LTH (the restaurant) in print

I thought that folks in the LTHForum might be interested to read the lead article in Hungry Magazine today (June 16) -- it's about Chinatown and features Little Three Happiness. Hungry is at http://www.hungrymag.com

The article sure made me want to jump in the car and go to Chinatown!

I see the article also lets the Gary's chili oil cat out of the bag, if not its secret location.

strange article though - Spring World has Yunnan specialties, not Hunan.

If he got it wrong, post a comment.

I posted an article to Hungry once and learned from an observant reader that, though I had gotten a bit of trivia from no less an authority than Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food, it wasn't true. I fixed the article, and now know to double check even stuff from Oxford.

Did you notify Oxford? What was it? I'm interested, because I have several of the O food and wine companions, and I find them to be wildly uneven -- though I enjoy all of them. The editorial approach to the wine books and the USA book could not be more different. For starters, the wine tome is scholarly.

No, I didn't notify Oxford -- it actually didn't occur to me. I guess they'd want to know, wouldn't they?

The error in question is that the article on pigs identified the javalina of Mexico as a descendant of the pigs brought to the New World by the Spanish. There are wild pigs in Mexico that are descendants of those early Spanish pigs, but they are not javalinas. Javalinas are simply "pig-like" animals that are indigeouns to Mexico.

Cynthia wrote:No, I didn't notify Oxford -- it actually didn't occur to me. I guess they'd want to know, wouldn't they?

The error in question is that the article on pigs identified the javalina of Mexico as a descendant of the pigs brought to the New World by the Spanish. There are wild pigs in Mexico that are descendants of those early Spanish pigs, but they are not javalinas. Javalinas are simply "pig-like" animals that are indigeouns to Mexico.

Cynthia,

I feel moved to come to the defence of my friends in Oxford. The line in question in Alan Davidson's Companion to Food is as follows:

«Feral pigs of Spanish stock are also found in Mexico, where they are known as javalinas.»

I believe this statment is completely accurate. It might to do well to rephrase it as follows: There are feral pigs in Mexico which are descended from escaped domestic pigs brought to that land by the Spanish and (in Mexican Spanish) they are referred to as javalinas.

The existence and local name of the indigenous animal known in the United States as the 'peccary' is simply not addressed in this passage. I do think it would have done well for Davidson to note the existence of the peccary and his failure to do so certainly allows for misunderstanding. But still, the statement is accurate, I believe, as is. In any event, I believe both the peccary and feral pig can each be referred to as a jabalí; in the case of the peccary, there are other terms available and in the case of the feral pig (sus scrofa gone wild, as it were), one can -- if one cares -- use the fuller phrase jabalí europeo (unless that's reserved only for the genuine wild boar of Europe -- but again, feral pigs and wild boars are jumbled terminologically and perhaps too genetically). Me thinks.

It would be good to get input in this regard from native speakers of Mexican Spanish and if they deny the possibility of referring to a feral pig as a javalí with or without further qualification (e.g. europeo etc.), then it might be time to write to the publishers of the Companion to food. Alas, Mr. Davidson, one of the greats in the field of food history and food studies, is now deceased.

So, Cynthia, I think you were probably right in the first place, no?



Antonius

Typo corrected.

Well, I'm glad to know that there is an explanation. However, though it may be true that I could have left the term, the fact is, if you look up javalina in Britannica, they say "pig-like animal" and give a Latin name that is clearly not the same as that of the wild pig. Since the vast majority of people would not be as thoughtful in their pursuit of the deeper truth as you clearly are, I figured it was easier to just change the article (nice thing about publishing online), rather than field future comments from people who are certain that both Alan Davidson and I are wrong. It may have been right before, but now it looks more correct.

But thanks a lot for the explanation. I am glad that Mr. Davidson and Oxford need not slip in my estimation.

Cynthia and Antonius,

According to my McDonald's (Encyclopedia of Mammals), the collared peccary is also known as the baquiro, chacharo, javelina or javali.

The peccary (there are 3 subspecies) belong to the same order as pigs, artiodactyla (even-toed) but, unlike pigs, live in herds and practice altruisitic behavior when confronted by a predator. They are a completely different family from pigs. The collared peccary is considered a pest because it feeds on crops and is hunted for its meat. They are distributed from the southwestern U.S. to northern Argentina.

I have been unable to locate a Spanish translation for javelina or javalina but there is a Spanish translation for javelin meaning dart (referring to the peccary's short, sharp canines).

I agree, if there is a colloquial use for javelina or javalina, the writer should've explained it.

Javalina run rampant through the West Texas hinterlands. Growing up it was common knowledge that they were "like" pigs...but not actual pigs.

C, A, CG:

I think the specific question at issue here is not one of zoology -- it is agreed that there exists a pig-like animal (tayassu tajacu) native to the Americas that is not directly or very closely related to the pig brought to America by Europeans, namely, sus scrofa. Rather, as I indicate above, the question I'm addressing is a linguistic one and a very simple one at that, namely, whether the (collared) peccary/tayassu tajacu (jabalí de collar) and the feral sus scrofa are both referred to in (varieties of) Mexican Spanish as javalines. All that Mr. Davidson says is that there are feral pigs descended from escapees from Spanish colonial settlements and that they are called javalines in Mexico. Again, that simple and limited statement strikes me as being quite correct and has nothing to do with the separate question of whether there is another, unrelated and indigenous species of pig-like animals in Mexico and elsewhere in the Americas: There is and whether he was aware of that fact or not cannot be ascertained from what he wrote.

In this regard, it should be pointed out that the word jabalí is not a word native to any indigenous language of the Americas nor one that was somehow invented or coined in the the context of Spanish colonial life in New Spain. Rather it was brought by the Spanish from Spain where it had been used in reference to wild boars and, I strongly suspect, also to the morphologically similar atavistic feral pigs of the Old World. From that perspective, it is in no way surprising that feral pigs in the New World are still referred to with the inherited Spanish jabalí or variants thereof.

Now, concerning the specifically American critter, it seems that, confronted with the wild and pig-like peccary, Spanish colonists in some areas apparently just extended the use of the name jabalí to the native American tayassu tajacu. The English word 'peccary' and the various related New World Spanish forms of the pecarí, paquira, baquiro etc. etc. etc. sort (with the English presumably coming indirectly via the Spanish) go back to a borrowing of an indigenous American language word for the tayassu tajacu. The language in question is apparently Carib (north coast of South America) and it is therefore not at all surprising that this word is not universally used in relatively far-off Mexico for the native American animal. In any event, it seems from what I can gather that in some American varieties of Spanish, forms of the actual borrowed word for tayassu tajacu have also ended up being applied regionally to feral sus scrofa. The fact is, for lots of people, a wild pig-like animal is a wild pig-like animal and one term is good for both species.

In the course of reading material from some Spanish-language websites I get the impression that the meat of the peccary is very gamey and perhaps considerably more so than that of feral pigs. Has anyone out there ever eaten it? Christopher maybe? Other Texans or travellers to Mexico?

Casa de Samuel* has jabalí as an offering on their menu and I wonder what manner of beast it be that they actually serve. My friend, José, from Guerrero, described to me people in his area hunting what sounded to me to be more likely the peccary than the feral pig -- at least that was the impression I had at the time of the telling -- though now I'm unsure and would like to present him with a photo-line-up of swinish suspects and see what he picks out.

* http://lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=8847
* http://www.lthforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?p=19710#19710

Anyway, I never see anything wrong with trying to get things right, so I've found this an interesting topic to discuss and look further into, though I'm quite sure there are many who are their eyes...

Munchas gracias a todos los contribuidores en este discurso sobre los puerquitos salvajes.
Antonius


En cuestión de puercos todo es dinero, y en cuestión de dinero todos son puercos.
Mexican proverb

My eyes had indeed begun to glaze a bit, but happily, I came to in time to get a nice chuckle out of the Mexican proverb at the bottom. Thanks.

Seth...FYI, in the original Spring World article it was Yunnan, but I didn't notice that my editor wrongly changed it. As you can tell by the geographical description, I was describing Yunnan. Thanks for the heads up. I changed it back on the website.

Danged editors! Nice article and thanks for popping into this thread.

I do not doubt the likelihood of Antonius's thoughts -- there are so many things over here (and elsewhere in the New World, such as Australia) that got labeled with the names of things from "back home" -- nasturtiums, for example, and peppers, and probably javalinas.

However, since my reputation is not so well etablished (yet) as Alan Davidson's, I don't want to risk saying something that might appear incorrect, even while acknowledging the likelihood that Davidson's statement is accurate.

But I appreciate very much the discussion. I love analyzing how words get from one place to another. Words have almost as much history as food -- and sometimes, that history overlaps (such as why we have separate words in English for the animals and their flesh -- thanks to the Norman Conquests -- pig, sheep, cow in Anglo-Saxon, porc, mouton, boef in French). Good fun.

So thanks for the history of tayassu tajacu, Antonius.

Names are important (taxonomy not zoology) or Odysseus would not have replied "Nobody" when Cyclops asked his name. I think you have another article, Antonius.