riz de veau

[Laurence Horn]

Barry unearths
>
>   THE COOK, 24 August 1885, pg. 9, col. 2:
>
>   _KITCHEN ENGLISH IN FRANCE_
>   The use of English in the kitchen in France is as bizarre as the use of
>French in the kitchen in England or America.  The simple ginger snap is
>set down grandiloquently in the bill of fare of an American summer hotel
>as _gateaux de gingembre_.  And a recent bill of fare at the Grand Hotel
>in Paris offered "Irisch-stew, a la francaise"--truly a marvelous dish.
>(...) Hitherto we have held as legendary, only, the translation of _riz de
>veau a la financiere_ as "smile of the little cow in the style of the
>female financier"--but, after this, nothing is impossible.
>

THE COOK obviously could have profited from hiring a 19th century version
of The New Yorker's fact checkers, or at least from consulting a French
dictionary and grammar book; a RIZ is not a smile, although it may sound
like one when pronounced, since it's homophonous with RIS 'thymus' and with
RIS 'laugh', and it's not quite 'in the style of the female financier' but
'in the financier style", where the [implicit] head noun STYLE is feminine.
Maybe the folks at THE COOK really knew this, but if so Mark Twain was much
cleverer about such linguistic foibles.  The real questions raised by 'riz
de veau' (the French name for sweetbreads) are more curious than the
spurious ones:
1)  'Riz de veau' really "means" veal's rice (or, if you insist, little
cow's rice):  How did the word for thymus, RIS, get confused with the word
for rice, RIZ?  (Of course the two were homophones, as noted.)  Maybe the
French thought "riz de veau" was a euphemism, which brings up...
2)  Why do WE call them sweetbreads?  Is THAT a euphemism?