From: jc@minya.UUCP (John Chambers)
Newsgroups: rec.folk-dancing
Subject: Re: The Folk Process Lives On; or, They Don't Call 'Em "French Fries" in France...
Date: 11 Sep 92 14:35:33 GMT

In article <16370@pitt.UUCP>, dan@codex.com (Dan Breslau) writes:
> While my wife and I were on vacation in Scotland a couple weeks ago,
> we  went to a ceilidh in Orkney.  After some music performance, they
> started the dancing (at around 10:30 -- a  time  when  some  of  our
> local  dances  are  finishing!)  with a polka-style dance we'd never
> heard of. ... Oh, and the dance we'd never heard of?  They called it
> "The Boston Two-Step".
>
> Dan Breslau (Resident of Boston, Ma.)

This has nothing much to do with dancing, but  the  principle  is  the
same as french fries in France:  In Finland, you very often see a sort
of dessert called "Bostonkakku", or "Boston cake".  I've never seen it
in  the  Boston  area,  or in other parts of the USA where I've lived.
It's vaguely like the thing called "Boston cream pie" (which  isn't  a
pie  at  all,  of  course;  it's  a  layer cake with cream filling and
chocolate frosting ;-), but different.  Instead of the cream  filling,
Bostonkakku  is two layers of cake with a jam or preserve filling, and
usually no chocolate.  The taste and texture are quite different  from
Boston cream pie.  Who knows why they call it that?

More in the folk-dance line:  When I moved to Boston a  decade  or  so
ago,  I was somewhat bemused to notice that the folk dancers here used
the Norwegian polka as their "standard" polka. This is curious for two
reasons.   One  is  that,  at  the  time,  there was no regular public
Scandinavian dancing in the area  (but  there  is  now,  due  to  some
"immigrants"  like  myself ;-).  The other is that in most of the USA,
the German or Polish polka is the standard.  So how come around Boston
they somehow picked up the Scandinavian type of polka as the standard?

The story seems to be what biologists call a  "founder  effect".   The
area  has  relatively  small  German,  Polish  and Scandinavian ethnic
communities, so there's not really an indigenous polka, and there  was
a  niche available for colonizing.  Some years back, a few influential
teachers in the area liked the Scandinavian polka  and  taught  it  in
their beginning classes, and it caught on.

BTW, in Norway the "Norwegian polka" is usually called "pariserpolka",
or Parisian polka.  Again, who knows why? Probably due to the vagaries
of dance fashion a hundred years ago, and some teachers who picked  up
some  vaguely  similar  dance  in Paris and taught it in Oslo (oops, I
mean Christiania ;-).  Calling it Parisian makes it sound  so  classy,
you know.

Actually, the origin of the term "french fry" is known, and  explained
in  some cookbooks.  The terms "french" and "frenching" have been used
in English for centuries to refer to things (usually  vegetables)  cut
into  slices.  Some of the older forms usually included a sauce poured
over baked, boiled or steamed frenched vegetables.  A curious  example
in  some  old cookbooks is "frenched beans".  They are made by slicing
green beans lengthwise, boiling or steaming them, and adding a cheese-
or egg-based sauce.  Now why would someone take something like a green
bean and slice it into thinner strips?  (That's a rhetorical question;
actually I do know the answer:  cutting the beans releases more flavor
and aroma molecules.)

Enough rambling ...
-- 
All opinions Copyright (c) 1992 by John Chambers. Inquire for licensing at:
1-617-647-1813 ...!{bu.edu,harvard.edu,eddie.mit.edu,ruby.ora.com}!minya!jc 
--
Pensu tutmonde; agu loke.