Month: September 2020

This Norwegian name for an open-sandwich might be translated as smearbread since the Norwegian smor, meaning butter, derives from the same source as the English smear. The word is first recorded in English in 1933.  

Launching, sowcing, searcing, and smooring are probably not actions you knowingly performed as you prepared for your last dinner party, but they’re all culinary terms mentioned in A New Booke ofCookerie, published in London in 1615. Launch meant to slice, and is identical with the nautical launch: when a ship is launched, it slices into…

The sour cream often served with borscht is called smetana, a word that derives from the Russian smetat, meaning to sweep together. The name alludes to cream’s tendency, as it sours, to coagulate into lumps and ripples, almost as if the curds had been swept or raked onto the surface. A distant relative of smetana…

A smell-feast is a what a freeloader was called centuries ago. Someone who snuck into the wedding party or funeral of a stranger in order to nibble the cold cuts, all the while pretending to congratulate the groom or console the widow, was a smell-feast. In an early eighteenth-century play called The Invader of His…

For some reason, perhaps not too hard to guess, English has far more words to describe noisy gluttonous eating than dainty well-mannered eating. Of these dozen or so gluttonous words, slurp, first recorded in the mid seventeenth century, is the best known and the least offensive; you can safely chide your spouse for slurping his…

First recorded in the late nineteenth century, slumgullion refers generally to the innards of a gutted fish and more specifically to the watery crud, mixed with oil and blood, that drains from whale blubber as it is rendered. In what now appears, with the benefit of hindsight, to be a dubious marketing strategy, slumgullion was…

There is a strange scene in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 1 where Hal, the future King Henry V, teases a dimwirted bartender by insisting on talking with him even as the man is being beckoned by an impatient customer in another room; Hal’s joke, such as it is, is to see how many times he…