Mushroom first appeared in English at the end of the 14th century, borrowed from the Anglo-French musherum and the Central French moisseron. (Rx is a medieval abbreviation of the word.) In Western medieval and early modern manuscripts, it was used to instruct people how to take medical prescriptions: “Recipe honey with codfish oil,” for example. It’s the imperative form of the Latin verb recipere, which means to receive or take. The etymologies of food words, she said, are a path through the history of how we eat and cook. Tschann, who taught English and linguistics for many years at the University of Redlands, in California. It has playfulness built into it, and so does food,” said Dr. Do your friends dipping into a bowl of guacamole need to know that the word avocado started out as ahuacatl, a Nahuatl term that the Aztecs likely used as slang for testicles? Or that soufflé comes the French word for blown, which stems from the same root as the word flatulent? Over the Caesar salad, you could casually mention that the English word romaine comes from the medieval French laitue romaine, or Roman lettuce, which possibly arrived in France along with the popes who moved to Avignon from Rome to escape some nasty politics in the early 1300s.īut here’s a pro tip: When sharing food lore at a meal, it’s easy to cross the line. The smooth stripes are the milk, the bumpy ones the sugar. You could inform her that the British took the word seersucker from the Hindi sirsakar, which itself came from a Persian word meaning milk and sugar. Say someone shows up in a seersucker suit.
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