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It's a browser's treasure of culinary etymological lore, but there's a table of contents that bespeaks a structure, starting with foods named for what they look like (such as rambutan, the sweet, red-bristle-covered fruit named for
rambut, the Malay word for
hair; or cabbage, which arose from the Old North French
caboche, meaning
head, making the phrase "a head of cabbage" redundant). Next comes a chapter on food names associated with religion and the supernatural (from angel-food cake and cappuccino, named after the brown cloaks of Capuchin monks, to pumpernickel, which supposedly means
devil fart). There's a section on foods named by mistake, covering misnomers like geoduck, Bombay duck, and cold duck, none of which is related to the fowl, and a chapter on foods named for people and places, like Beef Wellington, Fettuccine Alfredo, Tootsie Rolls, and even Carpaccio (named after Renaissance artist Vittore Carpaccio, whose work often displayed a predilection for red).
Barnette delves into the stories of foods named for what's done to them or what they do to us (such as bangers, British sausages that'll explode if not pricked before cooking, and aubergine, which derives, via Arabic and Persian, from the Sanskrit for antifart vegetable.) And finally, there's a chapter on words derived from other words about food and drink, such as the dog term mutt, which came from muttonhead as an insult applied to dull people, which came from the assumption of stupidity of sheep, i.e., mutton.
Its index makes it a bona fide language reference, but it's more than just an academic resource. It's an etymologist's dream, a food lover's fantasy, and a general delight for anyone who takes joy in words and trivia. In telling the stories behind the names of foods, Barnette proves, as writers M.F.K. Fisher, Harold McGee, and Calvin Trillin have before, that a love of food and a fascination with language are not incompatible. --Stephanie Gold
Booklist
Barnette delights in uncovering the plain facts and sentencing to oblivion the fiction about food words we know and maybe love. In a frothy, tongue-in-cheek manner, she uses detective skills to expose six categories: foods named for what they look like (bow-tie pasta); religion and the supernatural (various meanings of angel food); mistakenly named foods (Jordan almonds); eponyms and toponyms (Cobb salad); foods named for what is done to them or vice versa (pesto); and words derived from food and drink lingo (bagatelle). The surprises don't stop with, for example, her note that
seersucker is from the Hindi word for milk and sugar. In effect, we're introduced to a wealth of new and unusual phrases, from
geoducks to the
pope's-eye, that will enrich, amuse, and edify gastronomes and linguists alike.
Barbara Jacobs
--Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
