…about tendril perversion. Which is not that, but the phenomenon in which a coiling cable or plant stem reverses its direction of coil.
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Well, that’s a thing to read first thing in the morning.
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…about ajvar. Which is a red pepper and aubergine spread/condiment from Yugoslavia that my wife found cheaply at Lidl, but the etymology is that in the 1890s there were labour disputes that hit local caviar (real “ajvar”, via Turkish “havyar”) production, so the red pepper salad that substituted for it in Belgrade were called “red ajvar” or “Serbian ajvar”, and since then that’s become the default meaning of the word.
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It was Belgrade where I first had it (along with rakija which is a whole post on its own) and was pleased to see you can now buy quite good ajvar in the co-op.
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The grocery store I go to has ajvar sections. Plural, because they segregate the Serbian, Bosnian and Albanian varieties. I don’t buy it, because my wife gets some locally made variety at Serbian restaurant.
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The phrase I tend to use for all of these is “it’s not like mama used to make it in the old country”. (In my case the old country was London in the 1970s, and mama made only a small selection of Weird Foreign Food and that rarely.)
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My eyes are still focusing this morning and I read that as:
“it’s not like mama used to make it in the odd country”
And I thought, “yeah the 70’s get pretty odd in places” before my eyes nudged my brain back to reality
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