the australian cook's dictionary

I was given a copy of Denise Grieg's excellent "the australian cook's dictionary" yesterday by a dieting friend in a vicarious mood and it should go no end to helping the food vocabulary around here. So goodbye to my favourite dish "Cooked in an oven Cow Meat with a thingy poured over it" and hello - well I haven't read it all yet. Two things have got my curiosity though.

The first is the sheer globalism of the entries, while still being representative of what we would consider "Australian" food. Although heavily weighted to French, almost every page is over 70% words of a non-English (and we could get into an argument over the definition of this) source. Eager social scientists or historians might make something of this and social changes of Australia.

My most ancient historical source is a 1970 copy of "The Australian Women's Weekly Cookbook". Again, French features reasonably heavily but a quick cruise through the comprehensive index barely yielded a double figure amount of non European terms whereas "tacd" has 26 in the "A"s alone - with a high representation of Japanese terms (might be the influence of her son working at Tetsuya's). Not many SE Asian food terms though and if you have a look through some of the blogs in IMBB you'll realise something serious is amiss.

The second point is that the singular of choux is chou. This would explain the dual spelling - if I'm not mistaken, it should be the singular form in chou pastry.

If either of these points even slightly interested you, you'll enjoy Cooking Verbs at Language Log. LL are F1 engineers, I am the bloke in greasy overalls at the garage saying "yeah well it might be the diff'".

Finally - one thing amiss is that it doesn't have pronunciation. This is a big issue for a man who spent more than a short time walking around saying chianti and korizo. Is there any difference in pronunciation between chou and choux?

Also, is "chop suey" a real Chinese word? I'd heard otherwise.