Kind of a small deal

Been about six years since I first came across it, maybe a hair more, but this is still my favourite Touhou arrangement.

Pros: No need to rely entirely on extremely fragile headphones or equally shoddy earphones.

The fish comes from the 1800s, when Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe were frying up fish before friday and eating it during the Sabbath; being Jewish means a lot of preparation like this, because you’re not allowed to work on the holidays, which includes cooking or indeed lighting a fire. The practice is not unique to eastern Europe, and was done at minimum in Portugal, India (mostly vegetables there, though) and Belgium, but I don’t know if it was a Jewish thing there.

Anyway, this goes far back enough to be mentioned in Oliver Twist in the late 1830s, namely the warehouses these were stored in. Starting in... depends who you ask, but about 1860 probably, they started selling this to everyone. A few enterprising non-Jews also sold it as fish cooked ‘in the Jewish style’. How this could possibly be a selling point in 1800s England escapes me.

So that’s the fish covered, sure. This in turn dovetails nicely with England’s fish consumption, especially cod, as a product of not being allowed to eat meat on certain days (this need for fish led to, among other things, the borderline-unintentional colonisation of what is now Canada). The potato? Well, for one, potato in Europe can only go so far back because it’s a North American import, but beyond that...

Frying in general was taking off in northern England since that was very much mill country at the time. This meant lots of oil from pressed cotton seeds, which was used for frying; I’m going to take a moment here to tell anyone reading this that as far as cooking oil goes, cotton oil is probably the worst kind you can put in your mouth this side of diesel, so uh, don’t do that.

Anyway, this in conjunction with the new ubiquity of potato as a cheap food crop in the UK resulted in a ton of potato being fried ‘in the French style’. It’s not actually French, but I imagine they either got it through France, or if the reason is anything like ‘French fries’ in the US, they got it from Belgium (the actual originator), namely the parts of it that spoke French. It took a while longer for the two to be combined into one dish.

Level 1: Adding superfluous Japanse honourifics.

Level 2: Replacing English words with Japanese words that mean the same, just to make it more Japanese.

Level 3: Take an English word or words, translate it into katakana (incorrectly at that), then romanise that back into English. Then, since this is incomprehensible, add the original English in parentheses next to it.

I’m currently proofreading for the first case of level 3 I have ever witnessed, which arrived at オタダンサ instead of ウォーターダンサー (never mind you shouldn’t be doing this to begin with), and so we have a sentence containing “the Otadansa (Water Dancer)”.