For a very brief period in the early eighteenth century, the word abesse was used as a name for any thin sheet of rolled-out pastry. The English word developed from the French name for thin pastry, abaisse, which in turn derived from the French verb abaisser, meaning to reduce. However, whereas the French term abaisse continues to be used in France, its English counterpart abesse died a quick death and has now been obsolete for almost three centuries. The differing fates of the two words may simply reflect a greater love among the French people for pastries. However, it is also possible that abesse never really caught on as an English culinary term because the upper-crust British, schooled in Latin, may have associated the pastry’s name with the Latin word abesse, which happens to be spelt the same way. Such a confusion would have been unfortunate for the pastry, because the Latin abesse, literally meaning to be absent, was sometimes construed as meaning to be deficient in being, which had long been a theological definition of evil. The sixteenth-century poet Edmund Spenser, for instance, gave the name Abessa to one of his allegorical characters in The Faerie Queene in order to emphasize her spiritual depravity. If the culinary abesse and the theological abesse were indeed confused with one another, then the upshot was that the English language deprived itself of a useful name for a thin sheet of rolled-out pastry.