pastry and tea.

I was talking to Wesley about what we eat with our tea. I find that sometimes I just have tea with a meal, but often I want something sweet in the afternoon. I find that chocolate things don't go well- they're overpowering, and go better with coffee. when I have few choices, I've had things like Twinkies. I prefer plain cake, though, which isn't always possible. It's funny, isn't it. When you think about it, Twinkies actually are cake. They can be a 'snack', as all cakes can. And cake is 'pastry'. Yet we don't think of some expensive pastry in a fancy restaurant as a snack, or in the same league as a Twinkie. If we all went to a fancy restaurant and saw a listing for 'soft sponge cake filled with essence of vanilla cream' we would not expect a Twinkie- and yet that's what a Twinkie is. How is it that we know which is which? Beef is beef- except when it's a fast food burger or filet mignon. The same problem applies to foods in other languages. As my lover crymad pointed out, 'wagashi' is a snack. I think in the website for Minamoto Kitchoan I cited here (I'm sure crymad studied it and corrected their mistranslations), crackers and vanilla-filled cookies are shown- as 'wagashi'. So are delicate tea cakes, jellies made from agar, sugar candies that melt in the mouth and hardly leave a taste, and 'pastries' made from bean paste and rice flower. In fact, there are four major kinds of wagashi (which I am sure crymad knows, and not doubt pointed out to all of you); in fact, I mentioned this in a previous post. However, When I refer to wagashi, I'm usually discussing the rather pretty bean cakes that aslo sometimes contain chestnuts or fruit. Just as if I were on a pastry group discussion and I mentioned eating filled sponge cakes (which no one would assume meant 'I ate Twinkies'), we can safely assume that if I wrote a passage last year about sharing soft wagashi with a lover, I didn't offer him a cracker flavored with soy sauce, or even a piece of yokan. Here's a link to more wagashi. Crymad will helpfully be goingto Japaan this week to gun down all the confectionery-makers who have the nerve to show pictures of dry sweets (ohigasi), yokan (jellied sweets), tsurezure (long-shaped sweets), and manju (baked sweets). Just a 'confection' in English can take in everything from Tootsie rolls to key lime pie, Godiva chocolates to Bazooka gum, wagashi is a big category. However, if you say 'wagashi from Toraya' or 'expensive wagashi' or 'I was feeding him wagashi and it was so delicious we had an orgasm and then ate two more, a tiny piece at a time', we can assume that this is not the equivalent of an Oreo being discussed. I happen to know for a fact (poor crymad- he keeps writing me love letters!) that crymad meant to explain the 4 kinds of wagashi to you all. After all, he has family in Japan. He probably assumed that everyone knew this, and instead wanted to emphasize the fact that wagashi can be crackers, too- which anyone who regularly shops in an Asian market and reads what little is written in Western lettering would tell you, even without the benefit of the superb Japanese education that crymad shyly hides from the rest of us. Crymad also forgot to tell you that each wagashi maker has his or her own recipes and specialties, just as some bakers only work in chocolate and others specialize in cookies.

I'm sure crymad wanted you to see all thse sites, and that it was only in a moment of loving distraction that he forgot to append these links that I found in approximately 5 minutes via Copernic, about a year ago. Note how all of them mis-translate 'wagashi' as 'tea sweet', even the one that shows things we would call crackers.