Andy’s Wordshop
Pickling continued. There are two basic ways of pickling, one with acid and the other with brine (salt water). Steel pickling these days usually involves hydrochloric acid (HCl), but for pickling vegetables it’s more typical to use vinegar (acetic acid, CH3COOH) or brine. In the case of pickled cabbage it’s lactic acid (C3H6O3), and technically-speaking that is produced by fermentation (kvasenie), but English speakers don’t talk about fermented cabbage, because then they would think it was preserved in alcohol. To finish up, it’s better not to use the word “sour” when talking about food with English speakers, because they don’t like the idea of it. They usually understand it in the sense of pokazené, so instead of *sour milk* it’s better to talk about buttermilk, and rather than *sour cabbage* it’s pickled cabbage or (German) sauerkraut.
Tricky Words in this week‘s OVI
Pickling. There are two basic objectives in this process, cleaning and preserving. The Slovak words morenie and moridlo cover these two ideas as well, cleaning with reference to steel and preserving for wood. In English though, unfortunately (of course), while pickling is fine regarding the cleaning of steel products, it doesn’t work in terms of preserving wood (the word for that is “stain”, as in škvrna, poškvrniť). So if you go to a DIY shop in the UK or the USA, planning to preserve (and colour) some woodwork, the liquid you ask for is called “woodstain”. The other point is that English pickling also refers to preserving food, especially vegetables, i.e. nakladať, especially gherkins (uhorky). In Slovak, as far as I know, you would only use moriť in the sense of preserving in connection with grain (obilnina).
