Month: September 2020

Pennyroyal was once a folk-name for marjoram, much like spuds is still a folkname for potatoes. Far from having anything to do with pennies, the herb’s name essentially means royal flea-killer. Its original Latin name was pulegium, meaning flea-bane, because its minty leaves were used to repel the hopping pests. Pulegium evolved into the French…

The aboriginal people of North America made pemmican by drying strips of buffalo meat or venison, pounding them with some berries into a powder, mixing the powder with melted fat, and then storing the resulting lump in a little bag made from the skin of the animal. Although early pioneers did not like the taste…

The pecan is native to North America and thus its name derives from a Proto-Algonquian source, one that evolved into the Cree, pakan, the Ojibwa pagan, and the Abenaki pagann. From these various but similar names, British settlers derived their name for the nut, pecan, as did the French, who call it pacane, and the…

To the ancient Romans, a pear was a pirum, a name that Old English adopted as peru in the eleventh century (about six hundred years later, Peru was also introduced to English as the name of a South American country, a name that derives not from Latin but from the Guarani word piru, meaning water).…

Originating in Brazil and subsequently introduced to the rest of the world, the peanut has been known in English by a variety on names. First it was called pinda, a word dating back to the late seventtnth century and deriving from the Congolese mpinda, the name of an African legume resmbling the peanut Next, beginning…

Four hundred years ago, if you had a single pea in your hand, you would have called it a pease. That old form of the word can still be heard in a children’s rhyme: “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, pease porridge in the pot, nine days old.” The reason that pease used to be…

Via Yiddish, pastrami derives from the Romanian pastra, meaning to preserve, an apt name considering the meat is prepared for the marketplace by soaking beef in brine for several weeks, smoking it over sawdust for half a day and finally steaming it for several hours. The word was introduced to English in the mid 1930s…

The ancient Romans either had bad-tasting carrots or good-tasting parsnips because their name for the two vegetables was the same: pastinaca. This name derived from an older Latin word, pastinum, the name of a two-pronged garden fork that in turn derived from pastinare, meaning to dig. The similarity between the prongs of the garden fork…

The ancient Greeks called parsley selinon, a word that became—via Latin, Italian, and then French—the English word celery. This Greek name for the parsley plant may have shifted to the celery plant because—in dim light, from a great distance—the two plants are not dissimilar; scientists, at least, have seen fit to place both celery and…