November 28, 2017

Nigella Lawson upset about Dutch book translation

Filed under: Food & Drink,Literature by Orangemaster @ 10:23 am

Famous English gourmet Nigella Lawson has criticised the Dutch title of her cookbook ‘How to Be a Domestic Goddess: Baking and the Art of Comfort Cooking’, which in Dutch is ‘Hoe word ik een goddelijke huisvrouw?’ (Roughly, ‘How can I become a divine housewife?’. The irksome intruder is ‘housewife’ because there’s no ‘housewife’ at all in English. Although there is a reference to women with the word ‘goddess’, implying that women would be the target market, the Dutch title clearly goes one backwards step too far for Lawson.

“I’m not a housewife at all. I don’t have anything against housewives, but I’m a business woman with a career”, said Lawson to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf. Hey Nigella, the Netherlands still has the highest rate of European women who work part-time with and without children (!), where roughly 60% of them cannot financially support themselves and rely on their partner (usually a man willing to pay for them) or the government to take care of them.

Let’s unpack the mistranslation then: my Facebook friends’ best guesses are that it would sell better to women that way, that it was a man came up with this title and that Dutch women, having come very late and part-time to the labour market (1970s) as compared to their European counterparts, basically deserve to be talked to down to like this and will still buy the book receive the book as a gift because, hey, it’s Nigella Lawson.

(Links: nu.nl, scp.nl – PDF)

Tags: , , ,

January 7, 2015

Annoying Dutch adverts: pretty pans and superfluous sloths

Filed under: Animals,Weird by Orangemaster @ 10:42 am

‘Mooi’, the word repeated in the video below means ‘nice’ or ‘pretty’ — you get the idea. The problem with this advert is near the end when the man says, ‘they’re all really nice pans, but where can I find (buy) them?’ His tone is irritating, as if he’s imitating a stereotyped middle-aged Dutch woman or possibly a gay-ish man. The woman, who sounds more like a Dutch man, answers ‘fonq’, a brand name pronounced a bit like ‘funk’. ‘Are you going to cook, then?’, she says in an insulting manner, implying the man doesn’t do any cooking. ‘No, I’m going to bash your brains in with them,’ a retort that is meant to be funny, but falls flat like a pancake on the floor.

A wok shown in the middle was the Boomerang Wok, designed by Dutch designer Nicolai Carels.

The pan advert was recently nominated for Most Annoying Dutch Advert 2014, the ‘Loden Leeuw’ (Lead Lion) 2014 by television consumer program Radar, but
lost to a health insurance company that features animated sloths who save so much money on their health insurance they get unnecessary cosmetic surgery, as would Dutch celebs with too much time and money on their hands.

(Photo of a cooking class kitchen by Jana Gumprecht)

Tags: , , ,

February 5, 2013

Lab-grown meat a success, cooking it up is on hold

Filed under: Food & Drink,Sustainability by Orangemaster @ 2:04 pm

A year ago we told you about a lab in Maastricht that was growing synthetic meat, which was really expensive to make and should have been ready to grill in the fall of 2012.

The long-awaited lab-grown meat is now a reality, but researcher Mark Post wants to have at least two pieces of meat before he does any grilling, which again could take many more months. The goal is to have the two pieces of meat prepared by English chef Heston Blumenthal, owner of the three-Michelin-starred restaurant The Fat Duck in the UK who is very much into molecular-level cooking.

(Link: opmerkelijk.nieuws.nl)

Tags: ,

January 24, 2011

Cooking club rides bikes and sails boats to local farms

Filed under: Bicycles,Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 10:05 am

“The people here have no idea where they can buy locally grown food,” Kook Company’s Saskia van Deijk told daily De Pers. “That’s why when it is summer we take the boat to nearby cheese farms and the bakfiets to farmers. Once we’ve stocked up on ingredients we return to our building which is right on the river Rhine and prepare our meals.”

These meals are surprising variations on the Dutch kitchen: cold cauliflower mousse and profiteroles with a Gouda cheese sauce, or spinach poffertjes. The Kook in the name is not a reference to a mental state, but simply means ‘cooking’ in Dutch.

Photo: Kookcompany

Tags: , , ,

February 26, 2010

Zienzine, fanzine from Schiedam

Filed under: Art,Comics by Branko Collin @ 12:03 pm

Should you happen to find yourself in the slow train between The Hague and Rotterdam, you might come across this monthly fanzine made by Schiedam artist Ronald de Graaff and friends.

Zienzine is set up as a platform for contributing artists. It is distributed for free (in the train, and at the addresses of some of the makers), which is why each edition is limited to 250 copies. The editors are trying to put back issues on the web for those who don’t often find themselves in the slow train between The Hague and Rotterdam, but so far have only managed to make issue 0 of the five that have been published available for download.

The first issue contains stories about Volkswagen plagiarism, pinhole photography, and doodles and cartoons. There is also a recipe for vegetarian boerenkoolstampot. If you want to know how not to pronounce this word, see here (featured earlier).

I discovered Zienzine from the print edition of Zone 5300. Zone’s latest is filled with comics from Flanders, and may be had for a few more days. It appeared last December, but I could not review it then. TNT Post never delivered my issue, and I finally got to rectify that last week.

Tags: ,

April 24, 2009

Unique photo book of restaurant El Bulli

Filed under: Food & Drink,General,Photography by Orangemaster @ 9:18 am

elbulli

American Dutch, soon to be professional photographer Lori Lens-Fitzgerald published an online photo book about her very special visit in April 2008 to the world’s top restaurant (out of 50), El Bulli in Roses, Spain.

As Lori explains, “every year 2,000,000 people request reservations and only 8,000 people get them. One of my friends was lucky and had two extra spots. I took photos of every course (American tourist that I am!) and made a book.”

El Bulli is a three-star Michelin restaurant, run by Catalonian chef Ferran Adrià . It is mainly known for its ‘molecular gastronomy’, a mix of ingredients that you’d never imagine in your wildest dreams and a whole row of small dishes (25 to 30), with instructions on how to to eat them.

(Photo: Lori Lens-Fitgerald)

Tags: , ,

September 27, 2008

Record breaking cooking class

Filed under: Dutch first,Food & Drink by Branko Collin @ 10:20 am

TV chef Pierre Wind broke a world record last Thursday by teaching somewhere between 382 and 388 people how to make an non-fried egg roll (the numbers vary depending on the source). Among the participants were the Minister of Agriculture, Gerda Verburg, and truckloads of cooking school students. The previous record, 357 participants, was held by competing Dutch TV chef Cas Spijkers. The record attempt was part of De Week van de Smaak (Taste Week, which ends tomorrow).

(Link: Via Misset Horeca (Dutch). Photo of an unrelated Berlin cooking class kitchen by Jana Gumprecht, some rights reserved)

Tags: ,