Launching, sowcing, searcing, and smooring are probably not actions you knowingly performed as you prepared for your last dinner party, but they’re all culinary terms mentioned in A New Booke ofCookerie, published in London in 1615. Launch meant to slice, and is identical with the nautical launch: when a ship is launched, it slices into the water. Sowce meant to pickle, and evolved from a Germanic source meaning salt; nowadays the word is still marginally familiar as a synonym for drunk, as in “We got soused last night.” Searce meant to sift, which might seem unlikely given that the word developed from the Latin saeta, meaning bristle. The connection, however, is that the bristles were woven into a rough cloth, through which stone-ground materials, like flour, were sifted. As for smoor, it appears in a recipe from A New Booke of Cookerie that explains how “to smoore an old Coney, Ducke, or Mallard, on the French fashion.” Smoor literally meant to smother (and in fact is probably related to that word), but in a culinary context it denoted a dish that was slowly cooked in a closed container, much like a modern crock pot.<\/p>\n
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Launching, sowcing, searcing, and smooring are probably not actions you knowingly performed as you prepared for your last dinner party, but they’re all culinary terms mentioned in A New Booke ofCookerie, published in London in 1615. Launch meant to slice, and is identical with the nautical launch: when a ship is launched, it slices into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-s"],"yoast_head":"\n