Tasty trivia

In a list of Turkish dishes, I came across the word kavurma which apparently means "cubed browned lamb". It looked suspiciously close to korma, the name for a saucy North Indian dish, so I naturally wondered if they were related. Yup! The OED traces them both back to an older Turkish qawurma from the verb qawurmak "roast, bake". Furthermore, there seems to be another cognate in the name of the Persian dish ghormeh (Turkic/Arabic /q/ regularly becomes /G/ in Modern Persian), a kind of lamb stew.

I haven't been this excited since I figured out that Armenian basturma and Yiddish pastrame must be distant cousins. (Again, the connexion is Turkish: Ottoman baSdirma, of uncertain origin; the modern form is pastırma.) It's both thrilling and dispiriting to find these cognates. On the one hand, I love uncovering cultural interpentration; on the other, it makes the individual cuisines seem somewhat less special when you realise how much they've borrowed from their neighbours.