Kitchen technique

The thirty-second entry is a massa quebrada, broken pastry word for word, and the English name for it keeps a sense of « short » that survives nowhere else. « Shortcrust pastry » has nothing to do with length. In cookery « short » is an old adjective meaning friable, crumbling, ready to give way under a finger, and it is far older than any explanation of why fat makes flour behave that way. The same sense holds the little family around it together: « shortbread » is named for its texture and not its size, « shortening » is the fat that produces that texture, and a cook who calls a dough « too short » means it will fall apart, not that there is too little of it. So the two languages describe one pastry from the two ends of a single event: quebrada names the breaking, « short » names the state that makes breaking easy. One thing follows for a reader going outwards: « short pastry » and « shortcrust pastry » are the same article, and « a nice short crust » is praise and not a complaint.