A Brief History of Food: Words, names and meanings

What follows was inspired by the video “Vegetables don’t exist” on the YouTube channel “Words Unravelled” hosted by Rob Watts from “RobWords” and Jess Zafarris author of the etymology books “Words from Hell” and “Once Upon a Word”.

As Tastes Of History is based in the UK our focus on food history and recipes is unashamedly British and Euro-centric. Clearly, however, cuisine and dining in the “Old World” has been heavily influenced by pretty much all areas of the globe. Putting aside any arguments about colonialism and imperialism for the present purpose, our diets have been enriched by discoveries in the Americas, Asia and Africa that introduced Britons to foods previously unknown in the classical and Mediæval eras. These new ingredients inspired innovative recipes and led to changes both to our mealtimes and our dining experience. It might surprise some to discover that even the meaning of the words we use to describe food in general, or more specific ingredients, have also changed over time. With that in mind, let’s dig in to a select few.

Meat

Today we use the word “meat” to mean the flesh of animals eaten as food. What we are actually describing is typically skeletal muscle plus its associated fat and connective tissue, but the term can also mean offal and other edible organs such as liver and kidney. “Meat” in this sense is often limited to mean the flesh of mammalian species (pigs, cattle, sheep, goats, etc.) raised and prepared for human consumption, while excluding fish, other seafood, insects, poultry, or other animals. However, the word comes from the Old English “mete” meaning food in general (and animal feed), but it was also used to mean a meal. Interestingly, vegetables were called “green meat”, and dairy products were called “white meat”. Over the centuries, however, “meat” simply became the word for flesh as we recognize it today.

A favourite of linguists, the words we use for the animals and their associated meal products illustrates the class dynamics between the Anglo-Saxons and the Normans. When William, Duke of Normandy, conquered England in 1066 he replaced all the existing Anglo-Saxon nobility with his Norman comrades. So, when pigs, cows, and chickens (the Germanic terms for these animals) arrived on the plate of the new ruling-class, they became a Norman-French derived word like porc (“pork”; from Latin: porcus “pig”), boeuf (“beef”), and poulet (“chicken”).

Daily bread

“Bread” is commonly used as a word for the most basic kinds of food - as in our “daily bread”. The root of the word means “to bubble” or “to boil” in reference to the rising of yeast (“yeast” itself also means “to froth or bubble”). While “bread” was used for the many and varied forms of food produced from flour, it could also mean a crumb or a morsel. Perhaps confusingly, bread is occasionally recorded as a word for meat, as in the term “sweetbreads”, which refers to the pancreas of an animal eaten as food. In this instance the bread element in “sweetbreads” might not be related to the word bread but might instead be related to another very similar Old English word meaning flesh.

It may not be readily apparent but the Latin for bread, panis, gives English speakers the words “company” and “companion”, that is the people you share bread with. The same Latin root is in “panini”, “empanada” and “pantry” where, in Mediæval England, “pantlers” oversaw the storage and preparation of bread. Even earlier a “loaf-ward” in Old English meant someone who looked after your bread, but more importantly the term evolved into the word “lord”. Meanwhile, a lady was literally a “bread maid” or a “bread maker”, someone who kneads bread.

The flour used to make bread is sometimes called “meal”, a word directly related “to mill” which might take place, for example, in a “windmill” where a “miller” grinds the grain. But “meal” as in a repast, a time of day when we eat, is unrelated as it comes from a Germanic root that meant “time”. Anyone familiar with German will know that the word “mal” means time in the sense of now. In German “once” is “einmal”, literally “one time”, “zweimal”, “two times”, and if you want something again, then “noch einmal” translates as “another time”. This is the sense of where the word “meal” means time, which leads to the oddity that a “mealtime” is literally the tautology “time time”.

Vegetables

It may seem an odd thing to say but “vegetable” as a term describing a particular group of popular foods may be a misnomer. There is currently no consensus that there is a scientific definition of a vegetable specifically as opposed to the plants we eat, which can be categorised as fruits and berries for example. So, the debate as to whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable is somewhat moot. As an aside, the tomato is a berry because, in botany, a simple fleshy fruit that usually encloses a seed or many seeds within it. Thus, apricots, bananas, and grapes, as well as bean pods, corn grains, cucumbers, and (in their shells) acorns and almonds, are all technically fruits. Thus a strawberry is not strictly a berry because its many true fruits, or achenes, which are popularly called seeds, are on the outside. Even so, for most people any small fleshy fruit is popularly called a berry, especially if it is edible.

Returning to vegetables, the literal and first recorded meaning of term was originally an adjective as indicated by the “-able” word-ending. But a vegetable is something capable of life or growing since its Latin root vegetari means “to animate” or “to bring to life”. All of which means the words vegetable and meat essentially represent something living, and that makes all of us vegetables.

Fruits

Apple In a similar vein, in the past “apple” simply meant any kind of fruit. As such apple tends to appear frequently in the ancestries of other words. A date for example was originally called a “finger apple”, but the word itself is derived from the Greek dactylos also meaning “finger”. In Old English eorþæppla (plural) literally meant “earth-apples”. This word was eventually replaced by “cucumber” to describe the widely cultivated creeping vine plant (in the family Cucurbitaceae) that bears cylindrical to spherical fruits used as culinary vegetables.

Peach The word “peach” was adapted via French from the Latin “malum persicum” meaning “Persian apple”, and a pomegranate literally means an apple with many seeds, from the Latin “pomum granatum”. The latter is related to the word “grenade” which make some sense since when a grenade explodes, its many fragments - figuratively its “seeds” - are blasted far and wide.

Pineapple In 1398 the word “pin-appel” was coined in Middle English (ME) to describe the reproductive organs of conifer trees (now termed “pinecones”). Remembering that “apple” simply meant any kind of fruit, a pin-appel was therefore the fruit of the pine tree. When Cristoforo Colombo (Christopher Columbus) encountered the pineapple in 1493 on the Leeward Island of Guadeloupe, he reputedly named it piña de Indes meaning “pine of the Indians”. However, since piña means pinecone in Spanish, and since pineapples look nothing like pine trees but a lot like pinecones, it is probably safer to translate the meaning as “pinecone of the Indians”. Either way, a linguistic connection between pinecones and pineapples was established. By the 1660s, however, pineapple referred to the tropical plant, with “pinecone” emerging in 1694 to replace the original ME sense of pin-appel.

The scientific name of the pineapple, Ananas comosus, combines the Tupi word nanas, meaning “excellent fruit”, as recorded first by André Thevet in 1555, and comosus meaning “tufted” in reference to its stem. Given the fruit’s South American origin, the first European explorers to discover pineapples were undoubtedly Spanish or Portuguese. With that in mind, there are two names used in Spanish for the pineapple: piña (as in piña colada) and ananás. Interesting, however, English is one of the few Indo-European languages (and its derivatives) that does not use a variation of the word “ananás” to mean pineapple. It is hypothesised that English stuck with piña (“pinecone”) possibly because the English colonies in the New World were trading extensively with the Caribbean islands and ended up using the Caribbean name. Meanwhile, the Spanish introduced the fruit to the rest of Europe whereupon a variation of the Spanish word ananás became the common term.

Avocado Another fruit with an interesting backstory is “avocado” which comes from the Spanish word aguacate, itself from the Nahuatl (Mexican) word āhuacatl. In Molina's Nahuatl dictionary [1] “āhuacatl” is also given as the translation for compañón “testicle”. Unsurprisingly popular culture makes the frequent claim that the word's original meaning was testicle, but this is not the case. The original meaning can be reconstructed as “avocado”, so the word seems to have been used in Nahuatl as a euphemism for testicle. Another piece of popular folk etymology holds that avocado is the same word as the Spanish for lawyer, abogado (an advocate), thus euphemistically comparing legal professionals with testicles. While this may explain the popularity of the connection, it far is more likely that these two homophones - avocado and abogado - were simply misheard. In the same vein, sometimes avocados are called “alligator pears” which, according to more folk etymology, stems from Europeans struggling to comprehend the original Nahuatl word. So, sounding a bit like “alligator”, and with a skin that can be green and kind of rough like an alligator’s scales, it is easy to see how this might make sense - it looks like a pear albeit with alligator skin. The same logic has seen avocados being called “butter fruits” because they have a buttery inside.

New World staples Following on from avocado, “tomato” is from the same Nahuatl language and means “swelling fruit”. Originally a drink, “chocolate” also derives from the same language and, together with the tomato, was not introduced to Europe until after the Spanish and Portuguese imperial conquest of South America. The same can be said of the humble “potato”, whose name is from the Caribbean language of Haiti where “batata” originally referred to a sweet potato. In the early 16th-century Portuguese traders carried the crop to all their shipping ports and the sweet potato was quickly adopted from Africa to India and Java. When first introduced to Europe by the Spanish, the name had changed from “batata” to “patata”. Spanish invaders in Peru had begun to use the common white potatoes as cheap food for sailors in the 1530s, and the first such “potato” reached Pope Paul III approximately ten years later, in 1540. According to popular tradition, potatoes were introduced to Ireland in 1565 by John Hawkins and later brought to England from Colombia by Sir Thomas Herriot in 1586.

Cultivated in Spain around 1560, just under a century later (1648) potatoes were being grown in Virginia. Between these two points (ca. 1590s), a variation of the Spanish name for the sweet potato was extended to the common white potato native to Perus since both had similar edible tubers. At first, albeit mistakenly, these varieties were called Virginia potato or the “bastard potato” because it was of lesser significance compared to the sweet potato.

Salted foods

It is fascinating how many words essentially mean “salted”. For example, while not necessarily brined now, “salad” was originally a word for brined vegetables that was later extended to mean any mixture of vegetables. Meanwhile, the word pasta in Greek described a “barley porridge”, but originally was perhaps “a salted mess of food”. The word’s etymology derives from the neuter plural word pastos, an adjective meaning “sprinkled, salted” (from passein “to sprinkle”). In late Latin pasta meant “dough, pastry cake, or paste”, but the term retained the implied meaning to salt or season food. From 1874 onwards pasta became the generic name for Italian dough-based foods such as spaghetti, macaroni, etc. The term was not common in English until after World War II. Pasta probably became more familiar to post-war Britons when, in the 1950s and to a degree the 1960s, small numbers of Italian immigrants, mainly from Lazio, settled in areas such as Manchester, Bedford, and Peterborough. Naturally they brought with them recipes from the Italian homeland which, over time, became popular with Britons until pasta has become one of the ubiquitous foods in the country.

Pizza While on the subject of pasta, let us dispel a couple of myths that the ancient Romans ate pizza and lasagne. First off, did the Romans eat pizza? The answer to this question was complicated when an image of a Roman period fresco (right) purporting to show a pizza gained traction on social media in June 2023. At the time BBC News reported “Archaeologists in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii have uncovered a painting which depicts what might be the precursor to the Italian pizza.” To which the Italian Culture Ministry added that the flatbread depicted in the 2,000-year-old fresco “may be a distant ancestor of the modern dish”. The fresco was discovered in the hall of a house next to a bakery during new excavations of Regio IX in the centre of Pompeii nearly 2,000 years on from the volcanic eruption which engulfed the city.

Tastes Of History is confident that although repeatedly described as such, technically what the fresco depicts lacks the ingredients to be considered a pizza. Instead, it would be more correct to say that it simply shows a flatbread apparently loaded with toppings resting on a silver platter alongside a silver goblet of wine. Yet, while the fresco might appear to show a “pizza”, there are two good reasons why it would be impossible for ancient Romans to make one in the modern sense. Firstly, one key ingredient typically found on today’s pizza is mozzarella cheese. While the Romans had similar cheeses, modern mozzarella is a recent invention [2]. A bigger “problem” is that in most instances the flatbread forming the pizza base is first topped with a tomato-based sauce. Inconveniently for the “Roman pizza” theory, as already mentioned tomatoes are native to South America and were not introduced to Europe until the colonization of said Americas. Why many modern viewers “see” a pizza is connected to arguments made in “Dispelling Some Myths: Romans in the Americas” where a “pineapple” is often identified in an early 1st-century AD floor mosaic. As we have already determined, like tomatoes, pineapples were also native to South America and did not arrive in Europe until nearly a thousand years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Moreover, we argued that it was highly unlikely Roman-era ships were robust enough to cope with a long Atlantic crossing and, more importantly, contemporary accounts by Greek and Roman geographers, historians and commentators make no mention of lands West of Ireland. The likelihood, therefore, of the ancient Romans being even remotely aware that the Americas existed is extremely doubtful. Thus, if tomatoes were unknown to ancient Romans, then pizza in the modern sense was also unknown.

Lasagne Lasagna (noun sing.) is a single flat sheet of pasta in Italian cuisine. When layers of these sheets are combined with a minced beef ragu, bechamel sauce, and topped with melted cheese, the resulting dish is the classic lasagne (pl.). Supposedly the word lasagna comes from the Greek λάσανα (lasana) or λάσανον (lasanon) meaning “trivet”, “stand for a pot” or “chamber pot”, although the last seems somewhat obscure as it unrelated to cooking. The Romans borrowed the word as lasanum, a “cooking pot” in which lasagne are cooked. Later the dish took on the name of the cookware, much as a casserole is a French cook pot.

In the 1st-century AD, references are made to tracta (singular: tractum; ancient Greek: τρακτὸς, τρακτόν), thin sheets of drawn-out or rolled-out pastry dough that were typically fried [3]. To confuse things further, this everyday foodstuff, popular in both ancient Roman and Greek cuisines, was also called laganon, laganum, or lagana (Greek: λάγανον). Writing in the 2nd-century AD, Athenaeus of Naucratis provides a recipe for lagana which he attributes to the 1st-century AD Chrysippus of Tyana. The recipe has sheets of dough made of wheat flour mixed with the juice of crushed lettuce that are flavoured with spices and then deep-fried in oil [4].

An early 5th-century AD cookbook describes a dish called lagana that consisted of layers of dough with meat stuffing. This has given credence to the misleading claim that the ancient Romans ate lasagne. There is no evidence to link the two dishes, and it would be misleading to do so even though, on the face of it, the two dishes do seem recognisably similar. Some might claim lagana was the inspiration for the modern-day lasagne, but the ancient method of cooking the sheets of pastry dough (lagana) does not correspond to our modern definition of either a fresh or dry pasta product. The confusion is easily understood when you consider that both have similar basic ingredients and perhaps a similar shape.

Salt cured meats Returning to the salted foods theme, the cured meat originating from Romania, usually made from beef brisket, known as “pastrami” is from the same salty root. The raw meat is brined (salted), partially dried, seasoned with herbs and spices, then smoked and steamed. Like many other meat products, making pastrami was a way to preserve meat before the invention of refrigeration. “Salami” is another food derived from the Latin word “sal” meaning salt, but so are “salsa”, “sauce”, “sausage” and, of course, “salad”.

Salary myth It is commonly believed that, at certain times in the Roman period, their soldiers were paid with salt, hence the word “salary”, but this is unlikely. The Latin word salarium does seemingly connect employment, salt and soldiers, but the precise link is far from clear. Any misunderstanding probably stems from the Roman historian Pliny the Elder who stated, as an aside in his discussion of sea water in Natural History XXXI, that:

“In Rome...the soldier's pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it...”.

On the face of it, Pliny’s claim is categorical but today it is more generally accepted that Roman soldiers were typically paid in coin. The word salarium is indeed derived from the word sal (salt) possibly because a soldier's salary at some point may have included an allowance for the purchase of salt. Alternatively, it reflects the price of having soldiers capture vital salt supplies and subsequently guard the roads, such as the via Salaria (literally “salt road”), along which this valuable commodity was transported to Rome.

Bacon One of the oldest methods of preserving food is by salt curing using dry edible salt. Two historically significant salt-cured foods are salted fish (usually dried and salted cod or salted herring) and, when combined with smoking, salt-cured meat such as bacon. It turns out, however, that “bacon” was a much vaguer term than currently and could refer to all cuts of pork. Its root is the proto-Germanic *bakkon meaning “back meat” and enters English in the 14th-century from the Old French for “meat from the back and sides of a hog”, originally either fresh or more likely cured. So, “back bacon”, the most preferred type of bacon in the UK, is something of a tautology meaning “back, back”.

Hidden terms

Food and its preparation is so pervasive that some words are related even though it might not be readily evident. Take for instance the word “precocious”. Originally related to plants, in the 1640s it meant “developed or ripe before the usual time”. Its Latin root combines prae “before” plus coquere “to ripen” or more literally “to cook”. Thus, a precocious child in English is one that is “precooked” - a wholly different and slightly disturbing connotation. Of course, in this sense the “precocious” is drawing attention to a person’s immaturity. Here are a few more:

• Often used today to mean a jumbled mix, hotchpotch was originally a type of thick soup or stew made of meat, vegetables and other ingredients available at the time. In English usage since the 14th-century, reading contemporary recipes one might encounter a variety of different spellings including hotchpot, hotch pot, or hog pot, or the early 15th-century hodgepodge (the spelling favoured in the US), hodge-podge, hodge podge, or hogpoch.

• Linked to hodgepotch, the word gallimaufry originating in the 1550s means “a medley, hash or hodge-podge”. This too enters English from the French word galimafrée for a “hash, ragout, dish made of odds and ends”. In Old French of the 14th-century, galimafree (or calimafree) meant a “sauce made of mustard, ginger, and vinegar; a stew of carp” although its origin is unknown.

• Potpourri (or pot-pourri), another word clearly borrowed from French, enters English in the 1610s. By 1749 the term referred to the “medley or mixture of dried flowers and spices” familiar to us today but, from 1855, it is also recorded as a “miscellaneous collection” in the figurative sense (originally in music). In French, however, “potpourri” literally means “rotten pot” where “pourri” is the past participle of pourrir meaning “to rot” that ultimately derives from Latin putrescere “grow rotten” which itself gives us words like putrefy and putrescent. In Spanish “olla podrida” has the same meaning although “podrida” is probably a variant of the original word “poderida” and could be translated as “powerful pot”. In both languages the term refers to a stew, which in Spain is usually made with chickpeas or beans, assorted meats like pork, beef, bacon, partridge, chicken, ham, and sausage, and vegetables such as carrots, leeks, cabbage, potatoes, and onions. The meal is traditionally prepared in a clay pot over several hours. So, rather than rotten food, potpourri probably implies food that has been stewing for a long time to enhance its flavour.

And finally

In Swedish, the word for a sandwich is “smörgås” which has given English speakers a “smorgasbord” - literally a “sandwich board”. As for the ubiquitous “sandwich” itself, its origin story was revealed in another article about mealtimes inspired by “Words Unravelled”. In the 18th-century it became fashionable among the British aristocracy to copy the French and eat a light meal in the evening while they gambled the night away. From this trend emerged a famous late-night snack that now dominates the modern lunchtime menu. The popular story goes that one evening during a 24-hour gambling session the 4th Earl of Sandwich, John Montagu, supposedly ordered his valet to bring him cold meats between two slices of toasted bread. In this manner he could eat his snack using just one hand while avoiding getting grease on anything else. Whether he was engrossed in an all-night card game or, as some suggest, working at his desk is not at all clear; both theories have been suggested. Whatever he was doing, the Earl’s name has ever since been attached to similar snacks, even though he probably was not the first person to place a filling between two pieces of bread. Oddly, however, if the tale is true then what we now call a “toasted sandwich” should, in fact, be just a “sandwich” and all other versions should be “non-toasted sandwiches”.

We have only just scratched the surface as there are many more food related words that could have been included. Perhaps Tastes Of History will return to the subject as discover the meaning behind other words, terms and phrases of a historical or culinary nature. If you have read this far then thank you and hopefully it has been a bit of fun. Bon appétit!

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Endnotes:

1. Alonso de Molina was a Franciscan priest and grammarian, who wrote a dictionary of the Nahuatl language published in 1571. ▲

2. Mozzarella is the Southern Italian diminutive form of mozza (“cut”), or mozzare (“to cut off”), derived from the method of producing the cheese. The earliest use of the word is in a 1570 cookbook by Bartolomeo Scappi who writes of “milk cream, fresh butter, ricotta cheese, fresh mozzarella and milk”. Reference to 12th-century pilgrims to the Monastery of Saint Lorenzo, in Capua, Campania being offered a piece of bread with “mozza” may date the term even earlier. Either way, mozzarella is not attested in the ancient Roman period. ▲

3. τρακτὸς, τρακτόν: “dough drawn out or rolled for pastry, Lat. tractum or tracta”, Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, A Greek-English Lexicon, on Perseus, retrieved May 7th, 2020. ▲

4. Serventi, S. & Sabban, F. (2002), “Pasta: The Story of a Universal Food”, Columbia University Press, p.16. ▲