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 same Indo-European source. Carve acquired its culinary sense in the early fourteenth century, but what has almost been lost to us is that it was once used as a generic term for dozens of more specific terms that varied according to the animal being dismantled. Thus, with knife in hand, a sixteenth-century host would proceed to break a deer, leach a boar, rear a goose, lift a swan, sauce a capon, frush a chicken, spoil a hen, unbrace a mallard, dismember a heron, display a crane, disfigure a peacock, unjoint a bittern, untie a curlew, allay a pheasant, wing a partridge, mince a plover, thigh a pigeon, border a meat-pie, tire an egg, chine a salmon, string a lamprey, split a pike, splay a bream, tusk a barbel, culpon a trout, tranch a sturgeon, undertranch a porpoise, tame a crab, and barb a lobster. Knowing which term corresponded to which beast was a sign of an individual’s sophistication and status, since only those blessed with endless hours of leisure could possibly memorize such huge lists of arcane gastronomic terminology.<\/p>\n
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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-39905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-c"],"yoast_head":"\n