Do you like fairy cakes?
What’s a fairy cake?
Before we get to that, see if you can answer this question…
Which of the following is a common recipe ingredient?
- a) Tatties
- b) Rocket
- c) Swedes
- d) Chump
If you answered all of the above you are right. Tatties are potatoes, rocket is arugula, swedes are rutabagas (as well as nice people), and chump is a cut of lamb or pork. What language is this? It’s English, though many Americans might not ever have heard these terms used as food. Fairy cakes (UK) and a patty cakes (Aus) are words used for cupcakes.
There are a number of different English cooking terms used in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Some are different words for the same foods people use in the US, and some are for foods that are more common to local dishes in these different parts of the world. For some British flavor, check out some of the recipes on BBC’s food section, a great resource for UK recipes.
One of the nice things about our recent Evernote integration is that it has exposed Say Mmm to new audiences, and we have gotten a number of requests to extend the service to other languages. We’d like to have it work in more languages and countries in the future, and as a first step we decided it could do a better job in other English speaking countries. So we did a bunch of research, added hundreds of new recognizable terms, and updated our automatic grocery lists to work even better for people in other English speaking countries. We have probably still missed some things, and we’ll continue to make improvements over time.
