Category: G
-
Graze
Around ten at night, as I sidle stealthily toward the fridge, my wife will often call out, “Mark, no grazing!” She means, of course, that I shouldn’t snack between meals, a North American habit that came to be known as grazing in the late 1970s. The word is apt because it implies the oblivious munching…
-
Gravy
When gravy first appeared in English at the end of the fourteenth century it referred to a fancy sauce for white meat made from broth, almond milk, wine, and spices; it was not until the end of the sixteenth century that it came to mean a sauce made from meat juices. The source of this…
-
Grapefruit
The grapefruit acquired its name in the early nineteenth century because its fruit grows in clusters like grapes; the word grape, in fact, once meant cluster. The grapefruit is a citrus fruit that is characterized by its large size and yellow skin. Its origins can be traced back to China and the East Indies, and…
-
Grape
Long ago, grapes were known in England only as wineberries, a name that suggests that the clusters were not so much plucked and eaten as stomped on and fermented. At the end of the thirteenth century a new name, grape, was borrowed from the French, who had long used the word to refer not to…
-
Granola
In the late nineteenth century, W. K. Kellogg invented a cereal he called Granola, made of wheat, oats, and cornmeal. Kellogg’s inspiration for the name was the word granulated, the idea being that the cereal is made by cooking its ingredients until they become clumped, or granulated. Granita, the name of an Italian sorbet, likewise…
-
Gob
Gob was adopted in the fourteenth century from Old French, where the word was used to mean a mouthful of food. The word still exists in Modern French, but now refers to a food-ball used to poison packs of wild dogs, or a ball of roughage sometimes found in the stomachs of sheep. In English,…
-
Gnocchi
The small, curled dumplings known as gnocchi take their name from the Italian nocchio, meaning knot. The word appeared in English at the end of the nineteenth century. Gnocchi is a type of dumpling that is crafted from farina potatoes or flour, which is then rolled into slender, rope-like strips, measuring approximately three-quarters of an…
-
Glutton
Despite their enlightened attempt to become one with the universe by devouring everything it contains, gluttons are often depicted as greasy, grunting grub-grabbers, gratifying their gross appetites with whatever falls within their greedy grasp. Their name, however, has a more temperate and less alliterative origin: it derives simply from the French gluton, which in turn…
-
Gizzard
Lacking teeth, a chicken must grind its food in some other way, a process accomplished in its gizzard. Before reaching the gizzard, however, the chicken’s lunch must pass through its craw or crop, a pouch in the bird’s gullet where gastric juice begins to soften the food. (Nowadays, the word craw is best known in…
-
Gin
Gin was invented in the mid seventeenth century by a Dutch doctor who claimed that his new spirit cured a variety of ailments; because it was flavoured with oil from juniper berries, the doctor called his wonder tonic genever, meaning juniper, a word that derives from the Latin name for the juniper plant, juniper us.…