Category: C

The large, ornate plate that is centred on the dinner table even before the food arrives is called a charger plate. Its name reflects its function: the word charge originally meant to load and the charger plate is loaded with dishes of food as the meal begins. The “loading” sense of charge is also apparent…

Chard is the name of the juicy leaves of a variety of beet known variously as the white beet, the silver beet, and the sea-kale beet (botanically chard is not related to sea-kale, but it does share its silvery-white colour). The most famous variety of chard is Swiss chard, so named because it is widely…

English has two chanterelles. One of them derives from the Latin cantare, meaning to sing, and denotes a female partridge used to lure other fowl to within gunshot, rather like the sirens of Greek mythology whose lovely singing lured sailors to their destruction on the rocks that surrounded their island. This chanterelle is also the…

In the early nineteenth century a dish named Cecils was often concocted by mixing minced meat with bread crumbs and seasonings, rolling the resulting thick paste into small balls, and frying those balls in oil. The fact that Cecils is spelt not only with a capital C but also with what appears to be the…

Although the word caviar has existed in French since the early fifteenth century, and in English since the late sixteenth century, the actual item—sturgeon eggs—was not always considered a high-brow delicacy: in nineteenth-century American saloons, it was given away like peanuts to stimulate a thirst for beer. Later, in the 1920s, Russian princes who had…

Although the Old Testament does not explicitly say so, there is a good chance that some of Noah’s naughty neighbours were punished because they had, among other things, engaged in catillation, that is, the unseemly licking of plates. This word, which does not apply to the bowls in which my mother makes her chocolate icing,…

Before the middle of the eighteenth century, restaurants did not exist, and inns, which provided lodgings as well as food, were not considered places that respectable people patronized. Accordingly, if you were hungry and wealthy but too tired to order your servants to prepare a meal, you ordered your servants to hire someone to prepare…

A cate is a delicacy, a dainty, a treat, a choice morsel, a tidbit. Because no one in their right mind ever buys a single tidbit, cate is almost always used in the plural, cates. Like the word caterer to which it is related, cate derives from the French verb acheter, meaning to purchase. In…