I want that REAL spicy stuff. Not that crap labeled “Medium”

(I’m in the US/Germany btw)

  • quediuspayu@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    I’m starting to think that when an American says salsa it means one specific kind of sauce.

    • evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      It’s salsa roja, salsa verde, salsa fresca, and any other fruit (mango is common) based condiment that you’d eat with chips. Salsa de mole, we just call mole. Other types of Mexican sauce like what you’d put over enchiladas, just gets called “enchilada sauce”.

      It’s a common thing with loan words to have them only applied to the subset of things that were originally imported and called by that name. No one out of Italy, for example would call pizza bianca “pizza” if you gave them a piece and asked what it is (I’m talking about roman pizza bianca, not “white pizza” being back translated).

      Sometimes the opposite happens, like “curry” being derived from a specific thing in a specific part of India, being applied by the British (and everywhere else they exported it) to basically any saucy Indian food.