"Fry" is an ambiguous word in English

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨NorthWestWind@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

Here are 3 examples:
Fried egg, fried rice, fried chicken

All these “fry” are different. If you were to use the “fry” in fried rice to fry an egg, you’d get scrambled egg. Fried chicken is done by submerging it in oil, which you won’t do with fried egg or fried rice.

This post is made from the perspective of a Cantonese/Chinese speaker. We have different words for these different types of “fry” (煎, 炒, 炸 respectively)

(Turns out I did post it in the wrong sub and I didn’t realize, mb. Photon has once again screwed me over. Got mad for no reason.)

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SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fry means to cook with oil.

You have pan frying, deep frying, shallow frying, they all have additional descriptors, and you can usually infer the type from the product.

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- altec@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  There’s also “air fry”, which is just an aggressive convection oven lol
  
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  - SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Usually you need to spray or toss the stuff with a small amount of oil first, or stuff has natural oils. The term is usually for using “another oil” so I would say adding oil would be a must instead of its own oils myself.
    
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  - themeatbridge@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Usually, the food has it’s own oil, which is heated by the air around it. That’s how air-frying gets food crispy (but it doesn’t always work).
    
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- ccunning@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Maybe with hot oil?
  
  I don’t think confit would be considered frying.
  
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  - SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Slow frying would be an apt description for a confit duck breast.
    
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- BackOnMyBS@lemmy.autism.place ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  In your opinion, what’s the difference between pan frying and sautéing?
  
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  - ccunning@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I think they can be used synonymously; sautéing may imply stirring or shaking the ingredients in the pan similarly to stir-frying.
    
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  - intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    “Saute” is french for jump, or jumped. Sauteing is this action: media.tenor.com/…/cozinhando-cooking.gif
    
    It’s a method of frying in the sense that “stir frying” is a method of frying. Sauteing is frying in a pan, such that you’re turning the stuff over regularly by this tossing action.
    
    One of the outcomes of sauteing is that your stuff gets browned in a randomized, pleasantly-varied manner, since with each toss-and-catch some items flip over and others end up on the same side again.
    
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  - snooggums@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    I thought pan fried was with a lot of oil, like pan fried chicken, and sautéed was with a small amount of oil.
    
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  - SchmidtGenetics@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    English and French terms?
    
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EherVielleicht@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Image

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- DarkDarkHouse@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The true deep Fry meme
  
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- Alue42@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  https://i.imgur.com/qbib2Fc.png
  
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- snooggums@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Lars is so dreamy!
  
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- son_named_bort@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Shut up and take my upvote!
  
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  - EherVielleicht@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Image
    
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southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Wait until you run into the other usages of the word!

But frying food is just using direct heat and oil to cook, regardless of the depth of the oil. And, you’d be surprised how deep the oil is when some people fry eggs or rice. It isn’t too unusual for eggs to have enough oil that they more or less float on top of it, though that isn’t done for scrambled eggs.

The word fry is also used to mean baby fish, electronics being damaged by surges or excess voltage/amperage, and sometimes even to indicate that someone is inebriated via drugs other than alcohol. Plus there’s irregular uses of the word.

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- Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Don’t forget vocal fry.
  
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  - snooggums@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Even worse, trailing off vocal fryyyyy.y.y…y.y.y…
    
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- Speculater@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  And the most common use of the fish version is to describe a person or animal as a “small fry” when comparing them to another similar group.
  
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Donebrach@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
No, it isn’t.

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xeekei@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
You forgot the small fry that will be vader someday later.

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- corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  … which is a term based on the word for small fish.
  
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  - OlinOfTheHillPeople@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Image
    
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JeSuisUnHombre@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
“To fry” means to cook in oil or fat. A distinction we can make is “deep fry” like the chicken, and “pan fry” for the other 2. We don’t use woks as much here so really the only difference between fried rice and a fried egg is whether you stir it or flip it, but both are still cooked in a pan with oil.

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- snooggums@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Deep fried and pan fried chicken are not the same thing.
  
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intensely_human@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Frying is basically conveying heat to the food via oil

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TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
We have some oddly obtuse language for cooking in English.

We use the same phrase to describe foods that are high in temperature and contain lots of capsaicin (hot). We can use spicy, I suppose, but it gets a little odd describing foods with lots of spices that aren’t chili pepper. I generally say “well-spiced” and that gets the message across. We hardly have a way to distinguish “types of spicy” flavoring, such as that from chili, horseradish or peppercorns. I’ve seen some people start to say mala (loan word, 麻辣) for numbing spice, but that’s uncommon and new.

That’s just a few examples.

It’s gotten WAY better. Some recipes from, like, the colonial era, have instructions like “cook well in a cold oven until done”, so progress has been made, it’s still often imprecise and clumsy.

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- odium@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  
  I’m not sure sure why English has so many lexical gaps specifically around cooking
  
  Have you seen British “cooking”?
  
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  - BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Lol, have my upvote.
    
    Now baking… The Brits seem to get that.
    
    It’s all a result of history.
    
    Hell, Brits were still under austerity through the 60’s, and didn’t really recover financially from WWII until the 80’s.
    
    There are some great shows on Amazon done by historian Ruth Goodman and friends. Victorian Farm, Tudor Farm, etc. “War Farm” really shows how difficult the Brits had it until post-WWII. I’d watch them in sequence, because it’s great insight to the different periods.
    
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- Jayjader@jlai.lu ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  The English royal court became french speaking after the normands invaded, around 200 or 300 years ago. Nobles and royalty can afford lavish meals and dishes.
  
  They can also regularly afford meat, whilst it was the peasants who tended to the animals. Thus pork (from porc) vs pig, beef (from boeuf) vs cow, poultry (from poulet) vs chicken.
  
  It doesn’t explainall of the gaps, but it’s an important part of the explanation.
  
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  - teft@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Around 2 or 3 hundred years ago? William the Conqueror was 1066 homie.
    
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  - BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    And the well-heeled like keeping the distinction between them (French-speaking) and commoners (English-speaking).
    
    It’s interesting, because that’s part of why Shakespeare was such a big deal - not only writing and performing in English for the Common Man, but was skewering the well-heeled while also expanding English.
    
    Neat stuff.
    
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- almost1337@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  “cook well in a cold oven” at least makes sense in the context of the time. Ovens then were not supplied continuous heat - instead, they were fired up to a high heat, and then as it slowly cooled food was baked in them according to the current temperature. A cold or slow oven would be at the low end, and a hot or quick oven would be shortly after it was first heated.
  
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  - TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    This is a great point. It wasn’t like every home had a thermometer in the oven and therefore they had to use different terminology and identifiers for indicating oven temperature. Similarly, this is why American recipes measure in volume vs weight, most homes didn’t have scales, they had cups and spoons.
    
    These were also “precise enough” for the era. Perhaps these lexical gaps form as more styles of cuisine become more common and other cooking methods are used.
    
    I’ve noticed this with some Indian recipes. The instruction “to grind” specifically refers to using grinders, either mill or wet grinders, that just aren’t common in the US and that can create some ambiguity in how finely to chop or grind something.
    
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sxan@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
I think y’all are missing the point. OP points out that in their native language, Cantonese, they have different words for each of these kinds of cooking. In English, we apply modifiers, if anything; “deep fry”, “air fry”, but we don’t have different words for the different types of frying.

That’s all they’re saying. Eskimo words for snow. Oregonian words for rain. Georgian words for “you’re an idiot.” Apparently, in Cantonese, they have a lot of different words for different types of frying.

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EffortlessEffluvium@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Scrambled egg is still fried egg

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- cordlesslamp@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You can make scrambled egg without any oil or butter if you have a really good non-stick pan.
  
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arefx@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Sometimes after an aggressive cannabis consuming session I myself even become fried.

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BearOfaTime@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Nope, nothing ambiguous to me.

To fry means to cook in a fat. That is all.

That’s like saying “blue” is ambiguous simply because there’s also 13 different Pantone blues.

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pH3ra@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
English cooking vocabulary matches the sofistication of their cuisine

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kbal@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Never mind the small fry. The word "put" has enough different meanings to fry your CPU.

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deegeese@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Fry is the name for baby fish.

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MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
This is why you sometimes how to make it specific by saying “deep fried” or “pan fried”.

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- Samsy@lemmy.ml ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  Deep fried? Can I get deeper fried ones? How about the deepest fried ones?
  
  Or isn’t this like the cooked stages of steak?
  
  Non-native speaker, too.
  
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  - NoIWontPickAName@kbin.earth ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Deep fried means submerged in oil
    
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  - TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    A “deep fry” is distinguished by totally submerging the food in oil, as opposed to a shallow fry (less often said, but still used) where something is fried in hot oil, but not enough to totally cover it. I thiiiiink Mandarin makes a similar distinction with the use of “broad oil” versus “bottom oil”, but I don’t speak Mandarin and I’m taking that from the rough translations from Chinese cooking videos I watch.
    
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  - odium@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Deep frying is when there’s like a bowl of oil that you completely submerge the food in.
    
    Pan frying is when it’s just a light layer of oil.
    
    Stir fry is like pan fry, but you stir while frying.
    
    Check out variations section of the Wikipedia article: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frying
    
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  - MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Deep frying specificaly refers to frying by submerging in hot oil. Fried chicken is deep fried.
    
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