Month: September 2020
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Grocery
Whereas the word spice is related to the words specialty and specific (because spices were sold by merchants who specialized in specific items), the word grocery is related to gross. Many centuries ago, the Late Latin word grossus, meaning large or bulky, gave rise to the Medieval Latin grossarius, the job name of someone who…
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Groaning
In the mid sixteenth century, the period extending from when a woman took to her bed to give birth to when she was strong enough to get back on her feet was called her groaning, a blunt reference to her labour pains. During this time, the food provided for the woman’s attendants and visitors was…
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Grill
Unlike English, which no longer assigns a gender to its nouns, Latin classifies all its nouns as masculine, feminine, or neuter. Some Latin nouns, however, once had two spellings, each representing a different gender, as was the case with the Vulgar Latin craticula and craticulum. These two words meant the same thing (little wicker screen)…
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Griddle
Although we now use griddles and gridirons only to cook food, they were once used as instruments of torture, that is, as large, metal grates that inquisitors would set a person on and set a fire under. This may have been the original meaning of griddle and gridiron, since the words are used as names…
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Grenade
In the endless pantheon of strange British dishes, one of the strangest is the grenade, an eighteenth-century dish made by surrounding six pigeons and a ragout with slices of veal and bacon, and then cooking the whole thing not on top of a fire, but rather between two fires. The name of this meaty dish…
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Graze
Around ten at night, as I sidle stealthily toward the fridge, my wife will often call out, “Mark, no grazing!” She means, of course, that I shouldn’t snack between meals, a North American habit that came to be known as grazing in the late 1970s. The word is apt because it implies the oblivious munching…
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Gravy
When gravy first appeared in English at the end of the fourteenth century it referred to a fancy sauce for white meat made from broth, almond milk, wine, and spices; it was not until the end of the sixteenth century that it came to mean a sauce made from meat juices. The source of this…
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Grapefruit
The grapefruit acquired its name in the early nineteenth century because its fruit grows in clusters like grapes; the word grape, in fact, once meant cluster. The grapefruit is a citrus fruit that is characterized by its large size and yellow skin. Its origins can be traced back to China and the East Indies, and…
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Grape
Long ago, grapes were known in England only as wineberries, a name that suggests that the clusters were not so much plucked and eaten as stomped on and fermented. At the end of the thirteenth century a new name, grape, was borrowed from the French, who had long used the word to refer not to…
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Granola
In the late nineteenth century, W. K. Kellogg invented a cereal he called Granola, made of wheat, oats, and cornmeal. Kellogg’s inspiration for the name was the word granulated, the idea being that the cereal is made by cooking its ingredients until they become clumped, or granulated. Granita, the name of an Italian sorbet, likewise…