Food French/Food Frankish
There's a fun thread over on Languagehat today about the word "vindaloo", which is apparently derived from a Portugese word for garlic wine sauce, and not Indian at all. In addition to the obligatory flamewar about cooking marinated meats, the commenters point to other examples of borrowing culinary terms and techniques from unexpected sources. Fish tacos, for example, came to Baja California from Portugal, via Japan.
Trade isn't the only way to acquire cooking terms, however. Anyone who's studied a bit of casual sociolinguistics knows that English got its name-of-animal/name-of-meat distinction from the Norman Conquest. English peasants slaughtered a cow, but at the table of their French-speaking lords, it became beef. The same applied to swine/pork, chicken/pullet, deer/venison, calf/veal and so on.
But where did French words themselves come from? Many of the cooking terms we've borrowed from French show Germanic origins, probably dating from Frankish rule:
- English broil was borrowed from brûler. But brûler was apparently a portmanteau of usler (of Latin origin) and bruir/broïr ("to burn"), from the Germanic *brojan.
- Growing up in the western marches of Cajun country, I ate plenty of crawfish étouffé. étouffer itself means "smothered", and is likely an alternation of Old French estoper. That makes it a cognate of stop, which an étouffé fan is unlikely to do.
- French rôtir comes from the Germanic verb *raustjan. I have no idea if the English word is borrowed from rôtir or inherited from the proto-Germanic root.
- My favorite of the the Frankish/French terms is "soup". French soupe, comes from Frankish *suppa. The meaning, however, shows a delightful semantic drift. Soupe originally meant not a stew-like meal, but slice of bread to be dipped in broth. The term came to refer to the dish itself, and then just ot the dipping sauce. That's the meaning English borrowed when the Normans invaded. But whatever happened to the English cognate for *suppa? It's still around, in sop.
Posted by Ben Brumfield at August 11, 2006 04:44 PM