Category: B
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Barmecide
If you were to sit down to a five-course meal of manna soup, ambrosia salad, roast jubjub bird, fresh funistrada, and braised trake—served with your choice of pigeon’s milk, nectar, or ice-worm cocktail, and eaten, of course, with a runcible spoon—you would be savoring a barmecide, that is, a feast of imaginary food. According to…
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Bard
Certain joints of meat will dry out when roasted unless they are protected by a thin covering of bacon or sliced pork. These protective slices are called bards, a word whose history extends back thousands of years to the Persian pardah, meaning covering. The ancient Arabs adopted this Persian word, using it to mean pack-saddle,…
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Barbecue
The Taino, a tribe of Haitian people obliterated by European explorers and pirates, called a framework of sticks used for sleeping on or cooking over a barbacoa. The word was borrowed by the Spanish in the mid seventeenth century, and entered English as barbecue at the end of the seventeenth century. Its early use in…
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Banyan day
A day on which no meat is served is called a banyan day, a term first used by British sailors in the mid eighteenth century to refer to those days of the week when, to conserve food supplies, they were fed only bread and gruel. Banyan days take their name from an Indian class called…
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Bannock
Since the eleventh century at least, round loaves of bread, made from barley or oats, have been called bannock, a name that the English derived from the Gaelic name for the same food, bannach. In turn, Gaelic probably derived the name of this loaf from the Latin panicium, Latin being the language of the Roman…
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Banger
I remember learning in grade school about Euclid’s notion of transitivity: if A equals B, and B equals C, then A equals C. The same principle does not hold in language: a sausage is a banger, and a banger is a gang member, but a gang member is not a sausage. Be that as it…
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Banana
Scholars of Renaissance literature have long noted that nowhere in Shakespeare’s comedies does a character slip and fall on a banana peel. This striking absence of fruit-slapstick is due to the fact that bananas, though they were described by travel writers during Shakespeare’s life, were not commonly imported into England until much later. In fact,…
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Balderdash
Throughout the seventeenth century, the word balderdash referred to any drink made by jumbling together liquids that should not, in a sane universe, occupy the same glass, much less the same stomach: beer and butter-milk, beer and wine, wine and milk—all are forms of balderdash. This now-obsolete sense of balderdash is clearly connected with the…
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Bakewell
The name of this dessert, made by lining a pastry case with jam before filling it with almond paste, did not originate as a piece of culinary advice, but from the town in Derbyshire called Bakewell, where the dessert was invented in the early nineteenth century.
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Baker’s dozen
Nothing makes my teeth gnash more than slicing a loaf of bread and discovering that some accursed bubble has hollowed an end of the loaf: not only do I get jam all over my lap as it drips through the resulting sandwich-cavity, I feel cheated for having purchased bread and gotten air. Such unholy bubbles…