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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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on an other board i frequent, a thread turned to a food thread-(honest, it wasn't me, and i haven't contributed to it..)
one question that came up was caster sugar
what is caster sugar? Apparently a what we in US would call superfine sugar (2X not 10X) not "confectionares sugar" (which is graded 10X) but finer than normal granualated sugar.
my question is, Why caster?
the america heritage defines caster (varient castor) as
1. One that casts: a caster of nets. 2. also cas·tor ( kstr) A small wheel on a swivel, attached under a piece of furniture or other heavy object to make it easier to move. 3. also castor a. A small bottle, pot, or shaker for holding a condiment. b. A stand for a set of condiment containers.
is caster sugar so named because it is found in 3.a? or is there an other reason for the name?
(we can follow up on niblet corn, or stingless beans, or burpless cucumbers... or even revive the thread, and talk about musk melons..) not that i am starting a food thread or anything!
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Joined: Apr 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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My dictionary puts castor sugar with castor, small container with fine holes in the top for sprinkling the contents. So yes, that would be your 3a.
If by stingless beans you mean stringless beans, I've always understood them to be runner beans or long beans which are specially bred so that there is no "string" from the stalk down to the end.
Bingley
Bingley
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Muffineer--why on earth? If it were big enough to serve muffins from, surely it would be too cumbersome to pass around as you would a sugar bowl.
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Carpal Tunnel
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We pass around syrup dispensers with no problem, right? The muffineers and sugar casters are about the same size as a syrup dispenser. I don't really know what a syrup dispenser is called, Jackie, but since I do like the sound of muffineer, well, the syrup dispenser could be a syrupeer, not that a muffineer dispenses muffins...
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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And if you were eating the syrup on the QT, you'd probably use it syruptitiously.
- deyartibus
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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[deyartibus, pfranz! Really!]
Jackie (and Helen, too, but especially Jackie),
Purely by coincidence I came across another interesting use of 'caster' last night while reading Othello, this time from that old dog, Iago. In the opening scene to the play, Iago complains that Othello has nominated Cassio--a mathematician and man damn'd in a fair wife--to be his lieutenant. Iago grumbles to Roderigo that the only understanding Cassio has of war is purely as a theoretician. Iago himself believes he would have been a far better choice. Then as Iago continues his bitter complaints, Shakespeare has him work in a few phrases related to math (Cassio's being the mathematician and source of complaint):
[Of Cassio]"But he, sir, had the election: And I, of whom his [Othello's] eyes had seen the proof at Rhodes, at Cyprus and on other grounds Christian and heathen, must be be-lee'd and calm'd by debtor and creditor; this counter-caster, He [Cassio] must his lieutnant be...(emphasis mine)"
This "counter-caster," I learn from the footnotes, is 'one who casts up counters, an old method of accountancy.' I have no idea what it was to cast up counters--wonder whether it was anything like ancient calculus.
Anyway. There is the sugar caster--and here in 'Othello' is the counter-caster.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Deyartibus--[straight over my head e]
Once again, I can read every word of Shakespeare's and not understand anything...but I can imagine that perhaps a counter was a certain amount of money, and that maybe a counter-caster was a person who cast them down onto a surface to add them up.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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No, no, Jackie, the counters were the next step up the accountancy food chain from tally sticks. They weren't money, they were literally "counters", the same as you would use in Snakes and Ladders or Ludo or any other board game. They were substitutes for various quantities of money. In a time when people, by and large, were slightly more illiterate and innumerate than most are now, the counters were a way of keeping track of who owed what to whom. Not sure precisely how the counters were used, but I presume that the counters pertaining to a particular individual would be kept in a box or on a notched board so that you could, at a glance, tell how much someone owed or was owed.
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Carpal Tunnel
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So, Cap, is there a relationship between those counters and the stones used (i.e., 'calculus') from ancient times as I initially suspected up there a few posts back?
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Carpal Tunnel
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They were substitutes for various quantities of money. Erm, well, yes, that's rather what I meant; I should have used represented instead of was: perhaps a counter was a certain amount of money. I imagine that counters of certain markings, size, or shape could have represented, say, 5, 10, or 20 talents (pounds, or whatever), like poker chips. A notched board--interesting.
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