Month: September 2020
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Herring
The North Atlantic fish known as the herring, long an important source of food in Britain, has had its current name for over thirteen hundred years. The name may have developed from the Old English word here, meaning army or multitude, in reference to the huge schools of herring that swim to the coast of…
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Hare
Although they both have long ears and are prepared for the table in a similar manner, hares and rabbits are not considered by zoologists to be the same animal: hares are larger, for example, and do not live in burrows. Nonetheless, their overall resemblance has long caused people to confuse them, resulting in frequent misapplication…
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Hamburger
The word hamburger dates back to 1834 where it appeared on a menu from Delmonico’s restaurant in New York. At that time, and even into the twentieth century, hamburgers were better known as hamburger steak, a kind of beefsteak ground in the style of butchers from Hamburg, a city in Germany. The name of this…
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Ham
Back in the sixteenth century, when fawning courtiers complimented Queen Elizabeth for her hams, they were not praising her culinary skills, but rather her limber legs that allowed her to dance more featly and jump more lightly than any other woman in her court. One Renaissance painter even depicted the dancing Queen in the midst…
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Halibut
The scientific name for the halibut is hippoglossus, Greek for horse tongue, so called because of its wide, flat shape. In contrast, its more common name, halibut, derives not from its shape but from when the fish was usually eaten—on Church holidays, or, as they were originally called, on holy days. The halibut, therefore, is…
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Haggis
The Old French name for the magpie was agace, pronounced agg-ass and deriving from a much older word meaning pointed, as is the bird’s beak. As Rossini’s opera The Thieving Magpie attests, this noisy and quarrelsome bird is infamous for its larceny, filling its nest with stolen scraps of cloth and bits of shiny metal.…
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Haddock
The name of this fish, once commonly eaten for breakfast in Britain, is first recorded in English in the early fourteenth century. Although its origin is uncertain, it may have derived from the French word for the same species of fish, hadot. This word in turn may have developed from the French word adouber, meaning…
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Gyro
A gyro is a sandwich made by roasting lamb, slicing it, and rolling it into a pita. The sandwich originated several decades ago at Greek lunch counters in the United States, and therefore derives its name, pronounced yheero, from Greek: guros, meaning a spiral or a turn, was anglicized as gyro and applied to the…
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Grub
The word grub has been used as a colloquial synonym tor food since the mid seventeenth century, but long before that, dating back to the fourteenth century, it was used as a verb meaning to dig. This original dig sense of the word probably inspired its later food sense: root vegetables, such as potatoes or…
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Grog
Made by mixing hard liquor with water, grog owes its name to Edward Vernon, a British admiral whose men nicknamed him Old Grog because he always wore a grogram coat (grogram is a coarse fabric, its name deriving from the French gros grain, meaning coarse grain). In 1740, Old Grog instituted the policy of adding…