Category: F
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Filbert
The word hazelnut is a native English word, dating back to at least the eighth century. In the early fifteenth century, however, hazelnuts also came to be known as filberts, a name introduced by the French, who called the nut noix de Philibert because it is usually ready to be harvested on St. Philibert’s day,…
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Fettuccine
In Italian a large strip of something is called afetta, a little strip of something is called afettucina, and many little strips of something are called fettuccine. For this reason, a bowl full of little strips of pasta came to be called fettuccine. The particular dish known as fettuccine Alfredo—or technically fettuccine all’Alfredo—takes the last…
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Feta
Feta is made by allowing milk to curdle, pressing the curds into a mould, and then slicing the resulting mass into slabs that are soaked in brine. One of the stages in this process—the slicing—gives feta its name, deriving as it does from the Modern Greek tyri pheta, meaning cheese slice. The pheta part of…
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Feast
The word feast is related to the word festival, and of these two words it is festival that has remained closer in meaning to the Latin source from which they both derive. This Latin source was the word festa, the name given by the ancient Romans to public celebrations, celebrations that did not necessarily involve…
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Fasels
When a word tries to do too much, it may end up doing nothing at all. That may have been the fate of the now defunct fasels, a word used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to refer to both the chickpea and the kidney bean. The trouble with this double-duty was that it made…
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Fart
Most people are comfortable eating in front of others, but few feel at ease when it comes to publicly acknowledging the other end of the alimentary canal. Farting, for example, especially during a meal, has long been considered outre. The ancient historian Suetonius records a story of a man who nearly died of distension after…
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Fare
Once an everyday term, the word fare, meaning food provided by a host, now seems relegated to a few old-fashioned phrases such as bill of fare and daily fare; anyone who now uses the word on its own—as in “My dear fellow, what fare do you offer today?”—instantly declares himself to be someone we will…
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Farctate
When you are so full that you can eat no more, you are farctate. Like the word farce, farctate derives from the Latin farcire, meaning to stuff.
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Farce
Farce is a seasoned mixture of chopped ingredients that chefs stuff into other things—things like chickens, fish, or even ravioli. Farce is also known as stuffing, dressing, or forcemeat. Etymologists once believed that farce was a corruption of the word force in forcemeat, but in fact the opposite is true: farce comes from the Latin…
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Fanny adams
One of the paradoxes of human nature is that we are capable of mocking the death of someone we probably would have risked our own life to save. In 1867, an eight-year-old child named Fanny Adams was murdered and dismembered in England. Members of the distinguished Royal Navy, perhaps distanced from the tragedy by the…