blitz
blitz – verbo transitivo
Blitz the tomatoes, garlic and olive oil together until smooth.
When the vegetables are soft remove from the pan and blitz in a blender.
I blitzed some oats in the food processor to make oatmeal.
Mia madre non era una casalinga eccelsa – di solito trovava cose più interessanti da fare – ma quando il disordine raggiungeva livelli inaccettabili faceva quello che definiva un blitz, cioè una sessione intensa di pulizie per ristabilire l’ordine, almeno per un po’. Il termine potrebbe sembrare strano, per una donna che il Blitz (il bombardamento tedesco sull’Inghilterra durante la Seconda guerra mondiale) l’ha vissuto per davvero, ma non sono neanche sicura che si rendesse conto del collegamento… e se anche fosse, avrebbe riso dell’incongruenza.
Blitz ha diversi sensi, sia come verbo che come sostantivo, ma tutti si riferiscono a qualcosa di intenso e concentrato. Tutti questi significati, come quello a cui si riferiva mia madre, risalgono a parecchio tempo fa; il significato in campo culinario però, cioè ‘frullare, sminuzzare nel mixer’, sembra abbastanza recente – non ne ho trovato traccia nel corpus nazionale britannico dei primi anni 1990.
Origini del termine
Blitz viene dal tedesco Blitzkrieg, cioè guerra-lampo, e in inglese venne usato in origine per riferirsi ai bombardamenti aerei su Londra
blitz – verb T
Blitz the tomatoes, garlic and olive oil together until smooth.
When the vegetables are soft remove from the pan and blitz in a blender.
I blitzed some oats in the food processor to make oatmeal.
Housekeeping was not high on my mother’s list of priorities; she could generally find much better uses for her time. But when the disorder rose to what she regarded as unacceptable levels she would have what she called a blitz, meaning an intense bout of cleaning and tidying, and order would be restored for a while. This may seem an odd choice of terminology by a woman whose childhood and adolescence were scarred by the actual Blitz, but I’m not sure she ever even noticed the connection. If she had, she would just have laughed at the incongruity of it.
Blitz has a number of different meanings both as a verb and a noun, including specialist ones in American football, but all to do with intense and concentrated action. These senses, like the one my mother used, have been around for some time. The cookery sense, however, seems to be relatively new: I could find no examples for it in the British National Corpus, compiled in the early 1990s.
Origins
Blitz comes from the German Blitzkrieg, meaning lightning war, and was originally used in English to refer to the air attacks on London and other cities during World War 2.
