the verb? Context, which means some fluency in Spanish.

Another example is batidora, which is a case of making a noun from a verb root (IOW, knowing just verbs gives you a shot at guessing nouns). Most of the time a word ending in -dora is some kind of tool to do the action implied by the verb part, i.e. computadora, a tool that computes (computar), or in this case a tool that beats (batir).

con el pollo mechado and pegada show another common construct in Spanish. The past participle of a verb, for instance cocinado (cooked) from cocinar (to cook) can often be used as an adjective. Since the participle ends in -o, which is usually masculine, it becomes cocinada (feminine) when used with a feminine noun, which is why it’s carne asada and pollo asado, from asar (to grill). While mechado follows this pattern and gets translated (accurately) by Google as shredded, mechar is a bit mysterious to produce shredded. And pegada, used here as adjective, is really tricky, with -a there is dictionary entry of ‘punch’ (no fit in this context), but pegado is stuck or glued, from the verb pegar (to hit, to paste). So Google translated this as glued, which is kinda right, but this is referring to a mixing bowl and that one wants to have firmly “stuck’ to a surface so you can mix the stuff inside without the bowl spinning all around or sliding over the surface.

The point of a lot of these details I mention is that you can’t just grab a Spanish dictionary (in paper or on your phone) and type in a word and get a definition and, often, get a meaning that really tells you something. That’s why reading lots of recipes could help a lot to them reading menus. Menus don’t usually contain cooking instructions BUT they do often contain derivatives of verbs (as adjectives or nouns) to do tell you something.

So learning a selection of verbs, like from my list if I ever finish it, can help a lot in reading a menu.

And knowledge of Spanish help to figure out something like hemos retirado. Again, you might guess retirado is a past participle (and guessing it’s regular, thus the verb is retirar). Guess what, that’s right! retirar (to remove) is directly used in the instructions as the conjugated form retiramos, which (again missing subject pronoun, but deduced from conjugation is ‘we remove’). It’s interesting the style of writing this recipe used we do xxx a lot, which is a polite form of language (instead of the imperative, commanding you (the cook) to retira (if being familiar and addressing you as tú) or retire (if being formal and addressing you as usted). This is also a good example of false cognate (not so obvious with retiramos, but you might guess retirado is retired and it’s not). Now hemos is the present we conjugation of haber, or we have. As in English this is one of the “moods” in Spanish (the perfect as spanishdict.com calls it or Pretérito perfecto in Spanish). So I have removed and I removed (retiré or retiraba, which gets into the messy distinction between imperfect and preterite (both for action in the past) are different in Spanish, just as in English and have slightly different meanings.

And finally I’ll show off a bit more of 898 days of studying Spanish to explain poder rellenarlos. poder is used a lot in Spanish and basically means ‘to be able’ (aka ‘can’). But the -los on rellenarlos is one of those things that defeats looking up derivative words in a dictionary. The -los is for an indirect object pronoun, in this case, them, which we affix to the verb infinitve rellenar (to stuff). There is quite a bit of this in Spanish and it can be confusing.

For instance dámelo is three words stuck together (the accent just shows it’s not pronounced with the same stressed syllable as normal). dá is the imperative polite ‘you give’ (a command to you (usted) to give) from dar (to give); me is just me as the indirect object, and lo is just it (the object), IOW, give it to me. So, of course you can figure out that estas manzanas, dáselas is ‘those apples, give them to them’, right?

So why am I “showing off” so of what I learned and pretending I could teach you some Spanish. Instead of that interpretation what I am showing is how knowledge of the language does facilitate reading. Even if you don’t know all the root words in a piece of text (like cooking instructions) all these little bits of Spanish grammar and conjugation and sentence construction can let you find the words that really tell you something.

And for this post my lengthy discussion also demonstrates how to get a really good verb list – go through lots of recipes in tedious detail, finding verbs in context and then with a combination of the not-too-bad but often flawed Google translations and the rest of the context you can build up a reasonable corpus, i.e. the infinitive form of a verb and its (possibly multiples) meanings you extract from the translation and deduction.

So I’ll finish with something basic in this recipe, from its title; pollo mechado

mechado is the past participle (so -ed in English) of mechar. But a dictionary lookup of mechar (several good online dictionaries) doesn’t yield ‘to shred’. Instead you get to stuff, or to throw into, neither of which fit shredded very well. There is an additional meaning to lard that is intriguing (certainly sounds like a cooking term).

In fact from an excellent source I mention on my cooking verbs page, www.mamirecetas.com/glosario. The somewhat crude Google translation yields this

At the time of wicking , holes are opened in the selected piece, and then they are filled, introducing in them foods that compensate for this tendency to dry out, usually bacon or bacon type fats , these are called wicks. Likewise, you can add elements that help make the piece tastier once cooked, such as aromatic herbs , vegetables, dried fruits, etc.

If you’re familiar with cooking, this is a description of the process of larding. Excellent, got it, but how does this get to shredding. The closest match in the dictionary (under culinary contexts) for ‘to shred’ is cortar en tiras (cut into shreds) or triturar (to grind).

Now in the past when dictionary searches fail to reveal a clue, I do just ordinary searches. Why try mechado , you’ll find a Filipino dish. So the best I could find, which fits this recipe is (from a user contributed site, just like this, attempting to explain Spanish phrases, but therefore often wrong)

Carne mechada is “pulled meat”…generally it is pork shoulder meat slowly cooked and then “mechada” (pulled) with a fork…like the pulled pork you put in a bun. Mechas is slang for hair threads….

It’s the ” y la mechamos con ayuda de dos tenedores ” in the first line (btw, that la before mechamos is not ‘the’, but an indirect pronoun it, which in this case precedes the verb, not affixed to it). So I guess. I have made pulled pork before, when the pork was too hot to shred by hand so I used forks, but wow, this one is tough. Given the “slang” is not used in Spain, presumably this must be a Latin American recipe.

All this work and now to summarize it all into a corpus and then do it a few hundred more times and I might be able to build a really good page that meanwhile a fluent Spanish speaker attending culinary school could create from memory.

p.s. In a little proof reading I notice I forgot to discuss nos guste (in the first line) so I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader to deal with verb gustar and how to say you/someone/we likes/liked/will-like/would-like in Spanish. Hint it involved the rarely taught in beginner Spanish subjunctive mood conjugation, but the often taught reflexive form.

te gustarás esta entrada de blog, sí

and you will say, por supuesto, excelente, me encanta.

Back to Menus in Spain, Part 2D (Ponferrada)

As a break from tedious discussion of Spanish, I found something else to talk about for this restaurant (MESÓN LA TABERNA in case you didn’t read the previous parts) One interesting photo that appears on Google Maps in the photos section for a restaurant is a copy of the check (cuenta). I guess people think they are doing a favorite to readers to see what a meal might cost in the place, which could be handy, since there are already tons of pictures of the food.

Normally I don’t copy photos from public sites as even though people take these pictures and contribute them free to the site (thus relinquishing their IP rights) most websites consider their content to have IP rights. There is a doctrine of “fair use” I won’t bore you with it (simple case, quoting a few lines from a book in your paper giving credit and source), but I figure all parties involved like publicity. I’ve given Google seven photos that Google keeps telling me that one has 95K views and all of them together have 240K views. So the small number of views of this photo I clipped from Google is a tiny fraction of what I’ve given them. So sue me, Google. BUT I do advise readers not to follow this example.

I chose this particular check because it’s a hefty total, but also because it has a lot of line items to talk about. The fun part of this is that the receipt is fairly narrow and thus the entire name of the food item can´t fit, so for those what was the item? We’ll get a few of those to talk about.

But first, the text at the top of the check is fairly straight forward, but there are a couple of abbreviations as the labels of the columns, which require the full vocabulary to understand. Also, for my USA readers, remember , is used in Spain (and most of Europe) where we’d use . AND € is Euros, now the only currency as the peseta was abolished in 2002; for your info today the € is about $1.17, so IOW about the same as the item would be in USA with the tip which, usually, is included in the bill in Spain, as is the IVA tax, so you can just think of the price as essentially the same.

Cant	la cantidad	the number of this particular item ordered
Descripcion	la descripción	description and it appear their printer can’t handle accents
Precio	el precio	simple enough, the price of an individual item
Total	el total	cant x precio

We deduce there were four people for this ticket from four big dishes, 8 (two per person) orders of bread, but five desserts and only three drinks. So $42 each isn’t cheap, but certainly not a luxury restaurant.

Moving to the items ordered by this group I’ll repeat the all uppercase descripción from the cuenta and then complete the item with the remaining letters/words in lowercase in red. Our first item is MENU FIN DE SEMana, which doesn’t mean anything specific, but whatever the weekend menu is (remember, in Spain, el menú is a set combination of (usually three) items and carta is the list of individual items).

The next one took some work, BOTILLO CON CAChelos which is not an obvious answer. It took careful scanning of multiple online photos of the restaurant’s menu (no online text) to find botillo con cachelos, verdura, garbanzos, y chorizo 15,00 €. This was my best guess as it means “chunks of potato” which this dish usuallycontains, but it might also refer to cachetes (cheeks) as we’ll find when we look at preparing this “classic” dish of Ponferrada. At least one preparation of this dish contains cachucha de cerdo, which is a vulgar body part in Latin American but in Spain it’s instead an awful looking dried head of a pig (ears, snout, skin and all).

We’re going to have a whole post on what this dish is, since it is “famous” in Porferrada in the next post.

So let’s try a few more, which are the starters, completing the truncated descripción from the carta posted outside the place: a) CROQUETAS DE BOletus, on the Tapas Tradicionales section of the carta, where boletus is actually a Latin term (and a genus of mushrooms), so, IOW, wild mushroom croquettes, b) HUEVOS ROTOS COn patatas … (four different possibilities), while rotos literally means broken, this is closest to a scramble, from the Toque el Huevo section of the outdoor carta, c) SALTEADO DE VERduras de temporado, sauteed seasonal vegetables, from the De La Huerta (Of the garden) section of the carta, d) CACHAPO DE TERNera con queso de cabra and cecina (no translation for cachapo, just an Asturian dish, typically of two pieces of veal (ternera) and cheese and ham (or cecina, sorta jerky), in this dish, breaded and fried from the Las Carnes section of the carta, e) ESCALOPINES DE ternera al cabrales, veal scallops (thin pounded cuts of veal) with the famous Spanish blue cheese, also from the Las Carnes section, f) CALAMARES A LA andaluz, squid in Andalusian style, from Tapas del Mar section of the carta.

Wow, these people ate a lot, two appetizers each and a full main course. I get llenísimo just thinking about it! A few of these items I can match up with the photos at Google maps or TripAdvisor and they are a substantial serving size. For fun you might to see if you can find these dishes in the photos.

But they’re not done. Either someone had two desserts or I’m wrong and there are five guests, because they finished with these postres: a) ARROZ CON LECHE, basically rice pudding, b) TARTA DE CASTADcastañas, not sure why the D is in the truncated version as castañas is the only thing on the carta that matches, basically the chestnut tart, and, c) TARTA DE LA ABUela, pretty certain it would be abuela, not abuelo, as this is a common thing in Spain, basically Grandmother’s Tart. Now TARTA can be confusing since it can be pie, cake or tart, but since cake has its own word, pastel, tart is probably the best guess.

So there we have it. This receipt alone, due to the limited space for the descripción doesn’t completely tell us what these people had to eat. Without the menu some items might be difficult to guess. So while a posted photo of this cuenta tells us something, we might need to do more research to guide our choices. And I think this is more food that most people would get, perhaps it’s a special occasion for them and they’ve starved for a day to have a grand meal. So the $42 each is probably a bit high. BUT, unlike the bills for most people in many restaurants in the US, booze is only a small amount. In fact, they only had a jarra (pitcher, and in Spain that’s less than pitchers in the USA) of beer, and the rest was just two bottles of water, one even free. So 8,50 € just barely would buy the grande margarita in my favorite place.

SO, if you’re looking at one of this checks someone posts you may need to do more research to figure out what it really means. But it can be a helpful guide, if you can’t find prices before you enter (prices are on the conveniently posted outdoor menu, I love those, fun to look at even you’re not stopping).

Back to Menus in Spain, Part 2B (Ponferrada, gastronomía berciana)

In the previous subpart I included a photo of a restaurant that was mentioned by Trip Advisor and now we’ll look at it a bit. The Trip Advisor page for the restaurant has a website link that is actually for a hotel that then mentions two restaurants connected to the hotel. Studying this led to a discovery of an even broader culinary topic that is connected to Ponferrada.

The two restaurants, RESTAURANTE LA VIOLETA and MESÓN LA TABERNA, have a single paragraph on the home page and then a MÁS INFO link. So I’ll start with MESÓN LA TABERNA, analyzing the paragraph from the home page and then a few paragraphs from MÁS INFO page. I couldn’t find any human English translation so I’ll do, as usual, side-by-side Spanish and Google translation to English, which I’ll correct a bit.

Now the point is, this is just text, nothing from the menu. Well, as one of the few places in Ponferrada with a website at all then I might try to use my newly learned Spanish to read this material and decide if I want to dine at either of these, perhaps also judging from the user contributed photos at the Trip Advisor site.

So how well would I do. Below is the paragraph on the main page. The words that are embolded are words I have not learned after 102 lessons in Duolingo. I’ll elaborate more about all the text associated with this restaurant in the next sub-part as it turned out just looking at a two words led to a lot of discoveries about food in Ponferrada.

MESÓN LA TABERNA	MESÓN LA TABERNA
Antigua bodega de piedra y madera rehabilitada. Cocina casera tradicional berciana, elaborada con los mejores productos de temporada que ofrece nuestra tierra. Disponemos de Botillo completo todos los días del año sin necesidad de encargo y de una amplia variedad de tapas y raciones de elaboración tradicional. Cuenta también con menú del día casero durante toda la semana.	Old restored stone and wood cellar. Traditional home cooking from Bercia, made with the best seasonal products that our land offers. We have a complete Botillo every day of the year without the need for an order and a wide variety of tapas and traditionally made portions. It also has a homemade menu of the day throughout the week.

First, amusingly Google didn’t translate the name of this place: MESÓN LA TABERNA at all. Now while I haven’t had taberna in any of my Spanish lessons I’d encountered it before in studying menus so didn’t have to look up that it is the, fairly obvious (i.e. cognate), ‘tavern’ or just ‘bar/pub’. Gosh, one would think Google would know that (and in does when not all CAPS and inside some prose). One tiny bit of my Spanish learning is that I correctly guessed that is feminine noun, even without depending on the obvious la in the name.

But mesón confused me (and also MSWord, where I’m using the Spanish spellchecker which decided this was misspelled and changed it to meson). Was it something like French maison which is a favorite (and often pretentious) part of a restaurant name? Well, kinda. spanishdict.com just defines it as: inn, tavern, bar, which kinda then means the literal translation would be “tavern the tavern” or “inn the tavern”. So I just double-checked in the Oxford translation dictionary would then said ” old-style bar/restaurant” as well as saying that tavern was a archaic use of the term. Interesting. Meanwhile back at spanishdict.com I noticed the “sense” (aka context) for a particular translation is ” old-fashioned” and “rural restaurant”.

Added: I later discovered GT doesn’t translate since it’s all CAPS and in lowercase it comes up with “inn the tavern”, as I figured out on my own, above. I also had second thoughts whether the picture I posted in the previous part, which I found via Google Maps is really the right place. Note that on the picture it also says Cervecería although it’s not clear that is part of the name (a cervecería is a beer oriented bar, aka, beerhall). Study of the map, however, shows this place behind the hotel and the LA VIOLETA in front of it, so hard to say.

Now only a fussbudget would waste 10 minutes and two paragraphs on this, trying to translate something Google couldn’t, but as usual, I learned something. Maybe you did too. IOW, I’m sum it up as saying they’re trying to position their taberna a bit more high end than the usual tavern by adding mesón to it. And looking at the photos I’d agree, it looks like a cool place and better than your run-of-the-mill bar, in Spain, that does have some food.

So let’s get on with and look at the text. But I’m going to analyze this from the POV of what could I read, after 638 days of learning Spanish. As my regular readers know I also spent my professional life in various jobs of creating software, so now I just do a bit of programming for fun, or some little thing I need. So I had developed a simple lexer (extract all the words in some text, a bit trickier than it sounds) and then a drill tool with an XML vocabulary I create from extracting vocabulary in my Duolingo lessons, which, therefore, can also compare a lexicon to see what is missing. So this means I have this:

Now the first bit of this I want to explain, two words Google couldn’t translate and are hard to find in dictionaries, is Bercia (also berciana) and Botillo. The full text is the in next part and the cyan was my coloring scheme for unknown words.

I immediately thought bolillo was a misspelling as my lessons have had la botella (which more than once I’ve misspelled as el botello). Now sometimes in Spanish a word can be both genders (not the same as neuter in other languages), e.g. turista or dentista or principiante but other times the last letter changes, e.g. el gato or la gata., el maestro or la maestra. IOW, is botillo something related to botella? Well, just barely. Google can’t translate this, but spanishdict.com says “A small wine-bag, a leather bottle” and but Oxford and the DLE (official regulated dictionary of Spanish) have no clue.

But it turns out, and this has often been the fun thing to figure out analyzing menus, botillo is actually a food item, ” a dish of meat-stuffed pork intestine” that is also a specialty of El Bierzo, a county in the Spanish province of León. So while there must be some connection to a wine bag (more likely bota as backpackers would know) the real definition is, as with other menus I blogged, a totally regional reference (possibly not even well known in other parts of Spain, but I doubt my Spanish teacher would know.

Now I actually just fooled myself which led to another mystery. When I saw El Bierzo my mind thought this was the other untranslated word, Bercia. But, alas while I was trying to get a link for you I couldn’t find it (but kept getting hits on Bierzo) so there is a connection. And here it is, after more research, “Bercian is the generic name of the linguistic varieties spoken in El Bierzo region, in the province of León, Spain.” And guess what, Ponferrada is capital. And, while I’ve never had it in Spanish classes, usually something like berciana is just a resident of this area (or possibly member of this ethnic group).

 

So there is quite a bit of research just to cover two words that I’ve neither learned in studying Spanish or that I can figure out, just from Google translation or dictionaries. AND, I’ve found this over and over again in Spain, some term that is some kind of regional reference that then implies certain culinary dishes. IOW, there is nothing to “translate” so it does raise the challenge of what to put into an app to aid people looking at menus.

 

p.s. I just discovered I insulted Google Translation a bit. Here’s the relevant bit:

Cocina casera tradicional berciana,.

Traditional home cooking from Bercia,

 

so, a-ha, Bercia never appeared in the Spanish text, but Google figured out that berciana should be “from Bercia”, clever Google. Now I discovered that while spanishdict.com didn’t know this at all, Oxford dictionary has these definitions: Adjective “Relativo a El Bierzo, comarca de la provincia española de León, o a sus habitantes.” (Relating to El Bierzo, a region of the Spanish province of León, or its inhabitants.) or Noun “[persona] Que es de El Bierzo.” ([person] Who is from El Bierzo.) It’s amazing what one finds if we keep digging.

 

Now if you want to learn more about la gastronomía berciana, you can try this link but you’ll have to figure out the Spanish yourself (and there will be a quiz)

https://www.ponferrada.org/turismo/es/gastronomia

And just for more fun here’s the official website for Botillo, including recetas – enjoy

https://botillodelbierzo.es/

 

Does learning Spanish help to read menus?

I suppose the short answer is obviously yes, but a more complex answer is “not very much”. It is also tied to how one “learns Spanish”. Most any form of Spanish instruction is oriented to a broad brush of the language, mostly focused on conversational forms and vocabulary. That could be handy in dining conversation but not so much for reading menus.

I used a variety of learning methods: 1) mostly Duolingo, which seems roughly equivalent to most online courses, 2) more recently actual teacher course that quickly became virtual due to COVID, but is interactive and responsive to individual student needs, 3) reading, although mostly the typical books for beginners and students, so little emphasis on food or dining, and, 4) listening, a variety of sources, Netflix Spanish language movies, Spanish language TV and Spanish language podcasts – this is a helpful adjunct to the other methods, but I have yet to find a Spanish language cooking show.

So in all these methods only a small fraction of the learning time is focused on food. Sometimes the lessons on shopping contain as many food nouns and the lessons on dining.

So as the only real quantitative data I can provide from 89 lessons (about 60%) of Duolingo in 502 days I have 202 terms (nouns, verbs, adjectives) directly or at least related to dining. Of those, and just masculine singular version of nouns, I have 124 (only 87 of which I’ve seen on menus) which I’ll list here:

aceite, agua, alcohol, almuerzo, arroz, azúcar, banana, bar, bebida, boca, bosque, botella, brazo, cabeza, café, cafetería, camarero, campo, carne, carta, casa, cebolla, cena, cerdo, cereal, cerveza, champán, champiñón, chef, chocolate, chorizo, cliente, cocina, comida, conejo, copa, corazón, cuchara, cuchillo, cuello, cuenta, cuerpo, dedo, desayuno, dulce, ensalada, espalda, estómago, frijol, fruta, fuego, galleta, granja, grupo, hamburguesa, hielo, huevo, jamón, jugo, leche, limón, limonada, mango, mano, mantequilla, manzana, mar, menú, mermelada, mesa, miel, naranja, nariz, océano, ojo, oreja, oveja, pan, papa, paquete, parrilla, pasta, pastel, pato, patata, pera, pescado, pez, pie, pierna, pimiento, pizza, planta, plátano, plato, pollo, postre, precio, primavera, primero, queso, refresco, reserva, restaurante, sal, salsa, sándwich, silla, sopa, taza, tazón, té, tenedor, tinto, tomate, tostada, vaca, vaso, vegetal, vegetariano, verdura, vino, yogur

If you compare this list to my glossary you’ll see this is only a small fraction of what I’ve compiled just from the menus I’ve looked at.

So, IOW, you’re not going to learn very much of the vocabulary you’ll find on menus in a generic Spanish class. And it will be worse if you just do some quickie conversation class before going on a trip.

Now, OTOH, I have two phrasebooks (one acquired over 30 years ago) and since dining is a big part of what is covered in those guides the vocabulary from those (which I can only report anecdotally as I don’t have detailed analysis) is actually quite a bit larger than I’ve learned in 500+ days of various Spanish learning methods. So a phrasebook can be handy BUT, frankly, those also cover only a fraction of what one finds on menus.

A menu is not prose so all the grammar and verb conjugations and such are almost entirely useless for reading menus. The vocabulary used is quite extensive compared to standard classes. And, especially in Spain, many of the words on a menu aren’t even in any dictionary, so rather unlikely to have been encountered in any Spanish courses. And beyond nouns, other words in the menu entries are closely tied to unique vocabulary of cooking. And some of those words not in dictionaries are just the names of dishes or ingredients.

So, you want to learn how to read menus, here’s what I would suggest (and I’ve never seen any class or book oriented to this curriculum).

1. read cookbooks, in Spanish, doing whatever you have to do (Google Translate, dictionary lookups, web searches for terms not in dictionaries) to “read” the material and then make your own set of flashcards of every word you think you’ll need to know.
2. read online recetas (recipes) websites which are easier to analyze and translate and create a set of flashcards from that.
3. search for any websites oriented to cooking, in Spanish of course, and extract what you can from those.
4. And, guess what, do what I’ve been doing, i.e. finding menus online and analyzing them.

Now when it comes to food you definitely have to be careful to concentrate your study on the country you expect to visit and be reading menus. There is a huge diversity of food/cuisine terminology in the Western Hemisphere Spanish-speaking countries where terms have different meanings in different countries (or often are unique to just a few countries, even regions within the larger countries) and are quite different (even contradictory) to Spain.

So you’re in for a major bit of work to spend weeks in Spain, dining with only Spanish source material (menus or verbal). So the difficulty of finding what one needs means there is a big hole to fill, which can be the revised purpose of my effort here. A couple more years of studying Spanish and then doing a ton of my four steps above, and then converting all that learning into a form that can be more easily accessed for someone who is merely going to visit.

 

 

Unplanned post of menu translation

Instead of my planned post I’ve digressed into analyzing the menu of restaurant in San Sebastián Spain, recommended by a loyal reader, Gandarias.

I’ve been working (offline) on a series of posts comparing my experience of now nearly 500 days of learning Spanish language with my original approach of analyzing menus from Spain and deducing menu vocabulary. My purpose has been to first find source material and translate it, create a corpus of translated material, extract from that corpus “translations” (not word-by-word, but more meaningful translations) and then create a smartphone app to contain all the deduced vocabulary and food/cooking terminology for a person trying to read menus in Spain.

I had originally planned to find source material and create a corpus without learning Spanish. I felt I could accomplish my purpose without language fluency. But somehow I got convinced to learn Spanish (I’m not good at languages so this is quite a challenge for me) and so for the past year I’ve had few posts about menus and interesting items I was finding. Just having a Spanish dictionary is not very helpful for figuring out what items on a menu happen to be.

So before posting some more on this general topic I had planned to show some menu items to just present some examples of some of the issues. I’d picked a restaurant, more or less at random, in Leon and had some examples ready to go. Instead circumstances provided me a different opportunity. While reading a post of another travel blogger about San Sebastián I decided to take a hint. While I can’t actually go to the restaurant, as recommended, I did find it had a good website that also resulted in an unexpected adventure.

On most of my previous analysis of menus I have not had a human English translation, partly because I was looking at small restaurants along the Camino de Santiago. So for my initial analysis I’m dependent on Google Translate, which often botches menus as I’ve pointed out in previous posts, plus then other investigation to figure out items.

In a few of the larger cities restaurants sometimes do have English translation and this provides some extra calibration. When one is trying to build a corpus it is inevitable some errors creep in, but the quality of the final consensus view of translating menu items is enhanced by having as much raw material as possible, so human English translations really supplement the guesses, I and Google, are making in our translations.

So Restaurante Gandarias has both Spanish and English, as well as Euskara, the Basque language given this restaurant is in the heart of Basque Country. It is also a very popular resort and thus likely to attract many clients who will appreciate the English version. And even in the Spanish menu some items still use the Euskara terms.

Now a note about “menu”. In most restaurants that’s what a diner gets, but in Spain it is common that there are designed menú, that is several courses chosen by the restaurant and combined as a single order, also as prix fixe to use the French term. The “menu” I had originally planned to use for this post is in that category. OTOH, some restaurants (and their websites) also provide a carta, which Google translates as ‘letter’ which is nominally correct and totally correct in other circumstances (ahora escribo una carta, see I’ve learned something, did that from memory) and it can also mean card, as in cartas de juego (playing cards, as opposed to tarjeta de credito for credit card; also fun when there are so many meanings for words, both to and from Spanish). But for this restaurant carta has the meaning, from the French and sometimes found in USA, a la carte. Or basically individual items ordered separately at the diner’s choice.

For the Gandarias carta it’s divided into sections: Todas (all), Ensaladas (salads), Entrantes (starters), Pascados (fish), Carnes (meat) and Postre (desert) – and yes, I’ve had all but Entrantes in my Spanish lessons. So I selected Todas (in Spanish version) and got four webpages of pictures of food with captions as to the item. Fine, I scooped up all four pages, did some fiddling to reformat and created the first column of my typical table I use for analysis. Knowing there was English I wanted to get the Google Translate first so I did that and lined up items in a second column of those (all this will be at the end of the post).

Then in what I expected would be a routine mechanical process I switched to the English version of the website.  Since Ensalada de bogavante was the first item I didn’t even need the picture to realize that Roasted baby lamb was not the same thing. A bit more poking around and I realized while it appeared the English and Spanish menu had the same items they were in totally different orders.

AH. A challenge. Now I have to take the English description of the item and find the corresponding Spanish. Now for this item,  Lettuce and onion salad I was able to pick   Ensalada de lechuga y cebolla even without looking at the Google Translate with is exactly the same, easy-peasy.

But it wasn’t all so easy; for instance Scrambled eggs with cod matches with Revuelto de bacalao, not just because one easily remembers bacalao is cod (about as common a food term as there is in Spain, even obvious from bacalhau where I actually had it multiple times in Portugal).  But also because while  Revuelto has dictionary translations: messy, upside down, mixed up, disheveled,  untidy, nauseous, cloudy, turbulent (and more), but most usefully scrambled. I have dug through enough menus in Spain to known that scrambled (and implied to be of eggs) fits, hence scrambled eggs with cod (even though huevo is missing in the Spanish). Amusingly Google doesn’t get the implied eggs and therefore thinks it’s the cod that got scrambled so it says: Scrambled cod so if you were using your phone do you think you’d order this.

Now a few stumped me a bit more than others, but like one of those games where you match up things in columns I only had a few left and thus got my clue:  Grilled magret was the human English translation. ¿Qué?  Magret stumped my usual translation sources and Google had missed it, but in a Spanish dictionary (with Spanish definitions of Spanish words, not translation) I did find:

Filete de pechuga de pato o de ganso muy utilizado en la cocina francesa.

which I can almost translate myself but here’s the GT

Duck breast or goose fillet widely used in French cuisine.

So, in other words, it isn’t a Spanish word, but the key hint (as well, a bit, the picture) is pato, so I was able to match up with Magret de pato (I never just did searches in my text, instead trying to translate myself).

So I wanted to do a couple of more to finish my point, about some challenges of translating menus (which, btw, are NOT solved by just learning to speak Spanish):

Almejas a la marinera

Clams a la marinera

Fisherman´s style clams

So it helps to know, a la marinera, which one would more typically associate with Italian food, is a particular style, really, just a typical tomato sauce, EXCEPT, typically in Spain and with clams it is NOT a tomato sauce – fooled yah. Yep, the human translation of Fisherman style is real helpful, might be useful in San Francisco.

Arroz con leche casero

Rice with homemade Milk

Rice pudding

Google is just too literal, arroz con leche is just rice pudding so the homemade (a valid translation of casero) just applies to the desert, not the milk,

Besugo a la plancha	Grilled sea bream	Grilled sea bream
Bogavante a la plancha	Grilled lobster	Fresh lobster grilled

Both of these provide a little fun as to exactly what a la plancha means. Yes, it does, more or less means, grilled, but then think about what a la parilla means (also grilled).  Usually a la plancha (literally on a plate, or in Italian, on the iron) means just cooked on a hot steel plate, cast iron pan or ‘flattop” in a diner.  a la parilla usually means a grate over some kind of open heat, either just gas or it can be wood (a la brasa). Now being fairly good with a grill myself these are quite different and I’d want to know which it really was. Which therefore brings up another point – reading a menu is not enough so being able to speak to your waiter (if knowledgeable) or even the chef may be required to really figure out if this is the dish you want. And therefore, that’s a different reason to actually learn to speak Spanish.

Chipirones a la plancha

Grilled squid

Grilled squids

chipirones can be interesting because it’s only one of the words for squid, but in this case it means baby (small) squid and frequently, in Spain, battered and fried squid, or as we’d order in USA as fried calamari. BUT, in this restaurant, given the picture, that’s not what this dish is.

Now: A brief side personal digression. For a couple of years I made multiple business trips to Japan. Learning Japanese was not going to happen but worst trying to learn the written is hard. My job required me to learn how Japanese is written (not the 1945 standard Kanji, just the algorithms of typography). At the time most Japanese restaurants had displays of plastic food (rarely picture menus) with little labels in Kanji. I quickly learned, while I had no clue what the Kanji meant, how to copy them into a little notebook and chose my item from the plastic food and then show the Kanji to the waiter. It worked fine and I always got what I expected. But I have no idea if the actual menu in this restaurant (unlike the website) would have the really dumbed-down version to show the pictures.

Now a few interesting ones that being fairly fluent in Spanish or knowing much about Spanish food won’t help so much, plus these stumped Google a bit.

Changurro al horno

Baked Changurro

Baked spider crab

You see Google didn’t know changurro. BUT, remember we’re in Basque country, so a bit more searching is that this word is really txangurro, where the tx, even just the x is a giveaway this is the Basque word and thus the Spanish spelling of it.

Kokotxas de bacalao al Pil-Pil con almejas

Cod Kokotxas al Pil-Pil with clams

Cod cheeks in pil-pil sauce with clams

The unusual spelling of kokotxas is another giveaway this is the Basque word, literally, cheeks, and really one needs to know this is a particular dish unique to Basque cooking to really have a clue what this means.

And

Pantxineta

Pantxineta

Pantxineta

I think you get this, obviously Basque, dessert where this is as good a description as any.

Rodaballo con su refrito ligado

Turbot with its tied rehash

Turbot with its thickened sauté

An amusing Google translation.

Tarta “Gandarias” elaborada por Rafa Gorrotxategi

“Gandarias” cake made by Rafa Gorrotxategi

Pastry chef Rafa Gorrotxategi´s “Gandarias” cheesecake

Totally meaningless terms, in any language. Even the generic Spanish tarta is ambivalent exactly what this might be.

Solomillo de vaca vieja con foie al Oporto

Old beef sirloin with foie gras in Porto

Old cow sirloin with foie in Oporto style

So here are a couple of interesting terms that just don’t translate (at least from Spanish): foie (the French word for liver, most foodies would just know this as language independent) and Oporto (second biggest city in Spain so probably most travelers would recognize it, but is it Port or OPorto (clue, in some language O is the)). And what style is that? If I was telling you about BBQ and said “Texas” style would you know that’s brisket withOUT sauce?

Tabla de ibéricos de bellota «Joselito»

Table of Iberico de bellota «Joselito»

Mixed iberian “Joselito”

I’ve mentioned Iberico de bellota in many posts before and if you go to Spain you’d better know what this means as you’ll pay a seriously premium price to get some slices of ham.

Personal Note: Here in flyover Nebraska there is actually a farmer who grows very similar pigs and lets them roam, yes, among oak trees and eat some acorns. AND, there is a gourmet butcher in Fort Calhoun, CURE (just there yesterday) who makes very similar (air dried, no smoke or salt) hams from those pigs, and, yes for a really serious price. I may never had had Spanish Lomo but it’s delicious from CURE.

Callos

calluses

Tripes

I had to include this one because, well, one reason I want to know about menus in Spanish is there are things I choose not to eat and this is one of them. Given Google can’t translate it, I’m glad I’ve got this in my lexicon.

And just for fun

Coulant de chocolate

Chocolate coulant

Chocolate fondant

chocolate is the literal word in Spanish for the same word in English (and nearly the same in French) BUT it doesn’t belong to any of these languages since it’s really xocolātl, so even Spanish has plenty of loanwords. But what about coulant, which is really a French word, meaning flowing, but interesting fondant in Spanish but that’s just another French word. And there is no English word, so if you don’t know what this is, there is no point in trying to translate.

So after a long post, you’re probably ready for dessert, so how about

Crema de yogur con mango crujiente y sirope de fresa

Yogurt cream with crispy mango and strawberry syrup

Yoghurt cream with crispy mango and strawberry syrup

Looking at the words on menus only reveals a bit about dining. Knowing a bit more about cooking, in general and Spanish in general, helps a lot. But if a person only had one chance to go to this restaurant and wanted to get the most interesting items some discussion with, hopefully, knowledgeable, waiter is essential.

So one conclusion from all this is that the basic idea of my project, translating food, is fundamentally a failure. One can translate words, or even combinations or words, and still have little idea what a menu item is.

Translation, as it is said in math, is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.

Serious dining in San Sebastián

I’ve been moving to return to doing posts about translating restaurant menus after nearly 500 days of spending most of the my free time working on learning Spanish instead of studying menus. I’ll comment more about this in a future post I’m working on, but as luck would have it I bumped into a subject that requires this post now.

I’ve been fortunate in life to, very rarely, have some superb dining experiences but nothing like I’ll show you here. Interestingly my most fantastic (nearing the level of this San Sebastián restaurant) were in Tokyo or in Beijing, which was expense account business dining (ridiculous companies get the tax write-offs but that didn’t stop me from enjoying my luxury). And for a few very special occasions I’ve indulged in luxury, but again never at this level.

What do I mean? Well how about 240€ per person! And with no drinks! (and given the look of their wine cellar I’d guess that would double the tab). I can’t quite even imagine blowing $1000 for our next anniversary dinner (though it might be fun).

Anyway I’ll get on with this subject. I bumped in an article about one of my favorite people, Lidia Bastianich (I’ve managed to at least go to her restaurant in Kansas City, nothing like this place). In the article she’s talking about her five favorite dinners and she mentions:

Hotel Akelarre

in the hills west of San Sebastián. The hotel itself is really beautiful (and seriously expensive) but its restaurant is over the top. Now I’m sure Lidia can afford this, and as a famous chef she got the VIP treatment I can’t even imagine, but can only dream about. But it’s places like this that make me think about my life choice to pursue “interesting” work over a more lucrative option, but, no regrets, I’ll settle to just dream, especially also the beautiful site (search for this in Google Maps for some fantastic photos)

They have three set menus (9 courses, choice for “main” course, each 240€) that look fantastic. I’ve extracted the menu in Spanish and the English (from the website) and then appended the Google Translations. Of course there is a lot of “exotic” culinary vocabulary on top of the ordinary Spanish. So I’ll come back to some parts of this menu in a future post, but here it is now (a little easier than scanning the website).

First I’ll post the text and human (&Google) translations that explain the three menus I post after that.

La fórmula de menú degustación tiene tres propuestas variadas diseñadas a conciencia para que disfrutéis de la alta gastronomía desde todos los sentidos y puntos de vista.   Los clásicos de AKELARRE es una fórmula con la que conocerás nuestra cocina a través de platos que llevan muchos años en nuestra carta.   Los Menús Aranori y Bekarki son dos variantes que te ofrecemos para combinar diferentes opciones que incluyen nuestras últimas recetas.

We propose three choices of thoughtfully curated tasting menus, designed to offer you an unforgettable dining experience you will thoroughly enjoy.       The Akelarre Classics is a selection of the most representative dishes of our cuisine through the years,     whilst the Aranori and the Bekarki are two proposals that combine signature dishes and our latest creations.

The tasting menu formula has three varied proposals carefully designed so that you enjoy haute cuisine from all senses and points of view.       The AKELARRE classics is a formula with which you will get to know our cuisine through dishes that have been on our menu for many years.   The Aranori and Bekarki Menus are two variants that we offer you to combine different options that include our latest recipes.

and following the menus I’ll post a quick (edited, generic or non Spanish removed, but a few Basque left in) lexicon of the vocabulary from these menus – see how many of these words you know. OR, guess how many one might learn in 500 days of generic Spanish lessons (hint: not many)

Note: The first column is Spanish (from Website, minor editing), the restaurant’s English translation (definitely human) and the third column is the literal Google Translate with a few of the amusing and classic mistakes.

 

Aranori
Huevo con Caviar sobre puré de Coliflor y Mantequilla de Cebollino.	Egg with caviar over cauliflower purée and chive butter.	Egg with Caviar on Cauliflower Puree and Chive Butter.
Ostra a la parrilla con salsa Ostra.	Grilled oyster with oyster sauce.	Grilled oyster with oyster sauce.
Xangurro en Ensalada de Hojas.	Txangurro (crab) in leaf salad.	Xangurro in Leaf Salad.
Finísimo y ligero Tartar de Buey, nueva Patata Soufflé y Pan de Hierbas Aromáticas.	Very thin and light beef tartare, new potato soufflé and aromatic herbs bread.	Fine and light Beef Tartar, new Potato Soufflé and Aromatic Herb Bread.
Merluza al Vapor de Algas. Plancton y Hoja de Ostra.	Hake in seaweed steam with plankton and oyster leaves.	Algae Steamed Hake. Plankton and Oyster Leaf.
Calamar como un Risotto, Flor de Mantequilla.	Risotto-like squid, butter blossom.	Squid like a Risotto, Butter Flower.
Pojarski de Cierva, Especiado.	Spiced Deer, pojarski.	Pojarski de Cierva, Spicy.
o	or	or
Lomo de Cordero y Rulo de Hierbas Frescas.	Loin of lamb and fresh herbs roll.	Lamb Loin and Fresh Herb Roll.
El Postre de la Leche de Oveja.	Sheep’s milk dessert.	Sheep’s Milk Dessert.
Refrescante de Cítricos Exóticos.	Exotic citrus fruits refresher.	Refreshing Exotic Citrus.
240€ (IVA incluido) – Bebidas aparte	€240 (VAT inc.) – Drinks not included	€ 240 (VAT included) – Drinks apart

 

 

Bekarki
Gambas con Vainas al Fuego de Orujo y huevas del mar.	Prawns and green beans on orujo fire and sea roe.	Prawns with Pods in Orujo Fire and roe from the sea.
Las hojas y el Foie bajo la lluvia. Kokotxa, Emulsion de Pipas de Calabaza Pan de Ajo y Perejil.	Leaves and foie gras in the rain. Kokotxa, pumpkin seeds emulsion, garlic and parsley bread.	Leaves and Foie in the rain. Kokotxa, Emulsion of Pumpkin Pipes Garlic Bread and Parsley.
Infusión de Caldo Verde, Cigala y Rape Ahumado.	Green broth, langoustines and smoked monkfish infusion.	Infusion of Green Broth, Norway Lobster and Smoked Monkfish.
Pulpo mimético.	Mimetic octopus.	Mimic octopus.
Lubina “UMAMI”.	Sea bass “Umami”.	Sea bass “UMAMI”. or
Presa de Ibérico a la Brasa, Risotto de semillas de Pimiento y Ajo en tres variantes.	Grilled Iberian “presa”, three versions of pepper seeds and garlic risotto.	Grilled Iberian pork, Pepper and Garlic Risotto in three variants.
o	or	or
Pato Azulón Glaseado y Etiqueta Especiada.	Glazed blue duck and spiced label.	Blue Glazed Duck and Spicy Label.
“Un Poco de Queso antes del Postre”.	“A bit of cheese before desserts”.	“A Little Cheese Before Dessert”.
La Otra Tarta de Manzana.	The other apple tart.	The Other Apple Pie.
240€ (IVA incluido) – Bebidas aparte	€240 (VAT inc.) – Drinks not included	€ 240 (VAT included) – Drinks apart

 

 

Los clásicos de AKELARRE	The AKELARRE classics	The AKELARRE classics
Ensalada de Verduras del Huerto y Bogavante.	Garden vegetables and lobster salad.	Vegetable Salad from the Garden and Lobster.
Tubérculos en Infusión de Hierbas.	Tubers in Herbal Infusion.	Herb-Infused Tubers.
Carpaccio de Pasta, Piquillo e Ibérico con Setas y Parmesano.	Pasta, Piquillo peppers and Iberico carpaccio with mushrooms and Parmesan.	Pasta, Piquillo and Iberian Carpaccio with Mushrooms and Parmesan.
Arroz con Caracoles y Karrakelas en film de Tomate y Albahaca.	Snails and periwinkles rice in a tomato and basil film.	Rice with Snails and Karrakelas in Tomato and Basil film.
Foie Fresco a la sartén con «Escamas de Sal y Pimienta en Grano».	Pan-seared foie-gras with “salt flakes and pepper grains”.	Pan-fried Fresh Foie with «Salt and Pepper Flakes in Grain».
Salmonete Integral con “Fusili” de Salsa.	Integral red mullet with “fusilli” sauce.	Wholemeal Mullet with “Fusili” Sauce.
Trinchado de Vacuno Mayor, Tendón y Piel lacada, “Patatas y Pimientos”.	Carved beef, tendon and lacquered skin, “potatoes and peppers”.	Carving of Greater Beef, Tendon and Lacquered Skin, “Potatoes and Peppers”.
o	or	or
Royal de Pichón con Morokil.	Pigeon royale with “morokil” (polenta).	Royal Pigeon with Morokil.
Gin-Tonic en Plato.	Gin & Tonic on a plate.	Gin-Tonic on Plate.
“Xaxu” con Helado Espumoso de Coco.	“Xaxu” with foamy coconut ice cream.	“Xaxu” with Sparkling Coconut Ice Cream.
240€ (IVA incluido) – Bebidas aparte	€240 (VAT inc.) – Drinks not included	€ 240 (VAT included) – Drinks apart

Lexicon of these menus (non food words removed, non Spain words removed); words learned in first 88 lessons in Duolingo (equivalent to a one term generic Spanish class) marked in bold. Basque words in pink. So think about how much of these menus you could “read” with a year of high school Spanish!

ahumado ajo albahaca algas aromáticas arroz azulón bebidas bogavante brasa buey calabaza calamar caldo caracoles cebollino cierva cigala cítricos coco coliflor cordero ensalada escamas especiada especiado espumoso etiqueta exóticos finísimo flor frescas fresco fuego gambas glaseado grano helado hierbas hojas huerto huevas huevo Ibérico incluido infusión integral IVA karrakelas kokotxa lacada leche ligero lluvia lomo lubina mantequilla manzana mar mayor merluza mimético morokil orujo ostra oveja parmesano parrilla pasta patatas pato perejil pichón piel pimienta pimientos pipas piquillo plancton plato Pojarski postre presa pulpo puré queso rape refrescante risotto sal salmonete salsa sartén semillas setas tarta tartar tendón tomate trinchado tubérculos vacuno vainas vapor variantes verduras xangurro xaxu

 

Animales en el menú

Just in case you ever dine at some restaurant in a Spanish speaking country where some more unusual animals might appear on the menu I thought I’d give you a list.

I like making lists and this was a fairly easy one as there were numerous sources with only a few contradictions. Of course a constant challenge with picking up Spanish words from the Net is some of these might be regional. And while I like crunching through lists (and now I think this one here is the largest one you’ll find) it’s a lot more work (than I want to do now) to research these palabras and see if they’re really 100% accurate, at least according to authoritative sources.

Note: While I list the sources (first column) in this table, just to show how frequently a word appears in various lists, I don’t actually provide the sources, so this is fully derivative work and not credited to original sources. The words show in bold are my choices for one word for each letter, usually something that was original in Spanish and imported into English.

So enjoy and beware in your dining that if these appear on the menu you’ll actually want to order them.

1 5	abeja	bee
1	áfido	aphid
2	aguaviva	jellyfish
1 3 4 5	águila	eagle
4	aguilón	large eagle
5	aguja del diablo	dragonfly
1	alacrán	scorpion
3 5	albatros	albatross
1 4	alce	elk
1 3 4 5	alce	moose
4	alce de américa	moose
1 5	almeja	clam
1	alondra	lark
1	alpaca	alpaca
1 5	anchoa	anchovy
1 5	anfibios	amphibian
1 5	anguila	eel
1 3 4	antílope	antelope
1 2 5	araña	spider
2	ardil	squirrel
1 3 4 5	ardilla	squirrel
3 4	ardilla listada	chipmunk
3	ardilla voladora	flying squirrel
1 5	arenque	herring
1 3 4	armadillo	armadillo
1	asno	donkey
1 5	atún	tuna
4 1	ave	general class of birds (also a large bird)
1 3 4 5	avestruz	ostrich
1 3 5	avispa	wasp
3	babuino	baboon
1 5	bacalao	cod
1 3	bagre	catfish
1 2 3 4 5	ballena	whale
3	ballena jorobada	humpback whale
1	barracuda	barracuda
4	becerro	calf
4	bicha	snake
2	bichos	bugs
1 3 4	bisonte	bison
1 4	boa	boa
4	borrego	lamb
1 4 5	buey	ox
1 4 3 5	búfalo	buffalo
4	búfalo de agua	water buffalo
1 2 4 5	búho	owl
1 3 5	buitre	vulture
4	burrito	baby donkey
1 2 3 4	burro	donkey
1 4	caballa	mackerel
1	caballito de mar	seahorse
1 2 3 4 5	caballo	horse
3	caballo de mar	seahorse
1 2 3 5	cabra	goat
4	cabra montés	mountain goat
4	cabrito	baby goat
1	cacatúa	cockatoo
2 3 4	cachorro	puppy
4	caimán	alligator
1 3 4 5	caimán	alligator
1 3 5	calamar	squid
3	calamar gigante	giant squid
1 3	camaleón	chameleon
1 5	camarón	shrimp
1 3 4 5	camello	camel
1 5	canario	canary
1 2 5	cangrejo	crab
1 2 3 4 5	canguro	kangaroo
1	capibara	capybara
1 2 3	caracol	snail
5	caribú	caribou
4	carnero	ram
1 3 4 5	castor	beaver
1 2 3 4 5	cebra	zebra
1 2 3 4 5	cerdo	pig
4	cerdo salvaje	wild hog
3	cerdo vietnamita	pot-bellied pig
1	chacal	jackal
1 3 4 5	chimpancé	chimpanzee
1 5	chinche	bedbug
5	chita	cheetah
4	chivo	goat
4	chucho	dog
1 3 5	ciempiés	centipede
2 3 4	ciervo	deer
1	cigarra	cicada
1 4 5	cigüeña	stork
1 3 5	cisne	swan
3	coala	koala
2	cobaya	guinea pig
1 4	cobra	cobra
4	cochino	pig  (usually live)
4	cocodrilo	alligator
1 2 3 4 5	cocodrilo	crocodile
1	codorniz	quail
1 3 5	colibrí	hummingbird
1 3	comadreja	weasel
1	cóndor	condor
3	conejillo de indias	guinea pig
1	cobaya	guinea pig
1 2 3 4 5	conejo	rabbit
4	cordero	lamb
4	coto	monkey
4	cotorra	parrot
4	couger	couger
1 4	coyote	coyote
5	crustáceos	crustacean
1 2 3 5	cucaracha	cockroach
1	cuco	cuckoo
1 5	cuervo	crow/raven
4 5	culebra	snake
1	danta	tapir
1 2 3 4 5	delfín	dolphin
1	demonio de tasmania	Tasmanian devil
1	dingo	dingo
3	dragon	dragon
1	dragón de komodo	Komodo dragon
1	dromedario	dromedary
1 2 3 4 5	elefante	elephant
3	elefante africano	African elephant
3	elefante asiático	Asian elephant
1	emú	emu
1 3	erizo	hedgehog
1	erizo de mar	sea urchin
1 5	escarabajo	beetle
1 3 5	escorpión	scorpion
1	estornino	starling
1 3	estrella de mar	starfish
1 3	faisán	pheasant
1 5	flamenco	flamingo
1 2 3 4 5	foca	seal
1 4	gacela	gazelle
1	galápago	freshwater tortoise
4	galbana	sloth
1 2 3 4	gallina	chicken (usually a hen)
4	gallito	baby chicken
1 2 4	gallo	rooster
1	gamba	shrimp
1 2 4 5	ganso	goose
1	garrapata	tick
1	garza	heron
4	gatito	kitten
1 2 3 4 5	gato	cat
3	gato montés	bobcat
1	gato montés	wildcat
1	gavilán	buzzard
1 5	gaviota	seagull/gull
1	gecko	gecko
3	geco	gecko
3	glotón	wolverine
1	golondrina	swallow
1 3 5	gorila	gorilla
1 3	gorrión	sparrow
1 5	grillo	cricket
1	grulla	crane
1	guacamayo	macaw
1	guepardo	cheetah
1 2	gusano	worm
1 3 5	halcón	falcon
5	halibut	halibut
1 2 3	hámster	hamster
1 3 4 5	hiena	hyena
5	hipogloso	halibut
1 2 3 4 5	hipopótamo	hippopotamus
1 3 5	hormiga	ant
3	hormigas rojas	fire ants
5	huachinango	red snapper
1 3	hurón	ferret
1 4	iguana	iguana
1 2 5	insectos	insects
1	jabalí	boar
1 4	jaguar	jaguar
1	jerbo	gerbil
1	jilguero	goldfinch
2	jirafa	giraffe
1 2 3 4 5	jirafa	giraffe
1	kiwi	kiwi
1 5	koala	koala
1 3 5	lagartija	lizard
4	lagarto	alligator
5	lagarto	lizard
5	lamprea	lamprey
1 3 5	langosta	lobster
5	langostino	crayfish
4	lechón	pig    (usually cooked)
1 4	lechuza	owl
1 5	lenguado	sole
1 2 3 4 5	león	lion
1	león marino	sea lion
1 3 4 5	leopardo	leopard
3	leopardo cazador	cheetah
1 3 5	libélula	dragonfly
1	liebre	hare
4	lince	bobcat
1 3 5	lince	lynx
1 4	llama	llama
1 2 3 4 5	lobo	wolf
2	lobo marino	sea lion
1	lombriz	earthworm
1 3 4	loro	parrot
1 3	luciérnaga	firefly
4	macaco	monkey
5	makerela	mackerel
5	mamboretás	praying mantis
1 3 5	manatí	manatee
1 5	mandril	baboon/ mandrel
1	mangosta	mongoose
1 3	mantarraya	stingray
5	mantis	praying mantis
1	mantis religiosa	praying mantis
1 2 3 4	mapache	raccoon
1 2 3 5	mariposa	butterfly
3	mariposa monarca	monarch butterfly
5	mariposa nocturna	moth
1 5	mariquita	lady beetle (lady bug)
1	marmota	marmot/groundhog
5	marsopa	porpoise
1	martín pescador	kingfisher
2	mascotas	pets
4	maza	monkey
1	medusa	jellyfish
2	medusa	jellyfish
1	mejillón	mussel
5	mero	bass
4	mico	monkey
1 3 5	milpiés	millipede
1	mirlo	blackbird
1 4 5	mofeta	skunk
5	moluscos	mollusk
4	mongosta	mongoose
1	mono	ape
1 2 3 4 5	mono	monkey
3	mono araña	spider monkey
1 2 3 4 5	morsa	walrus
4	morueco	ram
1 2 3 5	mosca	fly/housefly
3	mosca de la fruta	fruit fly
1 5	mosquito	mosquito
1 3	mula	mule
1 3 4 5	murciélago	bat
1	musaraña	shrew
1	narval	narwhal
1 3 4 5	nutria	otter
1 4	ñandú	rhea
1	ñu	wildebeest
3	ocelote	ocelot
4	oposum	opossum
3	orangután	orangutan
1 5	orca	orca / killer whale
4	orco	killer whale
1 3	ornitorrinco	platypus
1 2 3	oruga	caterpillar
1 2 3 4 5	oso	bear
1 3	oso hormiguero	anteater
3	oso negro	black bear
1 3	oso panda	panda bear
1 5	oso perezoso	sloth
1 3	oso polar	polar bear
5	ostiones	oysters
1 5	ostra	oyster
5	otaria	sealion
1 2 3 4 5	oveja	sheep
2 3 4 5	pájaro	bird
1 3 5	pájaro carpintero	woodpecker
5	paloma	dove
1 5	paloma	pigeon
5	panda	panda
1	panda rojo	red panda
1	pangolín	pangolin
1	panther	panther
1 4 5	papagayo	parrot
3	pastor alemán	German shepherd
1 4 5	pato	duck
1 4 5	pavo	turkey
1 3 5	pavo real	peacock
1 2 3 4 5	peces/pez	fish
1 3 4 5	pelícano	pelican
5	perca	perch
1	perdiz	partridge
3 4	perezoso	sloth
1 2 4	perico	parakeet
1 4	periquito	parakeet
4	perrito	puppy
1 2 3 4 5	perro	dog
4	pescado	fish  (caught, usually cooked)
1 5	petirrojo	robin
1	pez espada	swordfish
3	pez león	lionfish
1 2 3 5	pingüino	penguin
1	pinzón	finch
1 5	piojo	lice / louse
1 3	piraña	piranha
1 4	pitón	python
2	polil	moth
1 3	polilla	moth
2	pollito	chick/chicken
1 4 5	pollo	chicken
1 4	potro	colt/foal
2 4	puerco	pig
3	puerco espín	porcupine
1 5	puercoespín	porcupine
1	pulga	flea
1	pulgón	aphid
1 3 5	pulpo	octopus
1 3 4 5	puma	cougar
5	rana	frog
1 3 5	rana	frog
3	rana de árbol	tree frog
5	rape	monkfish
1 3 4 5	rata	rat
1 2 3 4 5	ratón	mouse
1	raya	ray
1	reno	reindeer
1 5	reptiles	reptiles
5	rezaderas	praying mantis
1 2 3 4 5	rinoceronte	rhino
5	róbalo	haddock
1	ruiseñor	nightingale
1 3 5	salamandra	salamander
1 5	salmón	salmon
1 3 5	saltamontes	grasshoper
1	sanguijuela	leech
5	santa teresas	praying mantis
1 4 5	sapo	toad
1 5	sardina	sardine
1	sepia	cuttlefish
4	serpiente	snake
1 2 3	serpiente	snake
3	serpiente de cascabel	rattlesnake
1	serpiente de coral	rattlesnake
1	suricata	meerkat
1	tapir	tapir
5	tecolote	owl
1 4	tejón	badger
1	tejón australiano	wombat
1 5	termita	termite
1 4	ternero	calf
1 2 3 4 5	tiburón	shark
3	tiburón martillo	hammerhead shark
1 2 3 4 5	tigre	tiger
3	tigre siberiano	siberian tiger
3	tijereta	earwig
1	topo	mole
1 2 4 5	toro	bull
5	tortolita	lady beetle (lady bug)
5	tortuga	tortoise
2 3 4 5	tortuga	turtle
3	tortuga baula	leatherback turtle
1	tortuga de mar	turtle
1	tortuga de tierra	tortoise
3	tortuga marina	sea turtle
1	tritón	triton
1 5	trucha	trout
1 5	tucán	toucan
1 5	urraca	magpie
1 2 3 4 5	vaca	cow
1 4 5	venado	deer
1	víbora	adder
1	visón	mink
1	wombat	wombat
1	yegua	mare
1 5	zancudo	mosquito
3 4	zarigüeya	opossum / possum
1 3 4 5	zorrillo	skunk
2 3 4 5	zorro	fox