Although we now use them metaphorically to refer to a confused mess of anything, the words hodgepodge, gallimaufry, and farrago all originated as names of jumbled mixtures of food. The oldest of these three is hodgepodge, a word that, in a slightly different form, dates back in English to the fourteenth century. At that time, the word was spelt hotch-pot, a form closer to the original French source of the term: the pot is the French pot, meaning a deep pan for cooking, while the hatch is a corrupt form of the French verb hocher, meaning to shake together. Originally, therefore, the term hotch-pot referred to a simple dish of vegetables and meat, shaken together and cooked in a pot. Over time, though, the pronunciation and spelling of hotch-pot was corrupted as people unconsciously changed the last half of the word to rhyme with the first half: the resulting hotch-potch appeared in the late sixteenth century, and is still the form used by many people in England. By the early seventeenth century the word had been further corrupted to hodgepodge, the form that now, at least in Canada, seems to prevail. As these changes in spelling and pronunciation occurred, the word’s original culinary sense faded into the background, and its metaphorical application to jumbles and mixtures of all kinds came to predominate. The word gallimaufry, like the word hodgepodge, also originated as a French cooking term: it referred to a stew made from varied ingredients, and it was formed by compounding the Middle French galer, meaning to rejoice, with the Middle French mafrer, meaning to eat abundantly (galer is also the source of the English gala, meaning a party). English adopted this French compound in the late sixteenth century, using it both as the name of a culinary dish and as a synonym for zany mixture. Adopted slightly later, in the early seventeenth century, was farrago, a Latin word which the ancient Romans bestowed on a blend of grains fed to cattle, but which the English borrowed to mean ridiculous medley. The source of farrago is the Latin far, meaning corn, a word that also gave rise to farina, an alternate name for corn flour. Incidentally, before the word farrago was adopted by English, such blends of grain were called bullimong, an odd word whose last half derives from the Old English imong, meaning mixture, and whose first half is of unknown origin. Other particularly strange words that once referred to mixtures of food include minglemangle, powsoddy, jussel, and olio. The first of these odd-looking terms, mingle-mangle, emerged in the mid sixteenth century as a name for the hodgepodge of scraps fed to pigs, and was formed by combining the verb mingle (meaning to mix together) with mangle (meaning to tear to pieces). Powsoddy also appeared in the sixteenth century, and was the name of a dish made from a sheep head and an assortment of other ingredients; the word likely derives from pow, a Scottish term meaning head, and sodden, meaning boiled. Somewhat older, dating back to the late fourteenth century, is jussel, the name of a stewlike dish made by mincing and mixing meat and herbs; the word derives through French from the Latin jus, meaning broth, which is also the source of the English juice. Finally, olio refers to a dish of Spanish origin made from beef, chicken, bacon, pumpkin, cabbage, turnip, and other ingredients; adopted by English in the mid seventeenth century, olio derives from the Spanish olla, meaning pot.