0414,How a pocket-sized snack changed the English language

天天用英语365天第104天

Maggie

1、Tiny pies have been a favorite food in Britain since the Middle Ages – and have changed the English language with idioms,nursery rhyme verses,even a mention by Shakespeare.

2、Some recipes are particularly offbeat.

===His style is offbeat but highly creative.

===I like his offbeat sense of humor.

3、While the quirkiest entry in this year’s Speciality Meat category was a cricket pie,one celebrated past winner was Phil Warmsley’s squirrel pie in 2014.

4、Warmsley told me that it has medieval origins,but still sells out at Market Harborough’s twice-monthly farmers’ market. “They’re also a great way to deal with a pest,” he laughs.

5、But it was Cornwall’s eye-catching Stargazy Pie that might be the most distinctive.

6、Cooked with sardines gazing up from the crust, this distinctive pie has roots in a 17th-Century tale from the fishing village of Mousehole.

7、The story goes that a fisherman named Tom Bawcock braved December storms to land a huge haul of fish that saved the village from starvation. To celebrate,his catch was baked into a giant celebratory pie – with fish heads left poking out as proof that the fish famine was over.

8、Today,Stargazy Pie is traditionally baked with seven kinds of fish,boiled potatoes,boiled eggs and white sauce. The fish serve a practical purpose,not just a symbolic one:oil from the heads enriches the pastry and moistens the pie.

9、Even in their early days,pies served different purposes for the rich and poor:as show-off delicacies for the former and portable food for the latter.

===They have a tendency to show off,to dramatize almost every situation.

10、So while wealthy feasts might include pies containing anything from game birds to mussels,the less well-off used simpler pies as a way to have food while doing outdoor work or travelling – the crust both carried and preserved the tasty filling.

11、the Bedfordshire Clanger:a British classic which cleverly combines main course and dessert,with savoury ingredients like pork at one end and sweet ingredients like pear at the other.

12、The name comes from a local slang word,‘clang’,which means to eat voraciously.

===He is reading voraciously.

13、However,cramming two courses into a pie makes a clanger rather unwieldy – and all too easy to drop,inspiring the English phrase ‘dropping a clanger’ for a careless mistake.

===I dropped a clanger by asking Tom how his dog was when it's been dead three months.

===I dropped a real clanger when I mentioned the party.He hadn't been invited.

14、Pies have been adding rich flavour to the English language for centuries. Even Shakespeare got in on the act,writing in his 1613 play Henry VIII that “No man’s pie is freed from his ambitious finger”,giving English the phrase ‘a finger in every pie’.

===He had a finger in every pie at school,from dramatics to football.

===John is sure to know about it;he had a finger in every pie.

15、Meanwhile,the description of a drunken state as ‘pie-eyed’ likely takes its cue from someone who,thanks to having over-imbibed,has eyes as wide and blank as the top of a pie.

===After drinking this glass of wine,I'll be pie-eyed.

16、‘As easy as pie’ – first recorded as ‘like eating pie’ in the horse-racing newspaper Sporting Life in 1886 – springs from pies’ historical role as convenience food.

===That job was as easy as pie.

17、‘Eating humble pie’,meanwhile,comes from medieval deer hunting,when meat from a successful hunt was shared out on the basis of social status. While the finest cuts of venison went to the rich and powerful,the lower orders made do with the ‘nombles’:a Norman French word for deer offal. Anglicisation saw ‘nombles’ pie become ‘humble’ pie.

===The 16th and 17th Centuries saw the rise of so-called Surprised Pyes...

===To eat humble pie is not a pleasant experience.

18、pie in the sky(画饼充饥)

19、The 16th and 17th Centuries saw the rise of so-called Surprised Pyes,created to impress guests at aristocratic banquets by concealing unexpected things under an additional removable pastry lid added after cooking.

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