Category: B

  • Blobsterdis

    Although it appears to be a court stenographer’s shorthand for “big lobster dish”—as in “Th vctm wz fhd in th blobsterdis”—the medieval food known as blobsterdis actually has no known etymology; even worse, its recipe was lost after the word became obsolete in the fifteenth century.  

  • Blintz

    A kind of folded pancake stuffed with sweet or savoury fillings, the blintz takes its name from the Yiddish blintseh, which developed from the Russian name for the dish, blinyets. Blinyets was itself a diminutive of blin, which evolved from mlin, which arose as the noun form of the verb molot, a Russian word meaning…

  • Blind tiger

    In the mid nineteenth century some areas of the United States made it illegal to sell alcoholic beverages. It was not, however, illegal to give away alcoholic beverages, and thus a new business emerged and flourished whereby impresarios would present an unusual zoological specimen—a blind tiger, for instance—which a curious spectator would pay a nickel…

  • Blaundsore

    The medieval dish of eels known as blaundsore seems to have a name that literally means white from red. The name of the dish goes back to that of an earlier dish, sorre, made by chopping up eels, seasoning them, and then adding powdered sandalwood to dye the food a reddish-brown. It was this dye…

  • Blancmange

    Next to taste, smell, texture, price, preparation time, and how easy it is to wash out of a blouse, colour is the most important attribute of food; thus, we have red peppers, purple onions, brown beans, blue cheese, black pudding, orange marmalade, and blancmange. The term blancmange, which literally means white food, was borrowed from…

  • Bistro

    According to one story, the small restaurants known as bistros acquired their name thanks to Cossacks who, during the Russian occupation of Paris, would barge into restaurants shouting vee-stra!, Russian for hurry up! The French restaurateurs assumed that vee-stra! meant fast food! and so later they bestowed this Russian word—which they spelt bistro—on little cafes…

  • Bismark

    The jam-filled pastry known since the 1930s as the bismark is also known regionally by other names. For example, in eastern Canada it’s called a jelly doughnut; in Manitoba it’s called a jam buster, and in parts of the American Midwest if s called a Berliner or, if it’s slightly elongated, a long-John. The pastry…

  • Biscuit

    In French the word bis means twice and the word cuit means cooked. Thus, biscuit literally means twice-cooked, which is how biscuits were originally made. By baking them, letting them cool, and then heating them again, the biscuits were made drier and harder and this improved their keeping qualities. The process had its disadvantages, too,…

  • Biryani

    Biryani

    One of the languages spoken in Iran is Persian, like English, a member of the Indo-European family of languages. Throughout history, Persian has given hundreds of words to English, including calabash, candy, carob, lemon, orange, pistachio, and even—oddly, considering that Iran’s hot climate makes keeping ice difficult—sherbet. These words were all adopted by English about…

  • Bibimbap

    Bibimbap

    Although it sounds like a bit of scatting by Ella Fitzgerald, bibimbap is actually the name of a Korean dish which began to get noticed in North American restaurant reviews in the early 1980s. Made by filling a bowl with shredded beef, rice, and marinated vegetables, topping it with a fried egg, and then stirring…