What's In a Word? by Webb Garrison

Author:Webb Garrison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Mug

OUR custom of referring to the human face as a mug is of relatively recent origin. Many beer mugs of the eighteenth century were shaped to represent grotesque human heads. A person not particularly noted for beauty of feature might bear a more-than-superficial resemblance to faces on such mugs. Consequently, he would receive much joshing about his ugly mug from friends and associates.

Cooking Terms

THERE is at least one serious gap in European history. Her contemporaries failed to record the name of the woman who first thought of stuffing an egg. Nothing is known about her recipe, except that she was liberal with pepper. Her invention was so hot that folk who tried it were reminded of Beelzebub’s fiery furnaces. As a result the tidbit came to be called a deviled egg.

Most other terms of cookery are prosaic by comparison. More than half were borrowed from the French—which suggests that English cooks were never very imaginative.

Braise stems from French for “hot charcoal.” Toast is but slightly modified from toaster (“to parch with heat”). Boil stems from a continental verb meaning “to make little bubbles.” Poach grew out of pocher, which meant “to pouch”— that is, to enclose an egg’s yellow in a little pouch of white. Fry, grill, roast, and baste were also adapted from French. Fricassee was taken as is from that language, but its ultimate origin is unknown.

The oldest term in cookery is probably cook, still much like Latin coquus. The Norse gave us bake, from baka (“hearth”). The Saxons contributed sear, spelled just as it is today. It originally meant “to wither by heat.” Scorch—bane of a cook’s existence— has a long history that goes all the way back to the Old English scorkle, which started life as a term for skinning meat by searing.

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