Category: C
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Cockle
Cockles are heart-shaped candies with phrases like / Love You and You’re Mine embossed on their sugary surfaces. Cockles are also edible bivalve molluscs that may be eaten raw but are usually cooked like mussels. The connection between these two cockles is a bit circuitous. In the seventeenth century, anatomists dissecting human cadavers noticed that…
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Cock-a-leekie
Several dishes get their names because they contain a cock cooked with something else. Cock-a-leekie, as its name suggests, is made by boiling a cock with leeks, a dish first referred to by name in the mid eighteenth century. Likewise, cock-ale, a dish invented in the mid seventeenth century, is made by mixing beer with…
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Cock
Although cock is the original English name for a male fowl, this sense of the word has been almost completely overtaken by rooster, a shift that occurred over the last three hundred years as cock came more and more to mean penis. First recorded in the ninth century, cock probably arose as an imitation of…
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Cleaver
Used by butchers to hack joints of meat in two, cleavers ultimately derive their name from an Indo-European source, pronounced something like gleubh, meaning to cut apart or to carve. This ancient source evolved into the Germanic word kleuban, which then developed into the English word cleave in the eleventh century; it was from this…
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Clam
The word dam appeared in English in the tenth century, but at that time it did not refer to the edible, bivalve mollusc that is an essential ingredient in chowder. Instead, dam referred to a device used to hold two things together, a device such as a chain or a clamp—the word damp, in fact,…
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Chow
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word chow—meaning/ood, as in chow time—derives from the name of a Chinese dog, the chow, once eaten as a delicacy in China. This suspicious etymology may have been inspired by an anecdote involving Charles George Gordon, the famous British General who suppressed several rebellions in China in the…
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Chopstick
The original and ancient Chinese name for chopsticks was tsze, meaning help, since the utensils assisted in getting the food from your dish to your mouth. However, the Chinese eventually replaced this name with a term that sounded similar, but seemed to better describe the motion of the chopsticks: k’waitsze, meaning the quick ones. British…
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Choke-priest
Perhaps in return for making gluttony a sin, gastronomes have often made men of the cloth their target when it comes to naming dishes. The Italians, for example, named a soup made with short pieces of pasta strozzapreti, which was translated literally and then adopted into English as choke-priest in the mid nineteenth century. Priests…
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Chocolate
Montezuma, the King of the Aztecs when Hernando Corte”s and his conquistadors first encountered them, so believed in chocolate as an aphrodisiac that he reportedly drank fifty large cups of chocolate beverage each day. If this is true, then the lusty Montezuma must have imbibed about five cups of chocolate every waking hour, a quantity…
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Chive
The Latin name for the onion—caepa—is not the source of the word onion, but it is the source of the word chive, a small bulb-plant related to the onion. The Latin caepa became the French cive, which was adopted into English at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Pronounced like shive, the word cive remained…