Talk:Genovese sauce

Lac Leman
Back in the days when you bought plane tickets by talking to someone, booking a flight to Cristoforo Colombo Airport was a delicate business. The agent could never find Genoa in their timetables, so you would have to use the Italian form and, unless you spelt it out slowly—G E N O V A—, you would hear the heave of a sigh of relief and in the twinkling of an eye find yourself booked onto a flight to Switzerland.

It seems apparent that Katharine Prescott Wormeley (or her publisher) made the inverse mistake in rendering Balzac’s
 * un ferra de Genève à vraie sauce génevoise
 * —Honoré de Balzac, Le cousin Pons (Paris: Larousse, 1919), vol. 1, p. 64

as
 * a ferra from Geneva with a true Genovese sauce
 * —Honoré de Balzac, Le cousin Pons, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley (Boston: Little, Brown, 1896), p. 100

Ferra must I think be a local, or archaic spelling of Féra, a fish found in Lake Geneva. A recipe for Féra ou truite à la genevoise, presumably a very similar dish to that described by Balzac, can be found here at the Agriculture Suisse website. Ian Spackman (talk)


 * your comment remains my favorite experience of collaborative scholarship on wikipedia. Cheers, Darouet (talk) 15:32, 31 March 2017 (UTC)

Sentence
This sentence should be improved: "Probably introduced to Naples from the northern Italian city of Genoa during the Renaissance, Genovese has since become associated with south Italy, and especially Campania." JacktheBrown (talk) 21:20, 24 April 2024 (UTC)