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 were once reputed to have little difficulty in swallowing any food put before them, and thus the name choke-priest may have been intended to suggest that the pasta made the soup so thick that even a corpulent priest would find it a daunting meal. In English, a similar idiom, enough to choke a horse, is likewise applied to an over-abundance of an item. Similarly, the port-wine known as kill-priest was so-named to suggest that its potency would cause any priest who partook of it to keel over, kick the bucket, and push up daisies. Other foods have names that allude to certain physical features of spiritual leaders. Since the late eighteenth century, for example, the terms pope’s nose and parson’s nose have been used to refer to the esculent rump of a fowl; these terms probably originated not so much as religious slurs as euphemisms for rump, just as white meat and dark meat originated as euphemisms for the chicken’s breast and legs. Finally, the term deaconing derives from the name of another Church official, the deacon, the spiritual leader who serves as the priest’s link to the community. In the secular world, deaconing is the merchant’s practice of placing the best fruits and vegetables on top of the pile to attract the attention of the passing consumer. The term arose in the nineteenth century out of the special preparations households made when the deacon dropped by for a visit, preparations such as getting out the best china, taking the covers off the furniture, and placing a bible on top of the coffee table. Incidentally, the names of these church officials all derive from Latin sources: priest from the Latin presbyter, meaning instructor; deacon from diaconus, meaning servant; pope from papa, meaning father; and parson from persona, meaning person (the parson was originally the person who embodied or “personified” the church as a legal entity).