HZ: Wolfsbane, fleabane, bugbane, dogbane, leopard’s bane. All these plants are poisonous.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: Are these poisonous to those specific creatures?
HZ: It would be amazing to discover that a plant is poisonous only to leopards.
MARTIN AUSTWICK: “I fed it to my dog fine. Pet leopard, no.”
HZ: "I just need something to keep all these leopards out my flowerbeds, but I want the squirrels to be okay."
Allusionist 141 Food Quiz transcript
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Did you know that, Samin, that my nickname for Helen is 'Pizza’?
SAMIN NOSRAT: What? Because of all the Z's?
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Because I once told Helen about this atrocious pamphlet that I read at the train station when I was in college. It was for some kind of like - I think it was called student advantage. Do you remember the student advantage card? There was a pamphlet for student advantage card, and they were trying to say like how useful it could be. And they're like, "Everybody knows students need a few extra bucks, whether it's to do laundry, buy some books, or just grab a slice of 'za!" And I had never heard that before, 'za, apostrophe Z A, and I was looking and I was like, "Are they trying to say pizza? They're abbreviating pizza? This is how cool kids say pizza. What is this?" And I felt so offended that they were trying to market, at me, a student, using this kind of language. And I told Helen about this, and then immediately after that she was doing a Reddit AMA and, and I think I went in there and I asked her if she was really hiding the fact that Helen Zaltzman was short for Helen Pizzaltzman.
HZ: Yes, my family shortened it when they moved to an Anglophone country.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Yeah, so now I just call her 'Pizza' for short. Naturally.
HZ: I just think an abbreviation where you understand less what the thing was is not a good one. I suppose you are saving a whole syllable which is half of the effort.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: Plus you sound SO cool and SO with it, calling it just 'za.
HZ: And you must be very busy person not to be able to do the full 'pizza'.
HRISHIKESH HIRWAY: You're a student, you've got skateboarding to do.
Allusionist 104. Words Into Food - transcript
KATE YOUNG: I can travel through what these characters are eating and what they're doing, and travel to places, to countries I've never been, but also to fantastical worlds that I've never been to and versions of this world that feel very different to my own or are 200 years older than this or one hundred years in the future or any of those things
Read moreAllusionist 103. Food Into Words - transcript
FELICITY CLOAKE: It's very nerveracking because people spend money on ingredients, they may be cooking it for a special occasion, they try to impress a date or whatever - there's a lot that can go wrong with food and it's quite a weighty responsibility to be responsible someone's dinner or their birthday cake or whatever; it is a big deal.
RACHEL GREENHAUS: If it's a cookbook for family use, you're going to write it differently than if it's a cookbook for expert bakers and figuring out how to get the recipe that's right for that.
MIMI AYE: It's very different from cooking in real life, I think. Which is weird because you're trying to tell people how to cook the dish.
RACHEL GREENHAUS: It would be really easy to show you, but it's hard to describe in language.
MIMI AYE: Yeah, it's a complete nightmare.
Read more