Category: W
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Worcestershire sauce
Worcestershire sauce takes its name from the English county—or shire—of Worcestershire, the home of the condiment’s inventor, Sir Marcus Sandys. With the assistance of the English grocers, Lea and Perrins, Sandys began selling his sauce in 1838, which by the 1860s had also come to be known as Worcester sauce, Worcester being the town that…
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Won ton
In Cantonese, won ton means dumpling, which is exactly what a won ton is, whether it is served in soup or as part of a side dish. In English, won tons were first referred to by name in the early 1930s. A culinary dish that is similar in appearance to kreplach or ravioli is commonly…
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Wishbone
By the early seventeenth century, the archery and arm-wrestling competitions that once followed medieval feasts had evolved into another sort of mighty contest: the custom of boldly plunging one’s ruffled arm into the chicken carcase, skilfully extricating—like Arthur pulling Excalibur from the stone—the furcula of the bird, and blithely challenging a fellow dinner guest to…
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Winkle
The winkle is a small, edible snail, one usually poached and then eaten with bread and butter. Its name, first recorded in the mid sixteenth century, is short for periwinkle, which dates back another fifty years to the early sixteenth century. Periwinkle in turn derives from the Old English pinewinde, meaning shellfish, formed by combining…
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Wine
The ancient Romans called fermented grape juice vinum, the source not only of the English wine—first recorded in the ninth century—but also of the German wein, the Dutch wijn, the French, Swedish, and Danish vin, the Italian, Spanish, and Russian vino, and even the Welsh gwin. The Latin word for wine—vinum—also gave rise to vinea,…
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Windfall
Centuries ago, and probably still in some rural areas, the day after a storm was pie-day, the day on which all the apples and pears that had been blown down by the wind were gathered and turned into pies, pastries, and jams. Because it was the wind that sent them tumbling to earth, these apple…
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White baker
In an early example of a trade guild trying to make its work seem more complex than it really is, bakers in thirteenth-century England divided themselves into The Company of White Bakers and The Company of Brown Bakers, the former devoted to the production of white bread, the latter to brown.
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Whisk
Cats have whiskers so they can gauge the size of hole they are tempted to slip through; chefs have whisks so that they can quickly beat an egg into a homogenous liquid. Both these tools take their name from a Germanic source meaning twig, because both whisks and whiskers resemble a small, pliable branch. Whisks,…
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Whet
A thousand years ago, you did not say your kitchen knives needed to be sharpened: you said they needed to be whetted. In fact, the word sharpen was not used to describe the act of giving a knife a better cutting edge until the sixteenth century. Once established, however, the word sharpen gradually overtook whet,…
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Welsh rabbit
Welsh rabbit contains no rabbit and is not Welsh in origin; instead, it is a dish of melted cheese poured over toast, invented by the British and given its name to mock the Welsh, who were supposedly so gullible that they would accept such a dish as real rabbit. The dish was first referred to…