Eating Your Words: Adventures in Food Etymology and History

There are very few men and women, I suspect, who cooked and marketed their way through the past war without losing forever some of the nonchalant extravagance of the Twenties. They will feel, until their final days on earth, a kind of culinary caution: butter, no matter how unlimited, is a precious substance not lightly to be wasted; meats, too, and eggs, and all the far-brought spices of the world, take on a new significance, having once been so rare. And that is good, for there can be no more shameful carelessness than with the food we eat for life itself. When we exist without thought or thanksgiving we are not men, but beasts.
~M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

Sometimes we feel like we need a dictionary to go to a restaurant. What's a reduction? Is pork belly the same thing as bacon? Why has the food been deconstructed? Or, we're eating something, and we think, who first thought up preserving food and how many people died before they got it right? When was yeast first used to make something rise, and how was that property of yeast discovered? We have been cooking for centuries, though ingredients and diets have changed over time, but who originally  thought up all these cooking techniques?

Well, some of these questions are now answerable, and you need look no farther than your library catalog for some of those answers. You could start with browsing the Larousse Gastronomique, but that's a big book, covering a lot of ground - you might be better served by something more specific, such as one of the following books featuring food etymology and/or history:


Words to Eat By: Five Foods and the Culinary History of the English Language by Ina Lipkowitz

Tasty: The Art and Science of What We Eat by John McQuaid

Eatymology: The Dictionary of Modern Gastronomy by Josh Friedland [eBook]

The Deluxe Food Lover's Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst and Ron Herbst

The Oxford Companion to Food by Alan Davidson 

Meathooked: The History and Science of Our 2.5-Million-Year Obsession with Meat by Marta Zaraska 

Sweet As Sin: The Unwrapped Story of How Candy Became America's Favorite Pleasure by Susan Benjamin 

100 Million Years of Food: What Our Ancestors Ate and Why It Matters Today by Stephen Le

Rhapsody in Schmaltz: Yiddish Food and Why We Can't Stop Eating It by Michael Wex 

Chilled: How Refrigeration Changed the World and Might Do So Again by Tom Jackson 

Food in the Air and Space: The Surprising History of Food and Drink in the Skies by Richard Foss 

Vitamania: Our Obsessive Quest for Nutritional Perfection by Catherine Price  

First Bite: How We Learn to Eat by Bee Wilson 

The Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes But Fed Up With Fondue (Plus Baconomics, Superfoods, and Other Secrets From the World of Food Trends) by David Sax

Kitchen Literacy: How We Lost Knowledge of Where Food Comes From and Why We Need to Get It Back by Ann Vileisis

Fear of Food: A History of Why We Worry About What We Eat by Harvey Levenstein

In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America by Maureen Ogle 

The American Plate: A Culinary History in 100 Bites by Libby H. O'Connell

Do you have a burning culinary question that you don't think would be answered by one of the books on this list? Let us know in the comments, and we'll try to find you a match!