What Is Your Country’s National Dish?

01Consider a time when you sat down to share a dish with family or friends.

02What was the dish?

03Is the dish special in your country or area?

04In today's lesson, we will explore how to talk about foods.

05We will learn about the structures and words commonly used to talk about popular dishes.

06Let's start with a comparison between cooking and grammar.

07Just as we have common ingredients when we cook, oil, salt, vegetables, meats, and so on, we also have common ingredients for sentences about food.

08These language ingredients include nouns, adjectives, and special kinds of phrases.

09Just as cooking is about using food ingredients in special ways, food discussions are about using language ingredients in special ways.

10Our first ingredient is the noun.

11Nouns give us the name of a dish or any food prepared in a special way.

12Nouns also give us names for all the spices and other materials that go into the dish.

13But nouns alone cannot make a rich, complete sentence.

14We need something else to add color, smells, and taste.

15That is how we arrive at adjectives.

16Adjectives are central to discussions about food.

17When we talk about any kind of dish, we describe it in terms of taste, color, smell, temperature, and so on.

18In other words, adjectives are like spices that bring flavor to plain nouns.

19There are many adjectives we use to describe dishes, but some common ones include rich, spicy, sweet, and fresh.

20So, we have nouns and adjectives, but we have one missing element.

21We need to express how ingredients go together to make up a dish.

22One phrasal verb is especially useful in this regard.

23Consist of.

24Consist of means to be formed or made of exact things.

25So, you might say that pizza consists of flour, cheese, sauce, and vegetables.

26Or you might say that kebab consists of meat and spices.

27There are, of course, many other phrasal verbs you can use to describe the act of cooking.

28We have explored some of them in previous Everyday Grammar Lessons.

29So far, we have covered a lot of territory.

30Nouns, adjectives, and one phrasal verb.

31How might we use these ingredients?

32Here is one possible example for how to describe any national dish.

33Noun is the national dish of noun.

34It is a adjective, dish, that phrasal verb, noun, noun, and noun.

35How might we fill in the noun, adjective, and phrasal verb spots?

36Let's use a traditionally popular dish in the United States as our example.

37Apple pie.

38You may have heard the expression, as American as apple pie.

39So, what could we say about apple pie if we used our example structure?

40Here is one possibility.

41Apple pie is the national dish of the United States.

42It is a sweet dish that consists of apples, sugar, flour, and spices.

43Of course, one could go on to add more details.

44You could say that apple pie also often includes a small amount of lemon juice.

45Or that apple pie is often served with ice cream on top.

46You have learned about one possible way to describe a popular American dish.

47Now we would like to hear from you.

48Can you write to us about a traditional dish in your country?

49Try to use the sentence structures that you have learned about, but feel free to include more details.

50Send us your piece of writing in an email to learningenglish at voanews.com.

51In a future lesson, we will provide feedback on the writing that we receive.

52I'm John Russell.

53I'm John Russell.

54I'm John Russell.

55I'm John Russell.