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The Thesaurus CD

This thesaurus is intended for students worldwide, whose interest lies in the art of gastronomy, especially patisserie.

Definition
“ The word thesaurus means a listing of words with similar, related, or opposite meanings For example, a book of jargon for a specialized field or more technically a list of subject headings and cross-references used in the filing and retrieval of documents, film, sound recordings, machine-readable media, etc. Although including synonyms and antonyms, entries in a thesaurus should not be taken as a list of them. The entries are also designed for drawing distinctions between similar words and assisting in choosing exactly the right word. Nor does a thesaurus entry define words. That work is left to the dictionary.”

It presents approximately 700 of the most frequently used words in professional patisserie in several languages and came to life from the joint efforts of the ALFMED Language School and the Olivier Bajard International School of Patisserie.

This document was made to help the students of the Olivier Bajard International School in their learning of the French language applied to French Patisserie.

Included in this thesaurus are translations from French into Spanish, English and Italian as well as in German and Japanese.

Each word in this thesaurus is presented as simply as possible while reflecting the spirit of its French origin in order to facilitate the understanding of its use within a French environment. This is why some translations initially appear to defy logic and be unnecessarily longwinded.

An analytical example of this is included below.

When making French meringue, we start with egg whites and sugar. An English instruction would say to whisk the egg whites until foamy, add the sugar and continue to whisk until the meringue tightens and forms stiff peaks. A French instruction may say to 'monter' the egg whites, 'ajouter' the sugar and to continue to 'monter' until 'serre'. The words we should pay attention to are the ingredients and adjectives that serve as indicators, both of which are easily translated, and the verbs. More attention must be paid when studying the verbs as, in this case, the term ‘monter’ does not mean 'to whisk' but 'to rise'. In the case of French meringue, we would 'raise' the volume of the egg whites by whisking but we cannot always assume monter to mean 'to whisk' because if we were to 'monter' a leavened dough, what we would have to do would be vastly different!

This excel document is composed of several sheets:

• « Index » that represents all the thematic parts of the Thesaurus
• « Locaux et Mobilier » Premises and furniture that counts almost 30 words (in French, Spanish, English and Italian) and presents a column with French synonyms too
• « Ustensiles Uniformes » Kitchen utensils and uniforms: this sheet is composed of almost 200 words in French, Spanish, English, Italian, German and some words are translated in Japanese too. In order to make this thesaurus as understanding as possible, pictures are included to describe each word
• « Sécurité Hygiène » Safety and Hygiene whose norms, risks and accessories were translated from French to Spanish and Italian
• «Aliments » Food almost 120 words from French to Spanish, English, Italian, German and Japanese
• « Recettes » Receipts words from French, Spanish, English and Italian. This sheet counts almost 100 words and is divided into several parts:
  
  • Fruit entremets
  • Chocolate entremets
  • Classical and other specialities
  • Frozen entremets Spring-Summer 2007
• « Fabrication » Making
  
  • Verbs that can be used in cooking
  • The Maryse
  • Adjectives
  • Expressing quantities

This thesaurus can be used in different ways:

♦ As a study tool: by using the lists as vocabulary lists from which to learn appropriate terminology by using the database to develop a written and visual association with a term.

♦ As a translator: upon encountering a foreign word one can find a translation by: searching the thematically sorted vocabulary list utilising the 'find' function on the computer (ctrl+f)

This work was realised by Irene Perianez Flores (Malaga University Spain) and Oriella Canale (Universita di Macerata Italy).


Irene assisted during her time on the 'Leonardo da Vinci' European Program run by Malaga University and was responsible for structuring the thesaurus, providing illustrations and the Spanish, Japanese and German translations.

Oriella was responsible for the translations from French into Italian and English.

This work could not have been achieved without the advice of Pascale and Olivier Bajard MOF for the technical part, for their assistance in the use of professional jargon and ALFMED assistance for the linguistic part. We would like to thank them for their help.