Words and pictures!

I have expressed my amusement before on discovering that a mystery dish in Portugal called “frango com carril” turned out to be chicken curry. On that first occasion, I tried to get the waiter to explain what “carril” was, only to have him lean over the table and say slowly and clearly, “Carril! Carril!”. For all the world, it was like an English person repeating an English expression loudly and clearly as if that made the meaning clear.

This year, as I tucked into “frango com carril” once again, we reflected on the likelihood that the Portuguese took the word direct from their own colonies in the Indian subcontinent.

And now, in the weekend’s “Feast”, the Guardian’s food magazine section, I found Yotam Ottolenghi telling me that the word “curry” derives from the Tamil word “kari”, meaning sauce. So it could well be that the Portuguese version is closer to the original than the English one! Interesting stuff!

This does not explain to me how the Portuguese make “lanch”, quite obviously derived from the English “lunch” (but pronounced posh-wise, not Northwest of England-wise), mean a snack!

So it goes.

Last Wednesday, when we had lunch in Pontevedra with a young friend, we found ourselves with a bit of spare time before we had to go for a train and our young friend had to go to work teaching English. So we popped into the Pontevedra museum to have another look at the Castelao collection. This Galician artist, painter, cartoonist, is one of my favourites. We like to go back and look at his work again and again: caricature-style cartoons, pencil drawings of typical Galician faces, social commentary and colourful, playful representations of aspects of Galician life. Always worth another look!

 Here is a selection:-