Category: P
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Potwaller
Throughout the eighteenth century, in some parts of England, a man was allowed to vote in the parliamentary elections so long as he was the head of his own household, and not simply a member of another man’s household. Householder eligibility was determined in turn by whether the man had his own fireplace where he…
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Potpourri
Although it is now the name of a fragrant mixture of flower petals used to perfume a room or a closet, potpourri was originally a dish of many meats stewed together but then removed and served separately. The name of this dish is French for rotten pot, the French pourri deriving from the same Latin…
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Potato
When the word potato first appeared in English in the mid sixteenth century, it did not refer to what we now call potatoes—that is, it was not a synonym for spud—but rather denoted what we now call sweet potatoes. The word potato derives via Spanish from the Taino word for the tuber, batata, Taino being…
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Postpast
Just as English now uses the word antipasto to refer to an hors d’oeuvre served before an Italian meal, it once used the word postpast to refer to a little snack following a meal. Postpast, which derives from the Latin post, meaning after, and pastus, meaning food, was current in English only during the seventeenth…
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Porterhouse steak
In the late fourteenth century, labourers who specialized in carrying heavy things from place to place came to be known as porters, a word that derives from the Latin portare, meaning to carry. Porters, not surprisingly, tended to be large men with small wages who could only afford to quench their thirst with a cheap…
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Portable soup
Portable soup sounds like a joke, rather like instant water or stew on a stick. After all, what soup isn’t portable? However, in the mid eighteenth century, the term portable soup arose to denote a foodstuff made by boiling meat until all that was left was a thick, syrupy resin that could be dried and…
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Portobello
No one is quite sure how to spell the name of this mushroom. Merriam-Webster has it under portobello, but then gives portabella and portabello as variant spellings. If we Google the word to get a snapshot of how real people are spelling it, the picture is just as murky: on the Internet, the phrase portobello…
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Port
Usually drunk at the end of a meal, the strong, sweet wine known as port takes its name from Oporto, a coastal city in Portugal through which it is exported. In Portuguese, Oporto literally means the port, and was bestowed upon the city because of its important harbour, one never made inaccessible by ice (the…
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Porridge
Bland and formless, as devoid of life as a crumpled sock, porridge had nothing to take its name from except the pot in which it was made. The original name of the substance was therefore pottage, first recorded in English in the early thirteenth century; by the early sixteenth century, the pronunciation, and therefore the…
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Pork
After the French came from Normandy in 1066 and conquered England, they decided that they would be the ones who ate the animals, while the defeated English would be the ones who raised the animals. Accordingly, most of the original English animal names—such as pig, cow, calf, sheep, and deer—continued to be used in the…