Brindis comes from ich bring dir’s, and Spanish soldiers brought it home from a war in Germany
Tapas Brindisa on Broadwick Street holds a 4.4 from seventeen hundred and five people, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and it does Spanish food seriously.
And the word in the name is not Spanish.
Brindis
In Spanish, a brindis is a toast, and brindar is to raise a glass to somebody.
And the word is German.
It comes from ich bring dir’s – I bring it to you – which is what a German drinker said as he raised his cup.
Spanish soldiers heard it, in Germany, during the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – and they brought it home, and it entered Spanish as a single word, and it has been there ever since.
What soldiers bring back
Which is a genuine category and which nobody has properly written up.
Armies are the great transmitters of vocabulary, and of food, and of drink – because they take enormous numbers of young men, move them a very long way, keep them somewhere strange for years, and then send them home.
Britain took the word booze in one direction and char for tea from India and blighty from Urdu. The First World War brought back napoo from il n’y a plus, and cushy, and a great deal else.
And the food went both ways. Curry came home with the army. So did the Turkish coffee that reached Vienna, and the croissant that supposedly followed it – though we should say, having checked, that the croissant story is almost certainly nonsense and appears in no source before the nineteenth century.
Six hundred and four articles, and it has never once varied. The tellable version wins.
The toast, examined
We have now assessed every drinking salutation in five postcodes and it is time to publish.
First: arriba, abajo, al centro, adentro. Up, down, to the centre, and in. It is not a sentiment at all – it is a set of physical instructions, and it is the only toast in any language that is genuinely useful.
Second: brindis. I bring it to you. German, in Spanish, from a war.
Third: the Georgian supra, which has an appointed toastmaster and a fixed sequence and takes four hours.
Last: cheers. Which is a shrug with a glass in it, and which is what the English say when they cannot think of anything.
The food
Serious. Brindisa are importers first and restaurateurs second, which is the correct order, and the ham and the cheese and the tinned fish are the point.
Verdict
Excellent. Order the tinned fish. It is not a joke and it is the best thing on the menu.
Why the tin is good
Because in Spain and Portugal, the tin is not the cheap option. It is frequently the expensive one.
A tin of good cockles, or razor clams, or sardines packed in the year they were caught, can cost more than fresh – and it is treated as a delicacy, sold in specialist shops, and given as a gift.
The best of it is aged. Sardines improve in the tin for years, turning over in the oil, and a vintage tin is a genuine thing that people seek out.
Britain, which invented the tin can, uses it for beans, and has spent a hundred and fifty years regarding tinned fish as what you eat when there is nothing else.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The specific knowledge throughout suggests someone’s been keeping a detailed diary of their descent into understanding how things actually work.