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Friday, November 26, 2010

Vocabulary for the Triply Stuffed

Probably the last concept some of you would want to think about the morning after Thanksgiving, yet a timely new word nonetheless:
cherpumple (chur-PUM-pul) — noun: a pastry desert consisting of a layer of cherry pie, a layer of pumpkin pie and an a layer of apple pie.
Etymology not necessary, or so I’d like to think. It goes without saying that, at least verbally and seasonally, cherpumple is the dessert equivalent of turducken, that other Greek mythology monster of a dish that mashes three types of poultry into a single form. No, the apple component isn’t enclosed by the pumpkin component and the pumpkin not by the cherry, but you have to admit that the comparison still works. I learned about this fascinating, horrifying item on Fritinancy, a great blog for all things verbal, on which the item was actually described as being even more fattening: cherry layer inside white cake, apple layer inside yellow cake, pumpkin layer inside spice cake, with all three stories wrapped in cream cheese frosting.

There’s even a picture, courtesy of the blog This Is Why You’re Fat:


Both the recipe and the name seemed to have been invented by Charles Phoenix, a SoCal personality who I first learned about on Tharpe-Tharpe’s blog from his guided tours of downtown Los Angeles. He even released a video explaining the creation of this Frankencake, which he boasted to the Wall Street Journal “puts the kitsch in kitchen.”


As if that weren’t enough to process after your yearly late-November gorging, I’ll give you one more: Fritinancy revealed to me the existence of what is essentially turducken + 1, an even more intimidating entity known as turbaconducken.

Previous strange and wonderful words:
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