Risotto with a pinch of former-toaster

The other day in the supermarket I saw some instant risotto and I thought I’d try it. Unfortunately the risotto was pretty nasty. But the good news is that in the process of cooking what turned out to be some nasty risotto I stumbled upon something delightfully hilarious: the English translation of the directions for how to cook the risotto.

(mmm risotto)





I don’t want my readers to go blind so, in order to make it easier to read, I typed the directions bellow.










In Spanish
4.) Cocine a fuego suave sobre tostador por 20 minutos en olla tapada, revuelva de vez en cuando.

In English
“Cook on a low flame over a toaster for 20 minutes in covered pot, stir occasionally.”

There are a couple things about this sentence which are a little weird. However, while there aren’t any huge problems with the sentence’s grammar it is painfully obvious that whoever translated this has never set foot in a kitchen in the US. If you haven’t already honed in on what’s so weird about this translation –the title to this article should give you a clue- think about what the directions tell you to do with “a toaster”. Most likely someone looked up the Spanish word “tostador” and saw that in English the word is “toaster”.

So, what exactly is it that they are trying to tell you to do, when they say “Cook on a low flame over a toaster”?

(In Chile this is what is known as a “tostador”. If you look up “tostador” in a Spanish/English dictionary you will most likely find the word “toaster”.)





(In the US this is a “toaster”)


Now take your toaster and your risotto and try to “Cook (it) on a low flame over a toaster for 20 minutes in covered pot” Afterwards let me know how it went. Does your toaster have a warrantee? Does it cover melting your toaster all over your kitchen stove’s burner? Now I guess while you’re at it you’ll also have to see if your oven has a warrantee. On second thought, maybe you should just use a “tostador” like the one in the picture above. That would probably save you a lot of trouble.

If you’re at all like me if you had to confront a “tostador” you probably wouldn’t have the foggiest idea what it does. Well now that you know what it does here’s how you use it to toast some bread. Turn on the burner and adjust it to a low heat. Put the “tostador” on top of the burner and then keep an eye on your bread to make sure it doesn’t burn. You’ll probably have to constantly move the bread to keep it from burning. I call this cooking bread because it’s already been baked but you’re not really toasting it since you have to watch it and flip it around a bunch so that it doesn’t burn.

Ok. I know that I sometimes make mistakes when translating but I also know that before anyone tries to translate anything they need to know about cultural relativity and the differences between the two languages involved in whatever it is that you are translating.

In the meantime, be careful with you’re toaster. We wouldn’t want any crazed risotto recipes killing it now would we?