Category: C
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Cashew
Although it is native to Brazil, the cashew was introduced in the sixteenth century to other tropical countries, including India where the acrid oil from the nut is rubbed into floors to repel attacks by white ants. The name of the nut also originated in Brazil where the tree upon which it grows is called,…
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Carve
Before it came to mean the act of cutting up meat, poultry, or fish at the dinner table, the word carve signified the act of cutting designs or words into stone or wood. The word carve is, in fact, a cousin of the Greek word graphein, meaning to write, both words having derived from the…
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Carrot
Although the carrot gets its name from an ancient Greek source, the ancients did not cultivate it as a kitchen vegetable, consuming the wild variety only occasionally as an aphrodisiac. Prior to the sixteenth century, carrots were also not eaten as food in England, although women did use their fern-like leaves as hair decorations. In…
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Carnival
Although the word carnival is now used in a general sense to mean festival or even circus, the word originally had a much more precise application: it referred specifically to the holiday before Lent when Roman Catholics made merry and feasted, activities not permitted once the forty days of Lent began. To remind people that…
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Carling
In the sixteenth century, the Sunday preceding Easter Friday became known as Care Sunday, the word care being used to mean sorrow or grief. Because this Sunday was a part of Lent, certain foods—including meat—were proscribed, while others—such as parched peas—became traditional fare. The parching of the peas may have been intended to represent a…
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Carbonara
Diamonds, graphite, and coal are all made of carbon, an element whose name derives from the Latin carbo, meaning coal. The Italian word for coal, carbone, also derives from the Latin carbo, as does carbonara, a word that might be loosely translated as in the manner of the charcoal pit. Centuries ago, Italians gave the…
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Caraway
When a word is successively passed from one language to another, it not only may end up with a very different spelling and pronunciation, it may even refer to a different item than it originally did. For example, the Latin word for onion—caepa—became the English word chive, the name of a plant related to, but…
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Caramel
When heated until it melts and browns, sugar is called caramel, a word that literally means honey-cane: in Medieval Latin, the sugar cane plant was called cannamella, a word formed by combining canna, meaning cane, and mel, meaning honey. Cannamella then evolved into Spanish as caramelo, where it became the name of a browned sugar…
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Cappuccino
Served with a foamy head of milk, the dark coffee known as cappuccino takes its name from an order of friars known as the Capuchins. The beverage is so called either because its foamy head resembles the partly-sheared heads of the Capuchins or because a Brazilian order of Capuchins specialized in growing coffee beans in…
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Cantaloupe
The two common names for this orange-fleshed melon, cantaloupe and musk melon, derive respectively from the most divine and most earthly of sources. When introduced to Italy from Armenia in the seventeenth century this fruit was cultivated at the Pope’s country villa, a place near Rome called Cantalupo to which His Holiness would occasionally withdraw.…