It's ice-cream time again!
Hello and welcome to Radio Prague's ABC of Czech series in which this season we explore vocabulary related to Czech food and cuisine.
In the olden days, ice-cream was sold by vendors in the streets and when such an iceman - zmrzlinář arrived at your street with his van, it was a big feast for every child. Today, ice-cream in the Czech Republic is most often sold at confectioneries - cukrárna. In the communist days, the only type of ice-cream you could get in a cone was whipped ice-cream točená zmrzlina v kornoutku. The scooped variety - kopečková zmrzlina - reappeared only recently.
If you want to give yourself a real treat, then the right thing is zmrzlinový pohár se šlehačkou, literally an "ice cream cup with whipped cream" - a sundae.
Another popular variety is ice-cream on a stick. The most common Czech word for that is nanuk also the word for an iced lolly. Originally it was a brand name inspired by the 1922 US-French film "Nanook of the North" but over time it has become a generic term. As was the case with another brand name - eskymo. It's possible that it was inspired by the US brand name Eskimo Pie. An idiomatic expression, still used mainly by the older generation is cuc na kládě v čokoládě. Please, don't ask me to translate that one...
And we leave you with that for this week - the Czech word zmrzlina is enough of a tongue-twister on its own, especially if you try to pronounce it with your mouth full of cold ice-cream. So till next time, dobrou chuť, bon appetit!
