The Universe of Disco


Sat, 26 Dec 2020

Basterma

Screenshot of a tweet.
It says “Keys for me: kibbe, cheese pie, spinach pie, stuff grape
leaves (no meat), olives, cheeses, soujuk (spicy lamb sausage),
basterma (err, spicy beed prosciutto), hummous, baba g., taramasalata,
immam bayadi”

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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