World Wide Words -- 11 Jul 11

[Michael Quinion]

WORLD WIDE WORDS           ISSUE 740          Saturday 11 June 2011
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Author/editor: Michael Quinion      US advisory editor: Julane Marx
Website: http://www.worldwidewords.org               ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Article: Of messes in pots.
A. Subscription information.
B. E-mail contact addresses.
C. Ways to support World Wide Words.


1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HOLIDAY BREAK  As forewarned last week, I am taking a month's break 
until 9 July. Until then, I'm reprinting each week revised versions 
of pieces that first appeared in my book Gallimaufry.


2. Article: Of messes in pots
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Old-time cookery could at its best be as sophisticated in its own 
way as ours is today, but for ordinary people it often consisted of 
variations on the theme of putting ingredients in a pot of water 
and boiling them. The name of one such ancient dish appears in a 
moderately well-known expression:

    Ford was certain of only one thing: he did not intend 
    to ... sell humanity's birthright for a mess of 
    pottage.
    [Methuselah's Children, by Robert Heinlein, 1963.]

Those who know the Bible will recognise the allusion to the story 
of Jacob and Esau in Chapter 25 of Genesis. The expression "sell 
one's birthright for a mess of pottage" isn't in the 1611 King 
James Bible, but is a heading in the 1560 Geneva Bible. It's now an 
idiom that means a thing of little value (sometimes spoonerised 
into "pot of message"), though most people who use it would be hard 
pressed to define either pottage or mess. The latter is an obsolete 
term for a serving of food (it's from Latin "missum", something put 
on the table), from which the military mess gets its name. Pottage 
comes from French "potage", a word that may still be found on the 
menus of posh English restaurants, which meant something put into a 
pot, hence a stew - the Biblical original was made from lentils.

Pottages were important in medieval cookery - pottage, bread and 
ale were the staples for much of the population. For ordinary 
people pottages were often no more than oatmeal, stewed roots or 
boiled vegetables, as in the pease pottage that some of us remember 
from the children's rhyme:

    Pease pottage hot,
    Pease pottage cold,
    Pease pottage in a pot,
    Nine days old.
    ["Pease", from Old English "pise", peas, is the 
    original form, usually plural, that led to "pea" being 
    mistakenly created as the singular.]

So totally has pottage gone out of use that the rhyme often appears 
as "Pease porridge hot ...", though as we shall see that's not an 
unreasonable alteration.

Blancmange and gravy were two pottages with names we can still 
recognise. The latter wasn't then the juices of meat - it didn't 
take on that meaning until Elizabethan times - but a more ornate 
sweet and spicy sauce of ground almonds and broth, seasoned with 
sugar and ginger, into which was placed small pieces of oysters, 
eels, rabbit, or chicken. Its name is probably a misreading by 
scribes of Old French "grané", a grain of spice. Blancmange 
(originally "blancmanger", from Old French "blanc mangier", white 
food) wasn't then a dessert but a mild meat dish without any strong 
spices in it, containing chicken, rice, almonds, sugar, eggs, and 
cream. Leave out the meat and you're halfway to our modern version, 
which became a sweet jelly in the eighteenth century.

The names of most ancient pottages are now unfamiliar, such as 
porray. Strictly speaking, this should have been made from leeks, 
because the name is from the Latin "purrum" for that vegetable, but 
the word got confused with the French "purée" and so became a 
general word for all sorts of thick broths. White porry was mainly 
leeks, but green porray (also called joute, from the Old French 
word for a pot-herb or vegetable) was a varied and variable 
confection of green leaves according to season or that could be 
harvested from the fields or hedgerows, such as beet leaves (a 
favourite) or coleworts. This was a general name for any sort of 
brassica, which weren't as differentiated as they are now; "cole" 
is Old English, from Latin "caulis", cabbage, the origin of our 
modern "kale"; "wort" was a general name for a useful plant. Other 
less familiar native English plants might be included, such as 
docks, borage, or bugloss, possibly with parsley, thyme, mint or 
sorrel added to flavour it.

Frumenty (Old French "frumentee" from Latin "frumentum," corn) was 
often a dish for poor people, being hulled wheat boiled in milk, 
perhaps with egg yolks beaten in to thicken and colour it (rye or 
barley were sometimes substituted for wheat). Better-off households 
might add almonds, cream, currants, and sugar to enhance the 
flavour and might serve it with venison; by the 1700s it had become 
a sweet dish served as dessert. In the Wessex dialect spelling 
"furmity", it has its place in literature:

    Furmity, as the woman had said, was nourishing, and as 
    proper a food as could be obtained within the four seas; 
    though, to those not accustomed to it, the grains of 
    wheat swollen as large as lemon-pips, which floated on 
    its surface, might have a deterrent effect at first.
    [The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy, 1886. 
    Frumenty laced with rum shortly afterwards caused Michael 
    Henchard to sell his wife and child at the village 
    fair.]

Grand houses, with better resources and skilled cooks, could ring 
the changes on a lot of different pottages. They used a variety of 
sauces that supplied most of the flavour, as well as many of their 
names, which had usually been brought over from French. Mortrews or 
mortress (Old French "morterel" or "morteruel", a kind of milk 
soup) was based on milk and bread, with various pounded-up meats 
added to it, such as chicken or pork. Blanc dessore (from Old 
French; corrupted later to the meaningless English blank desire) 
was similar, sometimes served side by side with mawmenny or 
malmeny, essentially chicken with almonds and wine (the origins of 
these names is obscure). Egerdouce was a sweet and sour pottage 
that included a sauce of raisins, currants, and honey for the sweet 
flavour and vinegar for the sour (the name is from French "aigre-
doux", sour-sweet, but was Anglicized in various ways, including 
"eager-dulce" and even "egg-douce", though it had no eggs in it).

Charlet (from an Old French name for a type of pot) was usually 
boiled shredded pork mixed with eggs, milk and saffron seasoning, 
not so different from jussell or "jusshell (Old French "jussel", a 
juice or broth), which was a broth of various meats with eggs, 
breadcrumbs and saffron. Yet another pottage was bukkenade; the 
first English cookery book, The Forme of Cury ("cury" then meant 
cookery, from Old French "queurie"), compiled by Richard II's 
master cooks about 1390, said this was made from chicken, rabbit, 
veal or other meat, stewed with almonds, currants, sugar, onions 
and salt, thickened if necessary with flour and again coloured with 
saffron.

Many later recipes confirm that the type of meat in these recipes 
wasn't important, since the sauce created the flavour. The key 
feature of civey was onions (its name isn't French, but Old 
English, from "cipe", a type of onion, from which we get "chive", 
so it's unconnected with modern French "civet", a stew of rabbit or 
hare). Cullis (ultimately from Latin "colare", to strain or sieve) 
is recorded from the early fifteenth century. It was often made 
with chicken, though other meats or fish could replace it; it was 
boiled and strained to make a thick broth that was considered to be 
good for invalids. In the eighteenth century one variety became 
known as beef tea.

In the sixteenth century the term hasty pudding begin to be applied 
to a dish of flour boiled in water to a thick consistency, with 
milk or beer afterwards added; the name comes from the speed with 
which it could be prepared, not quite up to today's instant mixes, 
but quick enough. This was as much a porridge as a pottage, and 
indeed the word "porridge" evolved from "pottage", though the first 
porridges often contained vegetables, herbs or meat and the word 
was applied specifically to a salted or sweetened oatmeal dish only 
in the 1640s. Another name for the dish in Scotland and Northern 
England was crowdie, a word of unknown origin that seems not to be 
connected with the much more recent term for a type of Scottish 
cottage cheese often served with cream.

A similar dish was flummery (from Welsh "llymru"; perhaps related 
to "llymrig", soft or slippery), first mentioned by Gervase Markham 
in his English Housewife of 1623. He called it "an excellent dish" 
of "wholesomeness and rare goodness"; it was made by steeping 
wheatmeal or oatmeal in water, then straining and boiling it until 
it was "a thick and stiff jelly"; it was served with honey, wine, 
beer, or milk. Later that century it became a light, sweet dish 
made with eggs and flour. Its name was borrowed in the next century 
to describe empty compliments or nonsense:

    This word "flummery", you must know, Sir, means at 
    London, "flattery", and "compliment"; and is the present 
    reigning word among the beaux and belles. Pardon my 
    telling you what your dictionary would not have told 
    you.
    [Letter by Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone, 29 
    Nov. 1749.]

As the centuries passed, pottages went out of favour and their 
components were separately developed, with the meat element being 
served instead as fricassées, hashes, ragouts and similar dishes, 
and the sauces becoming distinct culinary items. All three words 
are French: fricassée from "fricasser", to cut up and cook in 
sauce; hash comes via "hacher", to cut up, from "hache", a hatchet; 
and ragout from "ragoûter", to revive the taste of a dish.

The thin broth derived from stewing meat also began to be served as 
a separate course, for which another French word, "soupe", was 
borrowed; in French this was broth poured on slices of bread, a 
thing commonly done in earlier centuries with pottages, and for 
which the closely related English sop was used. "Soup", in that 
sense and spelling, came into the English language only in the 
middle of the seventeenth century. One of its earliest users 
recorded it thus:

    W. Hewer and I did walk to the Cocke, at the end of 
    Suffolke Streete, where I never was, a great ordinary, 
    mightily cried up, and there bespoke a pullett; which, 
    while dressing, he and I walked into St. James's Park, 
    and thence back, and dined very handsome, with a good 
    soup, and a pullet, for 4s. 6d. the whole.
    [Diary, by Samuel Pepys, 15 Mar. 1668. An ordinary was 
    a set meal in an eating-house or tavern. The term comes 
    from a thing that is ordained - set out by custom or 
    rule.]

Pepys was very fond of his food. Some of the meals described in his 
diary might cause indigestion today just from reading about them:

    We had a fricasee of rabbits and chickens, a leg of 
    mutton boiled, three carps in a dish, a great dish of a 
    side of lamb, a dish of roasted pigeons, a dish of four 
    lobsters, three tarts, a lamprey pie (a most rare pie), a 
    dish of anchovies, good wine of several sorts, and all 
    things mighty noble and to my great content.
    [Diary, 4 Apr. 1663.]

Lampreys (from Latin "lambere", to lick, plus "petra", stone, 
because the lamprey attaches itself to stones by its mouth) are a 
native freshwater fish, notorious for supposedly having caused the 
death of Henry I (though the Dictionary of National Biography says 
firmly "The legend that Henry died of 'a surfeit of lampreys' has 
no basis in the historical record. It was not that he ate too many 
lampreys, but that his physician had advised him not to eat any at 
all"); in a lamprey pie they were baked in butter, drained, and 
then sealed under more butter so they would keep; Pepys's pie 
almost certainly came up from Gloucester and contained the famous 
Severn lampreys. Pepys also mentions "hog's pudding", an early type 
of sausage that today is regarded as a traditional Cornish dish; in 
his time the entrails of a hog were stuffed with a mixture either 
of oatmeal, suet, and tripe, or of flour, currants, and spices.

In July 1663 Pepys recorded eating umbles:

    Mrs. Turner came in, and did bring us an umble pie hot 
    out of her oven, extraordinary good.

Umbles were originally "numbles" (the first letter was especially 
variable, since the original was Latin "lumbulus", the diminutive 
of "lumbus", loin), which were the innards of the deer - the liver, 
heart, entrails and other third-class bits. It was common practice 
in medieval times after a hunt to serve umble pie made from these 
parts of the animal to the servants who had taken part. In the 
nineteenth century, in the phrase "eating humble pie", and with a 
nod to its lowly origins, it was created as a punning term for the 
state of being deeply apologetic. In Pepys's day, umble pie clearly 
had a higher status, since he records serving it to his boss Sir 
William Batten, Surveyor of the Navy; Pepys is often rude about 
Batten in his diary, but would hardly feed him low-class rubbish.

Pepys doesn't record "salmagundi" because the name is first 
recorded shortly after he stopped writing his diary for fear of his 
eyesight failing. It has been known by many names, including 
"salladmagundy" and "Solomon Gundy" (it can be traced back to the 
French "salmigondis", but there the etymological trail goes cold, 
though theories abound). Like its name it was a rather variable 
dish. Elizabeth Moxon, in her English Housewife in 1764, describes 
it as a Lenten dish and instructs the cook to take "herrings, a 
quarter of a pound of anchovies, a large apple, a little onion ... 
or shalot, and a little lemon-peel" and shred them all together. 
Other recipes suggested eggs, chicken, almonds, grapes, and raisins 
as ingredients. This highly variable mix led salmagundi later to 
take on the sense of a mixture or miscellany. Solomon Gundy was 
also sometimes known as Solomon Grundy, which may explain the 
nursery rhyme about "Solomon Grundy, born on a Monday ..." and the 
name of Mrs Grundy, the personification of social conformity and 
disapproval, whose name first appears in Thomas Morton's play Speed 
the Plough in 1798.

Other terms for confused concoctions also come from cookery. A 
hotchpotch or hodgepodge was in the fifteenth century term a meat 
broth or pottage that contained a lot of ingredients (its first 
form was "hotchpot", from the French word that contained the verb 
"hocher" to shake, suggesting ingredients mixed up in a pot; later 
versions are popular misunderstandings that turned the term into a 
rhyming couplet). Another, from the next century, is gallimaufry 
(French "galimafrée", a word of unknown origin), a hash made up of 
odds and ends of leftovers. In the seventeenth century, balderdash, 
now meaning nonsense, was an unappetising mixture of incompatible 
drinks, such as beer and milk or beer and wine; despite lots of 
theories, nobody knows where this one comes from.


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