Sat, 26 Dec 2020
This tweet from Raffi Melkonian describes the appetizer plate at his house on Christmas. One item jumped out at me:
basterma (err, spicy beef prosciutto)
I wondered what that was like, and then I realized I do have some idea, because I recognized the word. Basterma is not an originally Armenian word, it's a Turkish loanword, I think canonically spelled pastırma. And from Turkish it made a long journey through Romanian and Yiddish to arrive in English as… pastrami…
For which “spicy beef prosciutto” isn't a bad description at all.
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