They have a way with words in North America. Just shows: take a language out of its indigenous country and it grows, evolves, acquires a flourish and panache. I love some of the American names for foodstuffs: ‘scallion’ is much more resounding than the old boring ‘spring onion’. Eggplant is more descriptive, zucchini more authentic. Whole wheat - more precise. Cornmeal – in the UK we don’t even have a name for it apart from polenta which is not exactly the same thing. ‘Shrimp’ actually derives from the moniker for a short person, not the other way round, so why change it to a meaningless ‘prawn’?
Some expressions I’m not that sure about and it’s taken me a while to get them: ‘half and half’ - what? You’d never guess it was about cream. Broiler surely is a chicken, not an oven, and a pie - no, no, no! Pork pies! Pukka pies! All savoury. And an entrée is what you have for starters in my neck of woods.
Buckle belongs in the cute category. In UK it’s, awfully boringly, a crumble, and in a disappointing way a crumble here doesn’t usually have a cake underneath. Stingy or what? So what I call ‘a soft fruit streusel cake’, the Americans succinctly named ‘a buckle’.
That of course refers to the way the topping buckles on top of the fruit in a wavy manner. Very expressive. I think I’ll adopt it now, especially that the blueberry kind is the most common buckle and that is my firm favourite.
The fancy addition of the quinoa flour in the crumble topping comes from the NY Times Cooking buckle cake recipe.