The Etymology of Perkedel

I was browsing yesterday in Tap Phong (a wonderful shop on Spadina Avenue) and saw a kind of thermos flask called a Qingcheng Coffee Fot [sic]. This reminded me of a theory I have concerning the etymology of perkedel.

A perkedel is defined in my 1963 Malay-English dictionary as "minced meat." But most Singaporeans would think of a perkedel as a fried patty made not just of minced meat but also potato and onions. I've heard it referred to as a "cutlet" (somewhat quaintly, to my ear). If you order a "Royal Flush" from the very popular nasi lemak stall at Adam Road hawker centre, you'll get a perkedel along with your otak-otak and your deep-fried chicken wing. When I was a schoolgirl I used always to get a perkedel along with my mee siam in the school canteen. It was what I dreamed of through the morning, and it got me through Chinese and math. Bagus or what!

But I digress. Last week we were visiting friends in Copenhagen, and the conversation turned to food (naturally). I asked my hosts what they thought the national dish of Denmark was. They made various suggestions, among these liver paste with fried mushrooms and bacon (and, you know, it's quite nice!), but everyone agreed that frikadeller was the thing. Frikadeller are (according to Wikipedia), "flat, pan-fried dumplings of minced meat." I've never eaten any, but they look in pictures very like perkedel.

Of course, it's most likely that the word would have entered Malay through Dutch, and indeed the Dutch do have something called a frikandel, defined unappetizingly by Wikipedia as a "long, skinless, dark-coloured sausage that is eaten warm." 

I don't know anything about the phonemic structure of Malay, but it seems to me that originally at least it must have lacked an /f/ phoneme. The F section in my dictionary is only a page and a half long, and about ninety percent of those words are listed as being of Arabic or Persian origin. Many other loanwords that began in the original languages with /f/ or /v/ would have been pronounced with an initial /p/ (though the only example I can find at the moment is panili for vanilla).

Add to this the commonplace metathesis of /r/ and the vowel, and frikadel becomes perkedel. It's a little strange to me that our perkedel resemble Danish frikadeller more closely than the Dutch frikandellen (though, given the description of the latter quoted above, perhaps this is something we can be thankful for); and the monumental Singlish Dictionary by Jack Lee doesn't mention an etymology for perkedel (which he spells begedel), but I am quite sure it is the same word!

I'm probably not the first to think of this (indeed, my hubby is standing on the stairs claiming that he was), but no matter, it was a good excuse to think about eating.