Unta Is for Sopping Up the Last Bites

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Cori calling from beautiful Buffalo, New York.

Well, I have a couple of bread-related words.

The first one I have is from my family, and we call it unta.

I’ve never had to spell it before, but it’s, I guess, U-N-T-A probably.

It can be a noun or a verb, or it refers to that piece of bread that you use to sop up, like, the last good bite of whatever it is you’re eating.

So if you see something, there’s still sauce left on the plate or something in a stew, you’re like, oh, that would be good unta.

Or if you see something that you’re going to do that to, you would grab your piece of bread and say, like, I’m going to unta, and then top it up.

Okay.

And tell us a little bit about your family background.

Is there any reason that it might have been floating around from generation to generation?

Well, I think so.

My family is Jewish.

They call it a mixed marriage because they’re half Ashkenazi and half Sephardic.

But my grandparents’ generation used to speak Ladino, and I’ve always wondered if it maybe came from that language.

But I unfortunately haven’t been able to find anything in my Ladino dictionary, and my grandparents have passed, so I can’t ask them.

There’s a possibility there.

So, unta, I might spell it U-N-T-A, and that’s very significant, and that is specific to the Ladino and Sephardic connection.

Because in Spanish, Portuguese, Galician, and Catalan, there’s a verb untar, U-N-T-A-R, that means to spread, to grease, to smear.

So, you might say unta el pan con grasa, which means to spread with fat.

And also in Italian, there’s a bread known as fetunta, which is sometimes called panunta or fegorota, which means a greasy slice, where the unta in the word, U-N-T-A, means grease.

And so my thinking is that might be related to the idea that it’s the piece of bread that you use to sop up the grease or the gravy or the fat that’s left on your plate.

Yes, that’s absolutely what we use it for.

Like if you roast a chicken or something, all the fat that falls through is really good unto us.

Yeah, so it might not even be from your Jewish heritage, your Sephardic or your Ladino heritage.

But, boy, that’s very suggestive, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Oh, my family’s going to be thrilled.

Have something to go on.

So what’s the other word?

From your friend, I guess?

I was going to say, I’m glad you got that answer from Grant because I was thinking, oh, it’s just because you put the grease unto the piece of bread.

That’s terrible, Martha.

I know.

I think that one actually drew blood over here.

All right.

Give us the other word here, Courtney.

So my other word is from my best friend, and her family uses schnuff, which is a noun that describes the last piece of bread or like the heel on a loaf of bread.

I had never heard this before, and I think it’s so cute.

That’s very good.

Are they of German heritage, perhaps?

They are, in fact, yes.

Because there is a dialectical word in German, which means snout or nose, which is schnuff.

And it’s related to the English word snuff or snuffle.

And so think of a big cow’s nose, or a cattle nose.

It looks kind of like the end of a big loaf of brown bread, doesn’t it?

I can’t say I’ve ever thought that, but now that you say it, I’m going to see that every time I see a cow.

But that’s literally what it comes from.

I’m 100% sure of this.

Yeah, and it makes total sense because some people refer to the end of a piece of, the end of a loaf of bread, like a baguette or something, as the nose.

Right.

In English.

Yeah, in English.

And there are other body parts.

Sometimes, you know, you talk about the heel of a loaf of bread.

Some people call it the bread butt.

Or the bum end.

Yeah, the bum end of bread.

And in Spanish, it’s sometimes called the codo, the elbow.

So the schnuff makes perfect sense.

Yeah, the schnuff, the nose of the bread, the snout of the bread.

That’s fantastic.

You just made two families very, very happy with your bread for college.

Thank you so much.

All right, Courtney, thank you so much for calling us.

We’re so delighted.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Will do.

Thank you so much.

All right, take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.