Category Archives: word tasting notes

flummox

Posted on August 14, 2014 | Leave a comment

Oh, flip, you’ve fumbled this one – a flood of flim-flammery has left you flailing like a lummox and you’ve made a right bollix of it. You’re sure to flop and fall flat on your face; you’ve lost your moxie and are in line for full mockery. You don’t know what to do or say. You’re nonplussed, you’re confounded, you’re… words not… um, fail… And your wit and wicked tongue make like a floppy-footed clown all in white gown with flying feathers carrying a full stack of cake boxes, tripping on a filament and falling feet over fundament down a small set of stairs: flummox!

Some are flummoxed by the word flummox. What does it mean? Mainly what I have said: ‘bewilder, confuse, confound, nonplus’. Very often seen as the adjectival past participle flummoxed. The Oxford English Dictionary’s etymology notes that “The formation seems to be onomatopoeic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily.”

That sounds right, doesn’t it? The sometimes fluid but sometimes fluttery and floppy fl, the soft and heavy umm, the ox with its echo of a pointy-horned bovine and its feel of things landing and breaking or dispersing…

Of course, these are the things we’re used to in English. Other languages do not necessarily have the conventionalized feel of fluids or fluttering with /fl/ and the various other overtones throughout this word. Use it with a speaker of another tongue and expect them to be flummoxed.

One particularly fun part of this word is that other so-similar word lummox (naming an ungainly lout). Surely flummox is from the sound of a lummox falling flat or something like that, no? But there’s no evidence of that chain in the formation. Both were formed in England, both have related verbs with –ock instead of –ox, and both show up in the literature in the early 1800s, but lummox showed up in East Anglia (the lump on the lower right side of England, wherein Cambridge and Norwich may be found), while flummox showed up in Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Cheshire, and Sheffield – an arc up the mid-left side of England starting just above London and skirting the Welsh border. In New World terms that may all seem close (the distance of a day trip between two major cities), but the dialectal differences in England are immediately obvious to any listener. And the etymological record is not always replete; in such colloquial cases, it can be quite, um, bedeviling… confounding… erm… yes, flummoxing.

Thanks to Roberto Blizzard for mentioning flummox on Facebook a while back.

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dicatspora

Posted on August 12, 2014 | 7 comments

This is another word I made up myself from bits that were lying around. It’s a blend of diaspora and cat.

It turns out that I am not the first person to whip up this lexical canapé ex tempore; Georgie Anne Geyer used it in her book When Cats Reigned Like Kings. But she used it to refer to the global spread of cats (and cat adoration) from Egypt. I have something in in mind that is both more local and more universal, for all times and places where there are cats. Every litter – or almost every litter – becomes a dicatspora.

When a cat has a litter of kittens, it is only a matter of time before they are given away (or sold, I guess). They spread to friends, family, neighbours, strangers who answer ads; if you live in the country, they may just strike out on their own. They are dispersed, spread like dandelion seeds on the breeze of human connections: δια dia ‘across’ and σπορά spora ‘sowing’ (related to spore).

This is how we received and gave cats when I was a kid: a friend’s cat had had kittens and we wanted one; it grew up and had kittens of its own, and we gave them away in turn. In some cases we eventually got the cat spayed, but not before our friends were well supplied with quality felines (we kept a few to add to our set as well). We lived in the country, so we could have quite a few – and we could keep them outside as much as inside, which, along with medication, helped me not to suffer too much from my allergy. Never mind Oscar Wilde’s “each man kills the thing he loves”; I simply become allergic to it. It was an early and durable habituation to the idea that there would be things I wanted a lot that I would not be able to have.

It is not so cruel to cats to split up the litter; they are quite independent and tend to disperse in adolescence anyway. I like that, that independence (I too lived away from my parents most of the time starting in mid-adolescence, for educational reasons) and their low-intensity socialization combined with a desire for and expectation of attention on their own terms. They are like an introverted, questing mind, collecting experiences from various and sundry quarters and returning them to the repose of their quiet corner for curling up.

In grad school I was a teaching assistant for a course on intercultural studies. One theme we looked at was diasporas. There are the literal ones, of course, starting with the first to be called a diaspora: that of the people of Israel, across the world and away from the Promised Land. It has a resonance with many of us, Jewish or not; the longing for return can be powerful. The professors of the course took a liking to the idea of what they called each person’s “intellectual diaspora”: the many places the mind and interests had wandered to. I disagreed with this use of the term. Your mind, going to its many diverse interests, does not leave parts of itself in those places, never to return to its first home. Rather, it goes out and gathers things in and keeps them. Diaspora is centrifugal; the active intellect is centripetal, even hegemonistic.

Relative to itself, of course. It is not that a questing and acquiring mind is incompatible with diaspora. The wanderer, moving away from home whether or not by choice, may in the journeys acquire much knowledge and bring it along, keeping it in the moving library of the mind. The body moves away; the mind gathers towards.

Of course, I don’t really know what goes on in a cat’s mind. They don’t seem to have career plans; they don’t seem to desire fame or fortune, even if some of them get it. They rather prefer food and comfort… and exploration: the incessant curiosity for which they are famous, and their quest for superiority, even if literal (climbing high on the furniture). So they too embody the contradiction: each purring pawing part of each dicatspora puts the pet in centripetal.

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infenestration

Posted on August 11, 2014 | 5 comments

Do this: click “play” on the first video below and then click to skip the ad, and then immediately click “play” on the second video below, so they play at the same time. Watch the second one while the first one provides a backing soundtrack.*

Infestation may be a problem with insects, but with birds, infenestration can be a bigger problem. Especially if the bird or the window – or both – aren’t as resilient as in that video. One time when I was a little kid, we heard a smash and went and looked, and a bird had flown into the high window in our entryway. Neither survived.

Oh, is infenestration not a familiar word? I’m not surprised. Don’t bother looking for it in a dictionary; you won’t find it. But it’s a perfectly reasonable confection of parts. Defenstration means throwing something or someone out of a window: de ‘out’ plus fenestr ‘window’ (root) plus ation. Replace the out with an in and you get infenestration. Logical? I think so, and so does Ken Broadhurst, who – independently – used the same reasoning to arrive at the same word with the same meaning: see ckenb.blogspot.ca/2014/05/infenestration.html:

We have the term “defenestration” meaning to throw someone or something out a window. It’s related to the French word for window, which is fenêtre. We don’t have the word *infenestration* as far as I know. If we did, it would mean to collide with a window. People do it, and birds evidently do it a lot.

Infenestration is an infernal frustration, whether you’re a bird or a homeowner. It’s also a problem for people who have sliding glass doors, especially clean ones. A co-worker told me of a friend who broke her nose rushing inside – or rather, attempting to rush inside through a closed glass door. We have a big glass door on a boardroom where I work, and there have been collisions but no fractures. There’s also one in my apartment, at the entrance to the “solarium” (guest room/spare room/etc.), which is a great place for a sleepy person not to see the glass.

What is a defense against infenestration? In my apartment, there’s a tripod in front of the fixed section of the door, and a sticky note at eye level on the sliding section. Public buildings put dots on glass that people might walk into and paper silhouettes of birds of prey on windows that birds might fly into. Or they put nothing, of course. Dead birds are a common enough sight on the sidewalks of downtown Toronto. The offices leave their lights on at night and the birds try to fly in. They usually don’t get to go back and do it again.

*Intense thanks to Iva Cheung for this.

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superior

Posted on August 10, 2014 | 3 comments

From an 1827 edition of Paradise Lost. You can tell it’s especially fancy because it has the u. And the comma tells you to expect more – you can always expect more from a superior person.

Superior is Latin for ‘higher’. In English, it is a word for a boss or a bossy person, someone who is noteworthy or a footnote, someone or something that is the greatest, or the highest, or just all wet: upper crust or uppity and crusty, super or spurious. Unlike its antonym inferior, superior can refer to reality or pretension; like inferior, it can refer to physical position or more abstract qualities.

A truly superior person or thing has greater qualities: finer, rarer, nobler, more intelligent, more attractive. A person with a superior attitude simply pretends to such, and is in fact inferior and infuriating. A person may also be a superior: a boss, someone superordinate in the command chain. A supervisor, a manager. Paradoxically, a person may have superior qualities for an inferior position – be very good at doing the work – but inferior qualities as a superior – not good at managing those who do the work. Their superiority peters out, as per the Peter Principle. But we naturally hope that our superiors are persons of superior personal qualities. And sometimes they are.

Superior is the name of a lake, the largest of the great lakes, the farthest north, and the highest in elevation. It has fewer people living on its shores than the others do, however; superior position in this case, as in many, results in less accessibility. It is rough-edged, cold, and deep, qualities that sometimes also come with being a superior person. And it is all wet, just like people who have superior attitudes.

Superior is also a typographic term. It is or isn’t (depending on whom you ask) a synonym for superscript. Even for those who maintain a distinction between the two terms, the difference is small: they use superior to refer specifically to superscripted minuscule letters in abbreviations, such as the th in 9th and the re in French Dre. So footnote numbers and symbols may or may not be superior. But those people who insist that it is incorrect to refer to them as superior certainly are superior – I leave it to you to decide whether by that I mean having superior knowledge or just a supercilious attitude.

Superior is also an astronomical term. A superior planet is a planet that is farther from the sun than the Earth is. Why? Is it that they are more rarefied, or have greater affinity to the empyrean? No, silly, it’s because they’re further up. Up and down really mean ‘away from the direction of gravitation’ and ‘towards the direction of gravitation’. In the solar system, the centre of gravity is the sun. We may think the sun is above us because we’re thinking in Earth-centric terms, but in solar system terms it is below us: it’s the big heavy.

Which is rather funny. If you wish to be superior, it helps to be lighter – and indeed I more greatly esteem people whose levity exceeds their gravity. But in the business world, the person at the top is the big heavy around whom all others revolve, and you don’t want to be seen as a lightweight. But to become a superior, you have to climb your way to the top, and that takes effort, which proves that you’re moving away from gravity.

And towards heaven, perhaps – if you are the mother superior or father superior of a convent or monastery, for instance. Except that the sun is in heaven, and the sun is really below us in the bigger picture. But other parts of the heavens are farther away from the sun, but include suns of their own, many of them much heavier than our sun. Every star up there is a sun, the absolute down in its own system. Meanwhile, the superior planets are towards the darkness, but in our usual thinking light is superior to darkness. And superior letters are light subordinates to the letter or numeral they are attached to: they report to it and it is in that sense superior to them.

The more you look at superior, the murkier and less pure the subject seems to become. The letters and the concepts dance around. It leaves a sour-ripe taste. Does it rise up or get mixed up? Prior use leads only to greater confusion.

Finally we must realize that it is all relative, and the way to superior intelligence is to keep everything in perspective – and to maintain a sense of levity.

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Keuka

Posted on August 9, 2014 | Leave a comment

 

Keuka Lake from Bully Hill

As I mentioned in my tasting of traminette, I spent some time last weekend tasting wines along Keuka Lake. Keuka Lake is one of New York’s Finger Lakes; it’s on the west side of the bunch, and it has a distinctive feature: it’s forked. In fact, it looks not so much like a finger as like your thumb and forefinger and a continuation of their joining down to the wrist. Actually, it looks more like a forked branch you’d use to roast hot dogs or marshmallows. Or, you know, like a lake with a fork in it halfway up.

Keuka would seem a distinctive name, with its two k’s and its echoes of cucumber and cue card and eureka, but I imagine many people get confused between Keuka Lake and the lake two to the east, Cayuga Lake. It’s not that they look similar – Cayuga is longer, not forked, and has much gentler slopes on its sides – but the names sound nearly identical. If you say them slowly, it’s “key you ka” versus “cay you ga,” but who says place names carefully more than a couple of times? In the more relaxed pronunciation, the only real difference is the /k/ versus /g/ in the middle. Coincidence? Not altogether.

It’s not that the two words are really the same name. But they are related. Keuka comes from a word meaning ‘canoe landing’ and Cayuga comes from a word meaning ‘canoe carrying place (trimmed of a final syllable). Canoe see the common element? Of course, in both cases, the names aren’t accurate; they’re really names for shoreline places – the lakes themselves are more canoe rowing places.

Or, today, boat sailing places. Or looking at the pretty water from the shore places. Or, for a lot of people, wine tasting nearby places.

Which is where Keuka comes in for me. A trip down Keuka Lake for me is a trip down memory lane. I went on my first wine tasting trip there about a quarter of a century ago with my cousin Sharon, a wine aficionado (and somewhat older than me). That’s also when and where I first tasted icewine (at Hunt Country, which still makes an excellent icewine, full of brown sugar flavours). I don’t drink too much icewine – just too sweet for me after the first sniff and sip – but I love wine touring. That first experience made Keuka a bit of a eureka for me: it opened up whole new vistas.

Vistas are another reason this isn’t my first return to Keuka. Other Finger Lakes have wineries too – even more of them, in fact – but none are as pretty as Keuka. None have as European a feel. The hillsides sloping into Keuka Lake are dramatic. And there is a high bluff over the fork. With houses on it that look like a stiff rain might just wash them down into the drink.

Ah, never mind the houses, and never mind the canoes, either. I will prefer the drink. The wineries have not improved as rapidly as the ones in the Niagara region of Ontario, but they are catching up now. And I have some more catching up with them to do… next time through.

View from Heron Hill.

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traminette

Posted on August 7, 2014 | 1 comment

I was off on a little wine-tasting excursion over the weekend. We went to Keuka Lake, one of New York State’s Finger Lakes. Wine has been made in that area for about a century, but it’s been only a half century since Dr. Konstantin Frank introduced vinifera grapes to the area – the kind of grapes usually used in the non-benighted world to make wine. The grapes that had been used in New York before – and are still used for some products – tend to produce what Tony Aspler has called “block and tackle wines”: one drink and you can walk a block and tackle anyone.

The climate in New York can be hard on some varieties of grapes, so the winemakers are always looking to improve their stock with something that tastes good and is also sufficiently hardy. Enter traminette, a pleasant little white wine grape that is now being used by a number of the wineries in the area. It is a hybrid created in about 1965 at the University of Illinois Urbana/Champaign by Herb Barrett. It would be fun if Barrett had been trying to create a kind of urban champagne, but actually he just want to make a nice table grape that had some of the taste of Gewürztraminer. He made it by crossing Gewürztraminer with the hybrid Joannes Seyve 23.416 (does that look like a scriptural reference?). He sent some of it to the experimental grape breeding program at Cornell University, which is at the south end of Cayuga Lake, which is another one of the Finger Lakes. It has spread from there because it survives and it tastes good.

What does it taste like? Well, I’m not here to give you wine tasting notes. You would do better to go see for yourself. I will tell you that it’s reminiscent of Gewürztraminer but toned down, with some flavours that might remind you of pinot blanc or vidal or just maybe Riesling. Or, if you aren’t a wine geek: it’s a nice, moderately fruity white wine, not buttery and not too tart or crazy, but just a little quirky.

What I am here to give you is word tasting notes. Come on, now: we have the word right in front of us. Let’s taste it together. Say it slowly: /træ mi nɛt/. It starts crisp on the tip of the tongue /t/, with a little rolling release into the liquid /r/; the vowel can be realized a bit harder as /æ/ or a bit milder as /a/. The lips come together softly /m/ as though considering a taste. Then another vowel, which can be high and sweet /i/ or more restrained /ɪ/ or rather subdued, almost dull /ə/. The tongue tip presses in again softly and quickly /n/ to start the ending, which is strong and clear, medium-bright and dry /ɛ/ with a fast, crisp final stop /t/.

The word can’t avoid seeming feminine; it has that ette ending. But such a range of flavours swirl around: a mechanical conveyance tram, with a rough hint of tramp and a suggestion of jam; a tighter, tidier trim; perhaps a girl’s name, Tammy; a net effect that could be an ensnaring mesh or a tennis game. It may bring to mind a stern and hectoring martinet, or a dangling, dancing marionette, and perhaps something to marinate in the interim. Look at its shape on the page and you may get a glimpse of a mitten to make it handle the cold better, perhaps a bit of mint (absent from the wine’s flavour), a questionable marine influence, possibly inert, and a backwards look at the commercial mart. But you will certainly see how balanced it is, with the i in the middle and humps and crosses on either side – to the left one cross and two humps, to the right one hump and two crosses. It even looks vaguely reminiscent of rows of grape vines in an orchard.

Will all this affect how the wine tastes to you? I don’t know. It would be a fun experiment to have a number of wine aficionados taste a new hybrid and tell some of them it had one name – say, merlina – and some another – say, xenoraz – and see if their tasting notes seem to be influenced by the name.

But whether or not it would, it’s best to be conscious of all aspects of what you’re tasting. When you taste the wine, taste the word too.

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kerof

Posted on July 29, 2014 | 5 comments

I was still rather young, I remember, when I pointed to a percent sign and asked my mother, “What’s that called?”

“Kerof,” she said. Or maybe it was “kerrof.” Or “kerif”? I decided on “kerof.”

OK, sure, things have odd names. After all, & is called ampersand. (This turns out to be from and per se and, apparently, but how many people know that?) People can’t even agree on what # should be called. Why not kerof for %?

Look at it. Its line cuts through between the two circles like a kerf. It has an ornamental quality to it and is typographic, like a serif. It can seem as official as a sheriff or a seraph.

Not that I was fully aware of all these words at the time. I was, on the other hand, aware of the word carafe, so I knew when I saw carafe that it wasn’t a fancy spelling for kerof because I knew the stress was on the other syllable. Anyway, % looks more like two cups than one carafe.

I didn’t mind carafes. I took a dislike to the word decanter, though. Also to the word onus – actually I still don’t like onus, which seems like an average of anus and penis and would therefore be an apt name for the perineum (that’s the taint, for you plain folks). I decided that one of the most irritating sentences in English would be The onus is on the decanter.

And – here is where we come back to kerof – I discovered the word schwa (yes, I knew what it meant, and at first it seemed awfully self-important and prissy) and decided that Kerof Schwa would be a name for the sort of band that would sing annoying songs of all the things your teachers condescendingly tell you to do, and all those irritating phrases grown-ups say. Like “The onus is on the decanter.” With an instructional smile and over-gesturing finger. (If the phrase teachable moment had been around at the time, I would have determined it was the name of Kerof Schwa’s number one hit. Or maybe even a whole album.)

None of this told me, at the time, what the point of this oogly symbol was. All I knew was that my mother told me it was a kerof. And my mother was a teacher (one of the good ones, of course), so she knew.

Thing was, it wasn’t a percent sign actually that I was looking at. I realized a few years later that it had been a c/o on an envelope address.

My mom had said “Care of.”

Such a kerfuffle because I wasn’t kerof-ful…

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plash

Posted on July 28, 2014 | 1 comment

What is a plash? These days, it’s a rather precious splash: a pleasant plop, a pretty slap into the water; a word made for prose and poetry that is perused in plush places. I do not think an author could use it without seeming self-conscious. What, simply strip that sloppy starting /s/ from splash to make it a bit less conventionalized – or a bit more archaic-seeming? It may not please as planned.

But plash was not formed by taking the s off splash. No, in fact, quite the opposite: splash was formed in the late 1600s by adding the s to plash, which had already been around at least since the early 1500s. And somehow the sloppier, wetter spl version has prevailed, to make the set with splat, splatter, splodge, splotch, splutter, and the similarly sloppy splay and splurge. It is true that when you slap the surface of a pool of water, or drop a single thing into it, what you hear may be more like “plash” or “plook,” but we seem now to prefer our wetness less tidy and contemplative and more slap-dash. Or at least more conforming to other wet words.

There is actually an even older word plash, a noun meaning (according to Oxford) ‘area of shallow standing water’ or ‘marshy pool’. It’s been in the English language since before there was an English language for it to be in. It’s only used in certain regions of England now (Yorkshire, for instance). It has cognates in other Germanic languages; it may have an onomatopoeic origin – hardly surprising if it does. It may or may not have been the source of plash meaning ‘splash (but not so messily)’, or they may or may not have come from the same root. But really, when we have all these crashing, dashing, smashing -ash words and all these plopping or plucking pl- words, it really is an inevitable formation, isn’t it?

The more interesting thing, indeed, is just how splash has taken over by force of analogy, and plash has acquired a bit of a precious air in consequence. The sound symbolism may be the initial splash into the plash, but the splattered spots of mud and marsh will sometimes drain or dry in unpredictable ways and become more a part of the paint than mere fluid dynamics.

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chameleon

Posted on July 26, 2014 | Leave a comment

Would you rather be a chameleon? A little master of chamo— er, I mean camouflage? A lizard that comes with a million colours, and slips into whatever hue and pattern the situation demands? A smooth or rough operator, as needed? Crawling through the fruit garden of society, matching each lemon and each melon, sometimes a meh clone and sometimes taking a helm once and again, aiming to claim a meal and not become one?

A chameleon is not truly a master of disguise, I should say. The true master of disguise is the octopus, feeling its way through the marine environment, shifting to match coral, rocks, seaweed, by texture and pattern, or suddenly changing to startle – eight legs, thousands of sensitive suckers, tasting and tickling as it goes: smart. (Also delicious, just by the way.) See this and believe.

The chameleon, by contrast, does not shift shape, does not shift texture, and has a limited set of hues – though they can be vivid and vibrant. It changes colour as much by mood as by surrounding, and the changes take a little time, not a fraction of a second like an octopus. It shifts not to be invisible but to be appropriate or inappropriate, as the occasion demands, or just to suit its mood and never mind what’s around it.

And the chameleon always know what’s around it. Its eyes can see 360 degrees and rotate independently, ever on the lookout for what interests or threatens it, ready to focus accurately on a subject of interest. It can grasp and tickle with not only its feet but its tail, that famous curl. And its tongue! No other animal has such a tongue, capable of darting out twice the length of its body, capturing prey in an instant and retracting again. The only thing the chameleon is not so good at is listening.

So a chameleon can be the life of the party or a dark horse, a person who can be put into a place, scope it out, grasp the surroundings, snare prey with the tongue, catch the interest of others or pass relatively unnoticed as desired. Not necessarily an éminence grise; quite possibly a Boy George, a Karma Chameleon. Appropriate or appropriately inappropriate. Sometimes ambiguous and difficult, too, like the ch at the beginning of chameleon: you need to learn that in this case, as in chimera, it is hard and kicking as “k” and not catching as “ch” or soft and quiet as “sh.”

But a chameleon is not the dominant force anywhere it goes. It may be what the Greeks called a ‘dwarf lion’ or ‘ground lion’ – χαμαί khamai ‘on the ground’ or ‘dwarf’ plus λέων leon ‘lion’ – but the largest of them are not more than a foot, and the smallest can cling to your fingertip. A chameleon is not meant to be the leader, certainly not, but it is also not meant to be a minister or myrmidon. No, a chameleon is better suited to be a fine ornament of something – or someone – beautiful and captivating: like a flower, but much more fascinating.

And you know the ladies will love a chameleon, while few want to find themselves on a date with an octopus.

La Dame aux Chameleons

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roux

Posted on July 24, 2014 | Leave a comment

I’m listening to Trouble in Paradise, the new album by La Roux, and it has motivated me to pull off the shelf the large clothbound hardcover book inscribed to me by my parents for my 14th birthday. On page 782 I find only what I knew already:

ROUX – Mixture of butter or other fatty substance and flour, cooked together for varying periods of time depending on its final use.

The roux is the thickening element in sauces.

There are three kinds of roux: white roux, blond roux, and brown roux.

It goes on to explain the differences, which consist mainly in the means and degree of cooking: the flour browns variously much.

The book, I should explain, is The New Larousse Gastronomique.

My copy is in English, but I think it would read better in French. I say this because in French the three types of roux would be roux blanc, roux blond, et roux brun. Which mean, respectively, reddish-white, reddish-blond, and reddish-brown. Which are three appealing hair colours but are also three varyingly sensible descriptions of the colours of the flour-and-butter mixtures. As The Oxford Companion to Food explains, the first roux must have been roux brun: “These early roux were made by cooking flour and butter together until a reddish tint was obtained then using this to thicken a sauce or broth.” By “early” they mean in the 1600s; before that, various other things, including bread crumbs, were used to thicken sauces.

The great glory of French haute cuisine is its sauces; to make a proper sauce, you spend days roasting bones, boiling them, reducing them, making a roux, adding the stock, adding fried onions and vegetables and wine, and so on. At the end you have, stored in your fridge or freezer, sauce espagnole, which is the basis for sauce demi-glace, and both are the bases for a myriad of others. A white sauce (béchamel) is more quickly done but also uses a roux and is also a base for many others. (I find simply reading the brief recipes for these sauces in the Larousse therapeutic: “Cook 2 tablespoons chopped onion in butter. Stir in 5 dl. red wine, season, add a bouquet garni (q.v.) and boil down by two-thirds. Add 3 dl. Espagnole sauce, boil down by half and strain. Before serving, add 50 g. butter.” Violà, sauce bourguignonne – version I.)

I cheated on the days’ work of sauce making. I just used liquid OXO plus wine and herbs and the roux – different, I know, but quicker and easier and it pleased my parents well enough. These days I don’t cook French style much. But if I’m going to, I still know that a proper French sauce is made with a proper roux. The roux is at the heart of French cookery.

Which was an epiphany for me as an adolescent. I learned to make gravy from my mother, and she taught me the technique I still use for thickening pan drippings: put flour, cold water, and salt in a plastic container with a lid and shake; add some pan drippings and stir, and then stir the flour and water into the pan drippings. Not nearly as fancy as a roux and not at all buttery, but gravy with a roast is home-style cookin’. (Years later, volunteering in a soup kitchen in Harvard Square, I learned another fun trick: make a roux with flour and oil and, when it’s good and brown, instead of gradually whisking the liquid in so it wouldn’t lump, just splash in the whole lot of water cold and start stirring. Works shockingly well.)

None of this seems to have much to do with electronic dance music about affairs of the heart, which is what La Roux does, but words have the flavour they have and you cook with them as you will. And La Roux cooks, musically. La Roux is really Elly Jackson, who has red hair. Those who know French will know that roux is actually the masculine form, while la is the feminine article; this works with Jackson’s androgynous look.

And what would the feminine form of roux, ‘reddish’, be? Rousse. The proper French family name meaning ‘the red’ is embossed on the burgundy-coloured cover of my copy of the paper heart of French gastronomy: Larousse.

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