Category: B
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Bergamot
The word bergamot refers to two different fruits, one very sour and similar to an orange or lemon, and the other a very sweet variety of pear. Oddly, the two fruits acquired the name bergamot from distinct sources. The sour fruit takes its name directly from Bergamo, a city in northern Italy where it was…
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Belly-timber
In his translation of Virgil’s Georgics, the seventeenth-century poet John Dryden refers to fish as “finny flocks.” A hundred years later, it was this sort of ornate poetic diction that William Wordsworth dismissed as “inane phraseology,” and then set out to revolutionize poetry by writing verse that used the language of ordinary people. The term…
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Belly-cheat
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a belly-cheat was an apron. The term developed from how aprons prevent food from falling onto the belly of the cook, thus “cheating” the belly of a treat.
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Belly
The place where food goes after we swallow it derives its name from the Old English belig, meaning bag, which also evolved into bellows, a kind of silent accordion used to blow a fire higher. When belly was first applied to humans, it referred to the body in general, similar to how the German madensack,…
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Beet
The beet takes its name from the Latin name for the plant, beta. In English, the earliest reference to beets occurs in an eleventh-century manuscript devoted to the medicinal properties of plants; after that there are no written references to the red root-vegetable until the fifteenth century. During this four-hundredyear gap, beets were planted every…
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Beestings
Beestings is the first milk drawn from a mammal after it has given birth. Beestings has long been known to be especially rich, and therefore was used often as an ingredient in custards and puddings. It might seem odd that this milk has a special name, but in fact it even has three others: beest,…
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Beef
Along with veal, mutton, and pork, the word beef was introduced to English by the French-speaking Normans after they conquered England in 1066. Prior to the introduction of beef, native English words such as ox and cow had been used not only as the names of animals but also as the names of the meat…
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Bean-feast
The term bean-feast originated in the early nineteenth century as the name of an annual dinner given by employers to their employees, a name perhaps inspired by the mounds of baked beans that the boss generously ladled out at these festive events (perhaps, however, the boss’s seeming generosity was a diabolical, white-collar prank: the day…
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Bean
Just as beans have changed little over the last ten centuries, the word bean itself has undergone no radical metamorphosis: bean was first recorded in Old English about one thousand years ago, spelt then as it is now. The word derives from a Germanic source that may be distantly related to the Latin name for…
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Basmati
The name of the Indian rice that exudes a sweet, delightful smell when cooked derives from the Hindi word basmati, meaning fragrant. In English the word first appeared in 1845 in a dictionary of Indian terms intended to help members of the British Raj adjust to their new and unfamiliar surroundings. A long-grained scented rice…