In New Zealand, biscuits are what are known as cookies in the US, but US biscuits or Canadian tea biscuits are scones, which are neither cookies nor biscuits, and are pronounced like “gone” not “cone,” and can be savoury (cheese) or sweet (with sugar in the dough, or chopped dates – my favourite – or sultanas (ugh), and served with jam and cream), and they are different from griddle scones, which have no butter in the dough, and are not baked but cooked on a griddle or fry pan (usually without any flavouring). They should not be confused with drop scones, which are known as pikelets here, which are not small fish but small, sweeter pancakes, more like the US-style pancakes, though much smaller, and served at afternoon tea not breakfast, never with bacon or maple syrup or banana, which go with real, full-size pancakes as a popular café breakfast/brunch item in New Zealand, though these should not to be confused with thin pancakes or crepes, which my brother-in-law cooks – rolled with lemon juice and sugar – for his Asian-Kiwi-third culture family for breakfast, meaning that their understanding of pancakes is hopelessly confused, much like Americans’ understanding of biscuits.
Please excuse the long sentences, but there’s a lot to fit in and I’m trying to make this an eight-sentence #Microblog Mondays post (maybe the longest eight-sentence #Microblog Mondays post ever), so if you’re feeling breathless reading this, just imagine how I’m feeling writing it, as I decide whether to mention that we use mince, not ground meat, for our burgers, and accompany them with a salad with lovely peppery rocket, which I’ve had to translate (on my travel blog) to my US friends and US-based brother-in-law who left New Zealand a) before he would have learned to cook, if indeed he can now, and b) before rocket became the ubiquitous ingredient it is now, as I understand in the US it is called arugula. We use coriander to refer to the entire plant, not just the powder, or the seed, or the leaves, and so don’t use the term cilantro, but I’ve watched enough cooking shows to understand that, though many Kiwis would not, though I’m still confused with the term scallions, though I think I would say spring onions, and I wouldn’t know what to do if someone told me to broil something, as I heard on a US cooking show the other day, though I know that we say barbecue when the US says grill.
Whenever I mention capsicum, I’m often asked what it is by my US friends, so I should really say pepper, which is understood here I think, as we’ll talk about a red or yellow pepper, so it’s pretty interchangeable, though don’t get me started on the US yams and sweet potato, which we would call by the Maori name for sweet potato that is kumara, though in fact, a yam to us is small and sweet (though never a favourite of mine, and I haven’t touched one since I left home at 17), and originates from the Andes, where (according to Google) it is called oca. Another disliked vegetable from my youth is the broad bean, or fava bean, and I am sure there are more differences with other beans, as there are with root vegetables, including pumpkins, which we tend to use as a category of various squash (which is not a term we use), and until today (thanking Google again), I never realised that a rutabaga is what I know as a swede, and like to add to a winter soup.
We tend to use the Italian zucchini not the French courgette, though again both are understood, but to be contrary we’ve gone French and use aubergine not eggplant, pinot gris rather than the Italian pinot grigio, and syrah rather than following the lead of our even more contrary Australian cousins who call the grape shiraz. Cheers.
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