Month: September 2020
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Salt-cellar
Wine is kept in a wine-cellar and salt in a salt-cellar, the latter being an ornamented container from which the grains are scooped with a small spoon. These two cellars, however, are related only by accident, not etymology. About one thousand years ago, French developed the word saliere from the Latin word sal, meaning salt,…
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Salmon
Salmon acquired their name in the fourteenth century from the French name for the fish, samoun. The French, in turn, derived their word from what the ancient Romans named them, salmo, which is probably based on the Latin word salire, meaning to jump. The fish earned their name from their ability to jump up to…
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Salmi
A salmi is a ragout made by partially roasting game such as pheasant or partridge, cooking it in a saucepan with mushrooms, and then serving it in a sauce made from its juices and wine. It has long been assumed that salmi is simply an abbreviation of the dish named salmagundi. However, as a ragout,…
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Salmagundi
To the French, a salmigondis is an elaborate dish made by mincing, shredding, and slicing a variety of meats, vegetables, and pickles and then arranging them in concentric circles of contrasting colours on a large, flat plate. To the English, a salmagundi, which derives from the French salmigondis, is often an ad hoc hodgepodge of…
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Salep
Like tapioca, salep is a starch derived from a root and used as a thickener for soups and puddings. Salep derives its name from the Arabic tha leb, a shortened form of an Arabic phrase that means fox’s testicles. The resemblance of the salep’s tubers to canine testes must indeed be striking considering that the…
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Salami
Deriving ultimately from sal, a Latin word meaning salt, the word salami was borrowed from Italian in 1852 when it was used in an English translation of a German travelogue about a visit to Iceland. Exactly one hundred years later, salami developed a political life when, in 1952, it became part of the phrase salami…
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Sack
Although the word sack ceased to be used in the eighteenth century as the name of a Spanish wine, its frequent use by Shakespeare—who made the wine the favourite beverage of his greatest comic character, Sir John Falstaff—has prevented the word from being entirely forgotten. (The same cannot be said for the now utterly defunct…
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Runcible spoon
In 1871, Edward Lear, a Victorian artist and author, wrote a book of nonsense verse that included this passage from a poem called “The Owl and the Pussy-Cat”: “They dined on mince, and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon.” Over the next twenty years, other runcible items appeared in Lear’s poetry,…
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Rum
Before it was known as rum, the alcoholic spirit made from sugar cane was called kill-devil, so named because the crude rum made by English colonists in the Caribbean was, according to one seventeenth-century author, a “hot, hellish, and terrible liquor.” Kill-devil, which dates back to at least 1639, was joined a few years later…
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Rue (Ruta graveolens)
Rue also known as Herb of Grace. Although the culinary use of this bitter herb is banned in France because of the unfounded belief that it can induce abortions, rue is employed in eastern Europe to flavour cream cheeses and marinades. The herb’s name is not related to the rue that means to be sorrowful,…