food words - Felicia Davin

Sign in Subscribe

food words

A collection of 21 posts

three book covers: A Novel Arrangement by Arden Powell, Femme Like Her by Fiona Zedde, and The Spy and The Traitor by Ben Macintyre

Literal and figurative toasts

a toast to romance novels and one of my favorite spies

Pudding eater blues

yeah we're talking about Sherry Thomas again

A costly dish

in which I’m perilously out of my depth re: food words (but perfectly at home re: romance novels)

Snits

Hello, Word Suitcase readers! This newsletter normally arrives in your inbox on Sunday, which today is not. In theory it also comes every two weeks. I meant to send this last weekend, but our household was struck by back-to-back illnesses, the second of which was covid. We’re recovering, but

Future Cake

HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO, expr. For a long time I didn’t understand this expression. As a kid I thought, “isn’t having a piece of cake the same thing as eating a piece of cake?” After all, in English you can ask “would you like to

Archive dive

Word Suitcase is going on hiatus, n.—this word comes to English directly from Latin, where it meant “gap”—for a little while. I do have a few more word origins to share before I go, though. In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I finally finished Michael W.

Get on top

CREAM, n. We had to buy cream of tartar (potassium bitartrate) recently, and my beloved pointed out that the “cream” in cream of tartar must have an interesting etymology; it’s not the fatty part of milk, so why is it called “cream”? My first thought was that perhaps potassium

Cloven, clove, cleaved, cleft

Cloven, clove, cleaved, cleft

CLOVE, n. So I was baking again—as discussed previously I am always baking—and thinking about cloves (Syzygium aromaticum, the spice) and cloves (of garlic) and wondering why English would use the same word for two such very different things. The answer, naturally, is that it’s not the

Basket cases and pies

Basket cases and pies

COFFIN, n. I’ve been baking a lot lately—honestly sort of an unhinged amount, but what else am I supposed to do with myself, write my novel? (Yes.) Naturally, my baking includes reading about baked goods, so when I came across a mention of etymology in an essay about

False cities and restorations

French literature

False cities and restorations

FAUBOURG, n., RESTAURANT, n. A good way to make yourself sad during a pandemic—not that we have a shortage! and admittedly this sadness is trivial and selfish—is to read a book about a city you can’t travel to that lists restaurants you couldn’t safely eat inside

Bloodhounds and red herrings

Bloodhounds and red herrings

RED HERRING, n., exp. Without even trying to, in my head I had made up a whole little fake history for this expression. “Probably there was some groundbreaking important murder mystery with a literal red herring in it,” I said to myself, “and it was misdirection, and that’s why

Mastication

MASTIC, n. We had mastic candy from Turkey in our house this week. (This newsletter is not #sponcon, but the candy came to us through our Universal Yums subscription, which is incidentally also the reason licorice was on my mind a few weeks ago.) I had never encountered mastic before,

Garlic and wine

VINDALOO, n. This word is far outside my expertise, but I looked it up this week because I was watching Cobra Kai on Netflix, which is a goofy show about punching and how being the protagonist of an 80s high school movie leaves you with emotional scars, and on that

Ricolisse

LICORICE, n. This is the name of a plant whose roots can be dried and use to flavor food. It comes from a Greek term meaning “sweet root,” glykyrrhiza, which became “liquiritia” by the time Late Latin speakers got a hold of it. The way we spell it in English

Joints and popsicles

Joints and popsicles

Since I left Substack this week, I was thinking about expressions people use when they’re leaving a place, and I landed on “let’s blow this popsicle stand” as a particularly puzzling one. Why does “blow” mean “leave”? Where are all these popsicle stands and why are people leaving

Marmalade

MARMALADE, n. One of many wonderful things that happened in my introductory French classes last semester was a moment when, after I had taught the reflexive verb se coucher, meaning “to lie down, to go to bed,” a keen-eared student asked in English, “Is this like that song?” Video Block

Suck-egg grannies

A couple readers asked me about the expression “teaching grandmother to suck eggs.” I’ve never heard anyone say this in conversation, but the expression came up a couple times in my googling for last week’s newsletter on weasels and sucking eggs. I didn’t include it because I

Nuts to all that

Nuts to all that

PECAN, n. I’ve been reading, very slowly, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The author is a botanist and a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and the book is a beautiful collection of essays about gratitude and reciprocity and

Eating and reading

KECAP, n. This week I made a recipe that called for kecap manis, which is an Indonesian sweet soy sauce. Kecap manis is not readily available in the groceries of small-town Kentucky, where I am this week and where I grew up. So I had to look it up to

Ladies can have little a ham sandwich, as a treat

DÉJEUNER, n., v. This French word, déjeuner, is made up of the same morphemes (units of meaning) as its English counterpart, breakfast. In French, the verb jeuner means “to fast” and dé- is a negative prefix, much like de- in English (defrost, debunk, decipher, etc.). So déjeuner is to de-fast,

Bacon from heaven

Bacon from heaven

TOCINO DE CIELO, n. This noun is a Spanish dessert, sort of like a flan, and I encountered on it a restaurant menu this week while out celebrating J’s birthday. I always tell people that restaurant menus are the hardest thing to read in any language. Sometimes people think