Category: C
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Course
A course is a division of a meal, consisting of a single dish or of a set of dishes brought to the table all at once. From the sixteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century, most formal dinners had two or three courses plus a dessert. The name of this basic meal division, the…
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Coupon
Although coupon and capon are similar-sounding words, and although they both derive from sources meaning to cut, the two words are not related to one another. The ultimate source of coupon is the Greek kolaphos, meaning a blow or a punch, which Latin adopted as colaphus; this Latin word then evolved into the French coup,…
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Counter
Every kitchen has a counter, a surface on which food is prepared before it is carried to the oven or the table. The name of this kitchen furnishing is not related to the identically spelt counter that means contrary, as in counter-clockwise; that counter—the contrary one—derives from the Latin preposition contra, meaning against. On the…
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Cottabus
On any winter night, in any Canadian city, beer-soaked, toque-clad young men slump on sticky kitchen floors, flipping bottle caps in an attempt to strike a target worthy of their skill: perhaps the top of an empty bottle or the nose of an unconscious peer. This sport is called caps and it parallels, if not…
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Costmary
For hundreds of years, the British have grown costmary in their gardens and used it as an herb in salads or to give flavour to ale. Originally, the plant was simply called cost, a name that travelled from Sanskrit, to Arabic, to Greek, and then to Latin before entering Old English about a thousand years…
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Cos
The variety of long-leafed lettuce known since the late seventeenth century as cos—and also known since the early twentieth century as romaine lettuce—takes its name from the island of Kos situated between Greece and Turkey.
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Corsned
A corsned was once a dreaded morsel of bread used in the Middle Ages to determine the guilt or innocence of a person accused of a crime. The accused was made to swallow an ounce of bread, known as the corsned, that had been exorcised and consecrated by a priest. If, after swallowing, the accused…
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Cornucopia
A cornucopia is literally a horn of plenty deriving as it does from the Latin cornu, meaning horn, and copia, meaning abundance or a copious amount. Overflowing with fruits and vegetables, the cornucopia is still a common sight at Thanksgiving, although the original goat’s horn, a symbol of the nanny-goat that nursed the god Zeus…
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Corned beef
Corned beef contains no corn, but it does contain salt—lots of salt, because that is how the meat is cured. Nonetheless, despite the absence of corn in corned beef, the salty meat and the yellow niblets do derive their names from the same source. In the Germanic language from which English developed, the word kurnam,…
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Cookie
The obvious source of the word cookie is the wrong one: cookie has no relation to cook, which seems less surprising when you stop to consider that cookies are not cooked but baked. Whereas cook derives from a Latin source, cookie derives from a Germanic one: namely the Dutch koekje—a diminutive of koek, meaning cake—which…