Ladyfingers and Nun’s Tummies: From Spare Ribs to Humble Pie–A Lighthearted Look at How Foods Got Their Names

Mangled translations, misunderstandings, geographical mix-ups, and other happyaccidents have provided the English language with some of its most common andcolorful terms for food and drink. Foods such as peas, lemon sole, oranges,German chocolate cake, turkey, cherries, Jordan almonds, and refried beans allowe their names to linguistic goofs of one sort or another. A close look at thesefelicitous foul-ups can help illuminate the way language sometimes works. In thischapter, we'll explore how such names come about, often as the result of thattypically human impulse to take something seemingly foreign and turn it intosomething more familiar.In addition, linguistic mishaps occasionally produce English terms that seem tohave something to do with food but in fact do not. Apple-pie order, to egg on,chowderhead, big cheese, and pea jacket are just a few examples. We'll meet theseand many more at the end of this chapter.Words Misheard or MistranslatedConsider the cherry. The Normans who conquered England called this fruit acherise, a forerunner of the modern French cerise. The natives of the BritishIsles, however, mistakenly assumed that cherise was a plural and began referringto a single one of these fruits as a cheri. Several English words, in fact, wereformed by a process known to linguists as back-formation, one type of whichoccurs when a singular word is mistakenly assumed to be a plural. (Anotherexample is kudos. Many people assume that this word meaning "praise" or "acclaim"is a plural noun and speak of giving someone a kudo. Actually, there's no suchthing as a single kudo, for the word kudos, an ancient Greek term for "glory,"was borrowed whole into English.)Another food word formed this way is pea, a descendant of the Middle English nameof this legume, pease, as in the singsong nursery rhyme that begins "Peaseporridge hot." By the early seventeenth century, the English began referring to asingle one of these as a pea, although as late as 1614 Sir Walter Raleighdescribed something as being "of the bigness of a great Peaze." Both pea andpease, at any rate, are linguistic descendants of the ancient Greeks' word for"pea," pison.The same thing happened with capers. Among the ancient Greeks, the word kapparisdenoted a shrub with flower buds that could be pickled and added to salads andfish dishes. The Romans adapted this name into capparis, which eventually foundits way into Middle English as caperis or capres. Once again, speakers of modernEnglish lopped off that final s, so that now one of these piquant buds isreferred to as a caper.The opposite may have happened with the gherkin. This small pickling cucumber'sname apparently stems from a Middle Persian word for "watermelon," angarah, aterm the Greeks later changed to agouros and applied to watermelons as well ascucumbers. In Dutch, agouros became gurk, the plural of which is gurken.Similarly, many etymologists suspect that the word muffin arose, as it were, fromthe Low German Muffen, the plural form of Muffe, or "small cake." (True to itsGermanic roots, by the way, the English language once formed plurals the same wayas Dutch and German, by adding an -en to a singular noun. Vestiges of thispractice are still visible in our words oxen and children.)Several other foods got their names when strange-sounding parts of foreign wordswere changed to something that sounded more familiar. The crayfish or crawfish,for example, isn't a fish at all. Actually, this staple of Cajun cuisine has aname adapted from the Old French crevice, or "edible crustacean." Crayfish andcrevice are linguistic cousins of the English crawl and crab and are unrelated tothe English crevice, or "deep cleft," which comes from an entirely differentroot. At any rate, the Old French crevice skittered into Middle English ascrevise, the tail end of which eventually evolved into the more recognizable-fish.Another southern favorite, hoppin' john, apparently has nothing to do with eitherhopping or anyone named John. Some lexicographers believe this traditional NewYear's Day stew of black-eyed peas, rice, and bacon or salt pork may take itsname from a Caribbean dish called pois à pigeon, or "pigeon peas," an expressionvariously adapted into hoppin' john or happy john.A similar mangling of a French name occurred with the shortbread known aspetticoat tails. This term dates from sixteenth-century Scotland, where theFrancophilic courtiers of Mary Stuart called them petits gâtels, which laterbecame petits gâteaux, or "little cakes." Somewhere along the way the Scotsapparently decided that petits gâteaux sounded a lot like petticoat tails andstarted calling them that. They even began baking them in a ring pan withscalloped edges, so that now the cookies also bear a resemblance to their frillynamesake.Jordan almonds, those large nuts covered with a smooth, hard candy coating invarious pastel colors, come not from Jordan but from Spain. Their name actuallyderives from the Old French jardin, meaning "garden." This descriptive wasadopted into Middle English, in which a fine variety of almond was called ajardin almaund–but English speakers soon anglicized it, despite the risk ofgeographical confusion.Another food-related adaptation of a French word is the term kickshaw, which nowmeans "a fancy food or delicacy." Kickshaw comes from the French quelque chose,meaning "something." In the past, the British used both quelque chose andkickshaw interchangeably and, somewhat contemptuously, to denote "a 'something'French"–that is, food prepared in an overly fancified, Frenchified way as opposedto more substantial English fare. Thus in 1655, a persnickety English writerdismissed what he called "over curious cookery, making . . . quelque-choses ofunsavoury . . . Meat."Another French word misheard resulted in the name of the fish we call lemon sole.Actually, this fish is a type of flounder, not sole, and has nothing at all to dowith the tart yellow fruit, even though it may be served with a thin slice of it.The name lemon sole derives instead from a French term for "flatfish," limande.It's thought that limande, in turn, may derive from the French word lime, meaning"file" or "rasp," because of this creature's rough outer layer. Another theoryholds that the name limande (and, ultimately, lemon sole) comes from the Latinword for "mud," límus, a reference to the bottom-dwelling habits of flatfish.(If the latter is true, then the enticing lemon sole is a close linguisticrelative of the less-than-enticing words slime and limaceous, or "sluglike.")The word cutlet is another French derivative that isn't what it seems: it's not,as one might reasonably suppose, a "little cut" of meat. Instead, cutlet comesfrom the French côtelette, a descendant of the Latin costa, or "rib." This makescutlet an etymological relative of several other words involving "ribs," "flank,"or "sides," including the large, "ribbed" English cooking apple known as acostard, as well as the tender entrecôte steak that's cut from "between theribs." All of these words are also kin to accost–literally "to approach the side"of something or someone, not to mention the word designating the "rib" or "side"of a landmass, coast.Similarly, spareribs aren't "extra" ribs. Rather, this is an English alterationof the Low German ribbesper, or "pork ribs roasted on a spit [or spear]," fromOld German words for "rib" and "spear." (The same idea is still reflected in themodern German word for "spareribs," Rippespeer–literally, "spear ribs.") TheEnglish adopted the Old German word and altered it to ribspare, a term for"sparerib" that persists in England even today. More of them, however, switchedthe elements of this compound in a way that not only seemed to make more sensebut was also reinforced by the fact that ribs tend to be closely trimmed of meator, in other words, rather "spare."The name of the savory spice rosemary is also misleading. Because this minty herbgrew wild on the sea cliffs of southern Europe, the Romans called it rosmarínus, literally "sea dew." Thus the ros- in rosemary means "dew" and isrelated to the obsolete English words for "dewy," roscid and rorid. The -mary inrosemary, meanwhile, comes from a large pool of marine words, including mermaid,maritime, and marinara. (The last of these, referring to "sailor-style" sauce,apparently refers to the fact that the ingredients in marinara sauce were lesslikely to spoil at sea and could easily be prepared with a minimal use offire–always a concern aboard wooden vessels). English speakers who inherited theherb's name as ros marínus twisted it into the more familiar rosemary, acombination no doubt influenced by the traditional association between the VirginMary and her floral symbol, the rose.For that matter, even refried beans aren't what they seem. Although their nameseems like a reasonable translation of Spanish frijoles refritos, the fact isthat these beans aren't really fried twice. In Spanish, refritos literally means"well-fried," not "re-fried."