>>>We first fry (schmalzen. no idea how to translate, turn around in the hot lard?) it a bit in pork or goose lard.
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>>Fascinating. "Schmalz" is the Yiddish word for chicken fat. (Of course, lard, which, in English, generally refers only to pork fat, is a non-starter for Jewish cooking.)
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>It would be interesting to track the semantic changes of words when they migrate to neighboring languages. Schmalz, of course, lost the pork in this migration from german, but still kept its greasy nature :). Almost every time I find an interesting yiddish word, it's something I already knew - from german or generally slavic languages - but with a slightly changed meaning. Like Schmuck, which IIRC means jewelry in german, became... something unrelated, a nincompoop or something.
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And Schmuckler (with various spellings) is a not-uncommon Jewish surname.

Tamar