The creation of a new verb – To Ottoleng.

We all have our favorite cookbooks and Tim Hayward in the Financial Times looks at how much our choices reflect current entertaining trends. Perhaps this particularly resonated with me since I lived in the UK for most of the period he covers but I think it should ring true with many EYB members.  How often have we gone to a friend’s for dinner (do we still call them dinner parties or is that an out-dated description?) and been served a meal we could easily have chosen ourselves from our own cookbooks?

I love Tim’s creation of a new verb to reflect Ottolenghi’s current ubiquity on the dinner table – “Shall we Ottoleng tonight? I expect so, because it needs to become its own verb. I Ottoleng; thou Ottolengest; he Ottolengs. Oh yes … everybody’s Ottolenging now and we love it.”