"Sacha" wrote in

I pronounced it the 'English' way until I acquired the mother in
law! I
now have the reverse problem in that when I pronounce it Italian
fashion in
shops, or here in the nursery, English people look at me as if I'm
quite
mad. I need reverse brainwashing, or something!
I sometimes find myself in the interesting but confusing position of
pronouncing something the way mil did only for my brother's Italian
wife to
tell me that mil had lived in England too long and one does NOT
pronounce
whatever-it-is that way. I don't think it really matters very much
at all
but oregano is such an Italian-food-associated herb that it's the
one that
springs most easily to mind in terms of pronunciation. The thing I
find
most disconcerting about American pronunciation is the use of 'erbs'
for
'herbs'!

It seems that you might be an appropriate person to ask..... As you'd
know, there is a huge Italian population here in Oz. Since they
(mostly) migrated from Italy about 50 or 60 years ago, the tradition
of Italian cooking remains strong (I've had Italo-Australians tell me
that on return trips to Italy, the food was ghastly in comparison to
the Italian meals they can get in restaurants or homes here).

There are a number of suburban Italian gardens in a small city near me
that I always detour past in order to see what they are up to when
roughly going in certain directions. The productivity and range of
food plants they can produce on a quarter acre block always astounds
and amazes me - they grow food on every available square inch and
sometimes even on the road verges.

One elderly Italian lady has such a garden near where my daughter
lives. Her English is not very good, but I have conversations with
her occasionally. In one of these conversations, I was trying to ask
her about why she grew so much Oregano (2 rows that stretched for
about 30 ft right behind her front fence). She said that she waited
till they had flowered and then did something culinary with the seed?
or the flower heads?, but I couldn't figure out what it was she said
that she did. I've been meaning to get my chef neighbour who may
know, or if she doesn't, to ask her Nonna what it could be. Do you
have any idea?