Food for thought

“Our daughter sent me a food hamper for Father’s Day,” writes a Craigie regular. “Unpacking the goodies, I came across a packet bearing the legend ‘Cipolla’ and I thought that that was very like the Spanish word for onion – ‘cebolla’. The product was probably from Italy.

“And so it was. A description of the contents said it was a bakery product with onion and extra virgin olive oil.

“Words like ‘cebolla’ in Spanish have always intrigued me. We have ‘onion’, the French have ‘oignon’, but the Spanish have a completely different word – ‘cebolla’. Even the German is related to the Spanish and Italian terms. It is ‘Zwiebel’.

“I put it down to the Arab or Moorish influence on Spanish. Several words which are common to most European languages are entirely different in Spanish.

‘Carrot’ is ‘zanahoria’ in Spanish, for instance, although it is ‘carotte’ in French and ‘Karotte’ in German. After all, the Moors occupied Granada for hundreds of years before they were driven out by Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 15th century.

“The Orleans family with whom I stayed on a school exchange visit from Dundee in 1948 were full of their war experiences, how they fled west in 1940 and how they returned to reopen their greengrocery business in the Rue de Bourgogne after the fall of France.

“The only German Monsieur Midoux, father of the family, learned from the occupying forces was ‘sweebel’, as he pronounced it. He said the German soldiers were always desperate for onions; they seemed to use them a lot in their cooking.”

“Our Giant Himalayan Lily showing off its once-every-four-years flower!” says reader Alison Scott.