In the endless pantheon of strange British dishes, one of the strangest is the grenade, an eighteenth-century dish made by surrounding six pigeons and a ragout with slices of veal and bacon, and then cooking the whole thing not on top of a fire, but rather between two fires. The name of this meaty dish may have been formed directly from the Latin word granum, meaning grain, due to its being seasoned with “grains” of spice. Alternatively, the dish may have been named after the hand-held explosive known as the grenade because that munition’s shell-like construction resembles the successive layers of meat that make up the dish. (It’s even possible, though not very likely, that it was the fumosity of this meaty dish\u2014that is, its tendency to induce flatulence\u2014that led to its being associated with the hand grenade’s explosive force.) Incidentally, the weapon known as the grenade acquired its name in the sixteenth century thanks to its resemblance in size and shape to the pomegranate: that fruit, in French, is called a grenade, a name it acquired in the Middle Ages because of the countless seeds or “grains” contained within its tough and leathery rind.<\/p>\n
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In the endless pantheon of strange British dishes, one of the strangest is the grenade, an eighteenth-century dish made by surrounding six pigeons and a ragout with slices of veal and bacon, and then cooking the whole thing not on top of a fire, but rather between two fires. The name of this meaty dish […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-g"],"yoast_head":"\n