I've got dibs on that...
I found a recipe that called for grenadine molasses. Being published in a Western newspaper, it said I'd have to find a Middle Eastern speciality grocer, but here in Dubai, it's hard to find a grocer that doesn't specialise in Middle Eastern ingredients, so I got a bottle labelled (in Arabic) dibs roman.
Which brings up a problem of translation: in Western Europe, everyone has the same concepts, but different ways of saying them, so the English say 'bread' while Germans say 'brot' and the French are a 'pain'.
But when one goes East, the concepts are different, so a word-for-word translation becomes difficult. I know what an English 'word' is, but the Arabic 'kalima' is any combination of two or more letters, so not quite the same, but my Arabic-English dictionary says kalima is the Arabic for 'word'.
Which brings me to dibs.
In standard English, molasses has one meaning: crush sugar cane to extract the liquid, then boil that liquid until it forms a thick, dark, sweet syrup, and that syrup is molasses.
In Arabic, that syrup is called dibs, but Arabic has many different kinds of dibs besides molasses. The word dibs seems to refer to any thick, dark edible syrup.
In proper English, when a traveller comes across a concept that does not exist, the word is normally absorbed into English via the five-finger discount method of acquisition. But sometimes the traveller gets 'help' from one of the natives who speaks a little English, and this seems to be how dibs roman got translated as 'grenadine molasses' (roman is Arabic for pomegranate or grenadine). I find this unfortunate, because molasses is always sweet, but grenadine dibs is very tart, so Arabs without the benefit of an Arabic-English dictionary have translated dibs for me as vinegar. And one Lebanese said dibs has no translation into English.
So I wish, when the company was forced to find an English name to put on its international label, they had just called it grenadine dibs, rather than grenadine molasses.
I should also mention that Northern Arabs tell me they use it instead of vinegar to make oil and dibs salad dressing. And the recipe I found that caused me to buy a bottle said to mix it with sugar to make a sweet-and-sour sauce to pour over eggplant.
So now I've got dibs on the salad and the eggplant.
Which brings up a problem of translation: in Western Europe, everyone has the same concepts, but different ways of saying them, so the English say 'bread' while Germans say 'brot' and the French are a 'pain'.
But when one goes East, the concepts are different, so a word-for-word translation becomes difficult. I know what an English 'word' is, but the Arabic 'kalima' is any combination of two or more letters, so not quite the same, but my Arabic-English dictionary says kalima is the Arabic for 'word'.
Which brings me to dibs.
In standard English, molasses has one meaning: crush sugar cane to extract the liquid, then boil that liquid until it forms a thick, dark, sweet syrup, and that syrup is molasses.
In Arabic, that syrup is called dibs, but Arabic has many different kinds of dibs besides molasses. The word dibs seems to refer to any thick, dark edible syrup.
In proper English, when a traveller comes across a concept that does not exist, the word is normally absorbed into English via the five-finger discount method of acquisition. But sometimes the traveller gets 'help' from one of the natives who speaks a little English, and this seems to be how dibs roman got translated as 'grenadine molasses' (roman is Arabic for pomegranate or grenadine). I find this unfortunate, because molasses is always sweet, but grenadine dibs is very tart, so Arabs without the benefit of an Arabic-English dictionary have translated dibs for me as vinegar. And one Lebanese said dibs has no translation into English.
So I wish, when the company was forced to find an English name to put on its international label, they had just called it grenadine dibs, rather than grenadine molasses.
I should also mention that Northern Arabs tell me they use it instead of vinegar to make oil and dibs salad dressing. And the recipe I found that caused me to buy a bottle said to mix it with sugar to make a sweet-and-sour sauce to pour over eggplant.
So now I've got dibs on the salad and the eggplant.
posted by Dubai@Random at 2:23 pm
4 Comments:
If this pomegranate dibs is what I think it is, try roasting some onions and using this as the sauce to roast them in (dilute it with vinegar I think). It will be amazing, soaked up in arabic bread, yum.
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