calling all Melrose Park Calabrese (and Antonius)

My mom's family (mostly Provenzanos from Calabria) calls Italian fried dough with sugar, commonly served at the Taste of Melrose Park / Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, "BEE-twoees." This is like the word "between," but with the accent on the first syllable and an 's' at the end instead of an 'n.'

Nobody in the extended circle of relations has a reasonable English (or Italian) transliteration; we just say it. Honestly, I've never heard anyone else in Melrose Park, or other Calabrians from elsewhere, say anything like this. The closest I can reckon is that it's the word "pitta" (pita? piti?) said with a goofy accent or vocal diminutive. But I'd love to find out for sure. Has anyone else heard someone call elephant ears / fried dough / beaver tails "bee-twees?"

[crickets chirping]

Santander wrote:My mom's family (mostly Provenzanos from Calabria) calls Italian fried dough with sugar, commonly served at the Taste of Melrose Park / Feast of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, "BEE-twoees." This is like the word "between," but with the accent on the first syllable and an 's' at the end instead of an 'n.'

Nobody in the extended circle of relations has a reasonable English (or Italian) transliteration; we just say it. Honestly, I've never heard anyone else in Melrose Park, or other Calabrians from elsewhere, say anything like this. The closest I can reckon is that it's the word "pitta" (pita? piti?) said with a goofy accent or vocal diminutive. But I'd love to find out for sure. Has anyone else heard someone call elephant ears / fried dough / beaver tails "bee-twees?"

My family is not Calabrian but I have some familiarity with Calabrian dialects. The form you cite does not itself ring a bell for me but it is presumably a by-form of pitta, a word which, with various qualifications, designates a very wide range of dough-based products, from pizza-like flatbreads to sweet rolls with fruit and nuts and on to what I would call frittelle. The closest in form and sense to the word you cite that I know is píttula, a term indicating a fried dough item that is traditionally made at Christmas time.

Sincerely,
Antonius
Doctor of Victological Science
Director, Institute of European Victology
Academia Novi Belgii
www.namnam.edu

Thrice-worthy and beloved Antonius!

That's it exactly! I would never have figured out that transliteration from the way we say it, but here it is being made (terrible video quality) labeled with your rendering, although this particular grandma is making a stuffed version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUm_u0ZM ... re=related

Here is a recipe in Italian that's identical to ours:

http://tinyurl.com/2lkhwf

Pittule it must be - taking the plural and using it to refer to the singular as well. Bravo.

Other family dialect goofiness:

zgoolabast' - colander or strainer, from scolapasta, pasta-strainer

preachers - gnocchi. This one is crazy - some of the Italians went from NYC to Kansas to work farms out there, and picked up some serious Lutheran plainspeak. We think this is a translation of strangolapreti, priest-chokers, another name for (in some places, another type) of gnocchi since they are so good and heavy that the archetypal city priest chokes with joy at the peasant food. I've heard different theories on "gnocchi" itself, including that it is cognate with knot (in a tree, not in a rope) through the Etruscan word for lump.

bribat or pripatties - flattened meatballs, sometimes deep-fried, served over noodles or in soup. I had figured out that this one is properly polpette, from the Latin for pulp.

scaweel a deep-fried Christmas cookie, long strips of dough cut with a pinking shears, fried, and coated with honey and powdered sugar, from scaledde (scala a libretto?), ladder