Category: R
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Rocket
Many of the herbs found in an English kitchen four hundred years ago would seem unfamiliar to North American cooks today. For example, A New Booke of Cookerie, which was published in London in 1615, calls for some salad ingredients that might now seem more suited to potions and spells: leaves of gillyflower, bugloss, and…
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Rimmer
According to my mother, the crimped or crenellated edge of pies is not just decorative: the little indentations allow the pastry to “give,” so that the edge does not crack and crumble while it bakes. To create such a crenellated edge, a rimmer is often used, a device that clearly derives its name from its…
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Rigatoni
The small furrows that run up and down the rube-shaped pasta known as rigatoni are designed to catch the sauce and make it stick; these furrows also give rigatoni its name, deriving as it does from the Italian rigare, meaning to make a channel. This Italian word derives in turn from a Latin word, spelt…
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Ricotta
The white, creamy, bland cheese known as ricotta acquired its name, which in Italian means recooked, from its being made from leftover whey, the liquid remaining after making other cheeses such as pecorino or mozzarella. This leftover whey must be put through a second curdling or “cooking” before it can be turned into ricotta. English…
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Rhubarb
When rhubarb was introduced to Europe from Mongolia, it was grown along the river banks of what was then called the Rha but is now called the Volga. From northern Europe, rhubarb was taken south to Italy where the ancient Romans referred to the stalky plant as rha, since that was where it came from.…
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Releve
In a formal, French-style dinner, a dish that follows and replaces another dish is called a releve. The word literally means lifted away, a reference to the previous dish having been removed from the table. These dishes are also sometimes known as removes, and in fact remove is the older of the two terms, coming…
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Raspberry
Until the early seventeenth century, the raspberry was known simply as raspis, a word of unknown origin that suddenly appeared in English in the early sixteenth century. Before this time, the raspberry was known as the hindberry, so called because it was thought to be eaten in the wild by hinds, or what we now…
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Rasher
Thin slices of bacon or ham have been known as rashers for over four hundred years. In the seventeenth century, one early philologist proposed that their name arose from the fact that they are often made in a hurry: you “rashly” throw the slices of meat into the frying pan, taking little care to ensure…
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Raisin
From racemus, a Latin word meaning a cluster of grapes, French derived the word raisin, meaning a single grape. English adopted this French word in the fourteenth century, first using it as a synonym for grape (which had been adopted a hundred years earlier) and then shifting its application to a special kind of grape,…
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Radish
The colour of the radish—reddish—is not where this hot root takes its name; rather, it derives, through Italian and then French, from the Latin word radix, meaning root. Other words that derive from the same source include eradicate, meaning to uproot, and radical, which originally denoted a person championing a return to the “grassroots” of…