Um livro que não largo há vários anos e que busco sempre em grave urgência: John Ayto, A Gourmet's Guide. Food & Drink from A to Z. Gosto de ler dicionários. Este quase-dicionário tem uma mistura exótica de erudição, humor e sabores e conseguiu várias vezes fazer-me voltar muito viva ao mundo dos vivos, além de apaziguar várias dúvidas. Útil, também, como todo o livro deve ser, aberto ou fechado. Uma das minhas entradas preferidas sobre um fruto (infrutescência, se bem me lembro) que é caro, ácido e bonito, como um troféu, quando vem das ilhas, ou doce, sumarento e barato, como o amor, quando vem dos trópicos:
Pineapple
When first brought back to Europe from tropical America in the early seventeenth century, pineapples were called ananas, after anãnã, the name for the fruit in the Guarani language of Bolivia and southern Brazil. The term has stuck in most European languages, but English soon abandoned it. In England, people were quick to notice a resemblance between the exotic and delicious ananas and the humble pinecone, which from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries was known as pineapple and so the fruit iherited the pinecone's name. Early on it was also known simply as the pine; John Evelyn notes in his Diary for 9 August 1661: The famous Queen Pine brought from Barbados... the first that were ever seen in England were those sent to Cromwell foure years since. Of all exotic fruits, the pineapple is perhaps the one that has captured the British imagination over the years: gentlemen of sufficient means would compete with each other in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to grow ripe succulent examples in their hothouses, and stylized some pineapples began to decorate the gateposts of country houses up and down the land. As Jane Grigson explains in her Fruit Book (1982), it was faster sea transportation in the later nineteenth century that put an end to the pineapple as a rare luxury, and the tweentieth century has been the era of the tinned pineapple chunk. In the 1930's to be "on the pineapple" was, in British slang, to be on the dole. And nowadays, pineapple is US military slang for a "hand grenade".
Sublinho: gentlemen of sufficient means would compete with each other in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to grow ripe succulent examples in their hothouses. Cavalheiros de meios competindo uns com os outros para fazer crescer nas suas estufas exemplares suculentos e maduros. Não cansa reler.
Outras urgências intercedem. A lista continua já.
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