In reply to:

. When one seeks recipes which are as authentic as possible to consult (read, not use), one must often work with those which are written in English by people who are obviously ESL speakers.

One version of this particular recipe, which I found on-line, suggested that whole cumin seeds be reserved. Part way through the recipe, the following instruction appears: "Heat the ghee in a heavy-bottomed pan till hot and splutter the cumin seeds."

Splutter?

While I'm sure you're right about the ESOL nature of some of the recipe writers you've come across, I must respectfully suggest that the above example gives no proof of such. It was very evocative and instantly understandable to me as a speaker of NZ English. Indeed, the implied suggestion that using the word tagged the writer as an ESOL speaker made me splutter. Indian English is very distinctive, but I don't see anything in the quote that even idenifies it as Indian English. Just a delightfully concise and illustrative word picture. If it says anything about the writer's English, it might perhaps be that, unlike the US, India actually is part of The Commonwealth. Khuda hafiz.



noho ora mai
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