Convergent etymology: paella / pilau

The other day in the London City out of scientific interest I ate from a hipster stall a portion of /pʌɪˈɛlə/. It wasn’t paella – it looked and tasted like sewage sludge, black, oily, foul – but I couldn’t work out (and didn’t dare ask) what method had led to this madness.

A couple of days later, somewhere in NW, I paid a Moroccan street vendor a fiver for a fine piece of chermoula-marinaded sea bass, which came with rice, sold again as /pʌɪˈɛlə/. The rice was fine, but prepared and spiced like a generic Ottoman pilav, so I deserted the grunting Slav street alcoholic on my table, and gently cross-questioned the entrepreneur.

Firstly, Spanish branding works. So far, so obvious.

Secondly, paella-the-dish is a miserable Iberian copy of a great Maghrebism, and paella-the-word is merely the application of a Spanish ll marinade to pilau, or whatever. That’s amusing bollocks, so it should do quite well on internet.

Thirdly, the only difference between /pʌɪˈɛlə/-palou and risotto is that you stir the latter. Sounds like Caliphate cookery.

Then I had a pint of Doom Bar for 3GBP – not bad for a neighbourhood where three-bed ex-council flats go for a million.

Similar posts

• French lessons: Grannie on her bike rides across the pool
  Boby Lapointe, an obsessive, deranged comic genius who seems to have drunk himself to death aged 50, points to one of
• The etymology and typology of “trash bean”
  Kindly contributed by C, here’s a sign from the toilets of a restaurant in Jaén: Don’t though any papers into the water
• The PSOE’s non-guerra in Afghanistan
  I don’t think anyone would dispute that Iraq destroyed the PP as an electoral machine for a decade. For a multitude
• Sex and the internet in Spanish
  Here’s a curious little corpse-worm: Curious for me, because I thought that the arrival in Hispanidad of services provided over
• Should American-Spanish political interpreters know about Methodism?
  In an FT piece a couple of days ago (via) we learn that “As Benoy discovered to its cost, interpreters need