Now and then, right in the middle of an otherwise enjoyable meal, my headspace has been invaded by a question like, "What's the difference between frankfurters and wieners?" It's like an itch I can't scratch. Only, thanks to Google, I actually
can scratch it. And here, boiled down to their essence, are some of the answers I've found to pesky questions about what makes the difference between two equally delicious things. At least now, you won't have to Google them yourself.
Wiener vs. Frankfurter
I guess this is the obvious starting point. When it comes to the two pieces of "tube steak," either of which can form the active ingredient in a hot dog, the real difference is that there is no difference—except, perhaps, whether the manufacturers trace their lineage back to Germany (where Frankfurt is) or to Austria (home of Vienna). Some hot-dog brands, however, market products under both appellations. The distinction, in those cases, probably exists more for marketing purposes. There is a perception, for example, that wieners are slightly smaller, or that franks tend to be made of a single kind of meat (such as all-beef or all-turkey) rather than a blend (such as chicken, pork, and turkey). But in my opinion, that perception is all a matter of carefully-crafted imagery.
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| Not a sausage in sight! |
Wienerschnitzel vs. Jägerschnitzel
Here's where I begin to cut through some confusion and misinformation. Some popular answers to the question of what separates these two delicious morsels allege that one is made of veal, the other of pork; or that one is breaded, and the other isn't. The trouble is that they can't get straight which is which; reports conflict with each other. The most credible authorities, however, admit that both dishes may be made of pork, but are most authentically and preferably made of veal; breading is optional; and being pounded thin with a meat tenderizer before pan-frying is crucial. But the single factor that really determines which is which is the mushroom gravy. Jägerschnitzel has it. Wienerschnitzel does not. (A twist of lemon, however, would not go amiss.)
Cannelloni vs. Manicotti
The confusion between these two mouth-watering baked-pasta dishes is not helped by packaged pasta sold in grocery stores, nor by dishes offered on the menus of Italian-American restaurants, which treat the two as virtually interchangeable names for all but identical dishes. The only difference
seems to be what you stuff the pasta tubes with. But actually, if you're stuffing ingredients into tube-shaped pieces of pasta out of a box, it's got to be manicotti. Righteous cannelloni starts with flat rectangles of dough, which are loaded with toppings and then rolled into a tube or shell shape before being cooked. The former tends to have a cheese-based filling and a red, tomatoey sauce (sometimes with meat and veggies added). The latter tends to be stuffed with the meat and veggies, and the sauce may be either red (marinara) or white (bechamel). And Roberto's your uncle.
Stromboli vs. Calzone
I've looked up the difference between these two delicacies on several websites, and some of the explanations I've found are pure static. Again, restaurants are no help—the products I have seen served under these very different names are sometimes nigh unto indistinguishable. And frankly I don't care what city each one originated in, or whether one of them got its name from a song lyric. What I really wanted to know (and now I can share with you) is that, although both dishes start with pizza dough and come out of a steaming oven, stromboli is conceptually a rolled-up sandwich while calzone is more of a folded-over pizza. So, essentially, it's what goes inside the dough that makes the difference.
Springrolls vs. Eggrolls
Depending on whether you dine out at a Chinese-, Vietnamese-, or Thai-themed restaurant, you may come up with a variety of ideas on what distinguishes these two appetizers. The trouble is that the boundary will seem to change as you go from one ethnic tradition to another. Are springrolls supposed to be fried or not? Are they supposed to be bigger or smaller than eggrolls? Is one more authentically Chinese and the other rather Indochinese? Actually, neither of these questions is quite the right question (though the third one is close). The difference is really in the dough. Springroll dough is made from more of a rice-noodle mixture, while eggroll dough is more egg-noodle based. Thus, whether uncooked or fried, the rolled part of the springroll will tend to be thinner than its eggroll counterpart.
Wontons vs. Potstickers
Again, wontons are made of a thinner type of dough, and they are more likely to end up either deep-fried to a crunchy crisp or floating in a soup. Potstickers, whether steamed, boiled, or pan-fried, are sheathed in a thicker dough and may also be slightly longer in shape.
Which Mexican Soup Should I Order?
You're at an authentic Mexican restaurant. You're thinking about starting with a soup. The first thing you should know is that the difference between a "small" bowl and a "large" bowl is not the same as the difference between a "cup" of soup and a "bowl" of soup at most restaurants. If you order a "small" bowl, you will get an honest-to-goodness bowl. It may even be bigger than the largest size of soup-bowl served at most restaurants. A "large" bowl, on the other hand, will be big enough to drown a litter of puppies in (or kittens, depending on your proclivities). After settling that part of your ordering decision, the only other thing you need to know is that: Pozole is made with pork parts (soup-bone-type pieces, such as the face, knees, and ankles); Menudo is made with with beef parts (and in this case, I use the word "parts" out of delicacy—put another way, the dish will pass through the part of you that the cow contributed to it); and Albóndigas is made with little spicy meatballs. Either Pozole or Albóndigas may also include little balls of hominy, sort of like a maize-based matzo soup. I recommend them all, though it takes guts (pun intended) to chew on the meat pieces in Menudo, once you start thinking about where they come from.
Chickpeas vs. Garbanzo Beans
There is actually no difference. They're the same thing.
Jam vs. Jelly
It's simple. Whole fruit = jam. Gelled fruit juice = jelly.
Whiskey, Bourbon, Rye, Brandy, or Schnapps?
Whiskey is a distilled liquor, usually barrel-aged, made by fermenting a mixture of water and malted grain. Certain types of whiskey, such as Scotch, Canadian Whiskey, Irish Whiskey, etc., are literally named after the country in which they were produced. Bourbon is an American variant of whiskey in which the grain in question is specifically corn. Rye is another version of whiskey featuring a particular variety of grain (which, funnily enough, is rye). Brandy, though similar in color and often aged in the same kind of barrels, is made by distilling wine. And anything purporting to be brandy, but made from fruit rather than wine, technically falls under the broad category of
Eau-de-vie, which means "fruit-based distilled liquors." This broad category branches out into narrower ones delineated by their country of origin; for example, Schnapps comes from Germany. Some drinks that ride the boundary-line between brandy and eau-de-vie are the pomace brandies, such as grappa, made in Italy; these are made from what's left of the grapes after wine-making. And even these categories leave out a lot of choices for your next choosy bender.
When I admit that I waited to read J. K. Rowling's first novel for adults until the audio-book version came available at my local library, I knowingly risk my credibility as the book reviewer for the internet's Number One Harry Potter Fan Site. In fact, I left it till so late that I was still reading it when news broke that J. K. R. had published The Cuckoo's Calling under the pen-name Robert Galbraith. Alas, to be scooped! A taste more bitter than earwax! 
High school sophomore Joey Harker has such a poor sense of direction that he sometimes gets lost in his own house. One day, during a social studies exam in the form of a scavenger hunt around the downtown area, he walks into a patch of fog and comes out in another reality altogether. A world where McDonald's sports a single, green tartan arch, and where his parents have a daughter his age—but no son. While he is still reeling from this terrifying discovery, Joey is attacked by men on flying disks, and escapes capture only with the aid of a kid in a liquid-silver encounter suit. Joey runs for it, only to fall right into the clutches of another faction in a pan-dimensional war between the forces of science and magic. His awful captors plan to boil him down to his spiritual essence, inflicting unimaginable pain in the process, and then use his ability to walk between realities as fuel for their invasion fleet in the conquest of the multiverse. 
Polly Mayer is an in-house lawyer for a property development company. Her brother Don is a jingle-writing musician. For whatever reason, these two siblings have been chosen to be the next pair of contestants in a multi-dimensional game designed to answer the question, "Which came first—the chicken or the egg?" Their first clue that something funny is going on is when Polly realizes that somebody has been drinking her coffee, answering her calls, and even doing some of her work. Then, when she goes to the dry cleaner's shop to pick up her party dress, it's disappeared. Not the dress; the shop.
In the sequel to The Secret History of Tom Trueheart, the youngest of seven brothers in the last surviving family of storybook heroes must, once again, set out to save the older six. Not only that, but he must rescue five princesses who were spirited away on their wedding day before the helpless, horrified eyes of their wedding guests. Also, he has to stop a renegade Story Bureau scribe, now styling himself the King of Unhappy Endings, from marching an Army of Darkness against the Land of Stories. Just to make it fair, Tom is given a storybook handicap: the role and dimensions of the title character in the tale of Tom Thumb.
"Lidi was not easy to ignore, especially when flame shot out of her fingertips. Also, she had an attractive smile." A book that begins with a pair of sentences like this is off to a strong start. There's even more to say about it if it comes to an ending as mindblowing and intense as this book does. If, in between a strong start and a powerhouse finish, it is a tight-built, thrilling tale of love and magic and danger and perhaps much more, the trifecta may be downright overwhelming. Though it's in danger of becoming one of my all-time favorites, I can't hold back two tiny complaints. First, there's so little of this book that I came to the end wanting more. My other quibble is simply that the final pages left me wrestling with ambiguity, torn between joy and sorrow. It's the kind of ending that could keep a book club debating possible interpretations for a month. These are, technically, good things. But good things often give as much pain as pleasure.
Lately a lot of writers have been sending us dispatches from the Land of Stories. According to sometime Glee star Chris Colfer, it's a cluster of magical kingdoms where a pair of children from our world, transported through a family heirloom storybook, discover the true history behind many of your favorite fairy tales. In another account by Ian Beck, the Land of Stories is a country where designated heroes have adventures which the sprites of the Story Bureau set up for them, publishing the results for your reading enjoyment. But in Marissa Burt's debut novel, we visit not the Land of Stories, but the land of Story. This is an important distinction.
To start with, our language has two key names for the same art form: Verse, on the one hand; and Poetry, on the other. I think it might help things if we explored them as distinct concepts. It's also interesting to point out how other languages cope with the naming of this thing. For example, the Russian word Shtihi, with a nice guttural h similar to the German ch, suggests an analogy to the obsolete English word Stich, which in turn comes from Greek. In either English or Greek, this word can mean either a row (of trees) or a verse (of measured poetry or of Scripture). 
A social-networking friend suggested that I read this article yesterday, and I did. Once you get past sentences like, "The problem with the story that you should have no story except the story you choose when you had no story is that story is a story that you have not chosen," which hit the eye as the kind of philosophical drivel that could have been twice as clear in half as many words, it's an excellent, thought-provoking piece. I slept on it, got up this morning, and put in order a few of the thoughts the article had provoked. And here they are:
A few pages into this book by the author of The Tears of the Salamander, I decided that Peter Dickinson is probably the best writer living today. Given that I have only read these two of his fifty-odd books, that may come across as a hasty judgment. But I haven't forgotten that Tears was the best book I read in 2005, and I don't plan to forget that this was the best book I have read so far this year. It is not only a powerful and entertaining story, conjuring a lovely and dangerous new world, and peopling it with believable and lovable characters. It is also a prime feat of the writer's craft, perfectly balancing plot and pacing with dialogue and description. Its language is both transparently beautiful and beautifully transparent, with not one word out of place. Even when he is describing things that ought to be indescribable, Dickinson does it right. 
Oliver Finch is an all-American boy who likes wearing blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a New York Yankees baseball cap. But thanks to his father's career as a journalist and his mother's interest in archaeology, he finds himself living so far from Yankee Stadium that, in his time zone, the night games start at 5:00 the next morning. The country is Balabad, somewhere between Pakistan and Afghanistan: a country of mountains, deserts, and plains, inhabited by hundreds of often-warring tribes who speak as many strange, complex languages, none of which Oliver speaks. Between terms at the International School, he has nothing to do except hang around with his only friend: a Baladi boy named Zee, whose rich parents raised him in London. They spend most of their time visiting a friendly carpet salesman, and listening to Mr. Haji tell tall tales about his illustrious ancestors. It promises to be a hot, tedious holiday.
Joe Brooks, a boy who likes models and Monster Machine magazine, gets up in the middle of the night and finds that his bathroom door opens into a muddy plain stretching to the horizon all around. Suddenly Joe is in a strange, island world where the sun never shines, the war never ends, and the lost children who regularly appear out of nowhere never seem to get home again. A world torn apart between two sister queens who both blame each other for the death of a third sister. A world where trenches, barbed wire, and automated war-engines surround a walled city crumbling into ruins, where bureaucratic paralysis and water damage are together eroding the foundations of society, and where the secret police uses cruel interrogation techniques to wring the guilty secrets out of children, using them as leverage to keep the kids in line. 
Terry Pratchett's Discworld series is part of the bedrock of the Book Trolley's growing list of books to read after Harry Potter. Stephen Baxter is a science-fiction novelist, active since the early 1990s, whose forty-odd books I had never read or heard of until I found this book on CD, narrated by the talented Michael Fenton Stevens. Pratchett specializes in examining the nature of our civilization through the lens of a silly, off-bubble fantasy world. Baxter, I take it, likes to play with ideas related to time travel, alternate history, and parallel worlds. Put these two creative minds together, and you get a fascinating world-building experiment that shows what might happen to mankind if (or maybe when) we suddenly figure out how to "step" from one possible Earth to another. 
This book is what happens when a New York City schoolteacher stitches together nine fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to form one coherent story—while, at the same time, restoring much of the original versions' weird, scary, and bloody bits. And although the narrator often pulls the reader aside and begs him to make sure there are no small children in the room to hear the tale, the entire book demonstrates an amazing faith in kids' guts, brains, and hearts—not only that they can understand and appreciate such strong stuff, but that they are brave enough to take it, worthy to enjoy it, and keen to learn from it. Some parents may not agree that their little ones are ready to experience full-strength Grimm (let alone Shakespeare, as Gidwitz's students have done). But if they read this book, they might be won over.
The kingdom of Carthya is in trouble. Its king and queen, together with their eldest son, have been poisoned. The younger of the two princes was lost at sea four years ago, presumed dead. Its borders are lined with the armies of neighboring countries, hungry for the land's rich resources. Once the noblemen begin squabbling over succession to the throne, the resulting civil war will show the weakness their enemies are waiting for. And so you almost can't blame a young nobleman named Conner for coming up with a plan to put a pretended prince on the throne.
At age eight, Mike Higgins was playing Captain Kirk in his backyard when he spotted a tiny, green-skinned man with pointy ears, leaning against a head of lettuce and smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. "'Mummy, mummy,' I yelled out as I ran back into the house. Guess what! There are Vulcans at the bottom of our garden!'" Being the boy who saw an elf shapes the course of his life from that point forward—a life fraught with inadequacy and disappointment, conflict with his rich stepfather, mediocrity at his boarding school, off-and-on romance with a sharp-tongued co-ed named Cruella, awkwardness at talking with girls, and troubles with the authorities—so, basically, the quintessence of being a young British male. Only most young blokes don't stumble into an adventure in Elfland, skip fifteen years of their own life, and come back to find out they've won two Nobel Prizes after being declared dead. And I'm guessing that most of them can't tell the tale in a way that packs in as much heartbreaking honesty as this book does, while saving room for an average of one laugh per paragraph.
Well, I've gradually figured out a few handy proportions that have stood me in good stead. For example, I buy rice by the sack and store it in reusable plastic tubs. When I want rice for dinner, I use my 1/3-cup scoop to combine two scoops of rice and four scoops of water in a saucepan. I heat it to a boil, cover it snugly with a foil-wrapped lid, reduce the heat to the lowest flame my stovetop will allow, and set the microwave timer to 15 minutes. That's just ordinary white rice; with something fancier like basmati, I might let the rice stand in the unheated water for 20 minutes before lighting the flame. But basically, the proportion "two parts water to one part rice" has proved to be a handy rule of thumb, and it cooks in the same time whether I'm using the 1/4-, 1/3, or 1/2-cup measuring scoop.
Well, at least I now seem to have some of the basic proportions right. To start, I emptied my one-pound bags of lentils and peas into the same kind of storage tubs wherein I keep rice. Then I dispensed with the idea of cooking a whole pound of them at one time. I started today's lunch with two 1/4-cup scoops of lentil, followed by six identical scoops of water—i.e. three parts water to one part bean. Then, while heating it to a boil, I added about a spoonful of minced onion, about 1/4 spoonful of rosemary leaves, and a slice off a stick of summer sausage cut into roughly 1/3-inch cubes. 
