Eat Your Words. Paul Convery

for Every Taste

       Chapter 17

       Supplying, Selling, and Serving

       Chapter 18

       Kitchen and Table

      Come Dine with Me

       Chapter 19

       Dinners: Making a Meal of It

       Chapter 20

       Dining: Gastronomy and Gustation

       Chapter 21

       Diners: A Glossary of Gourmets and Gourmands

       Postscript

       Select Bibliography

       About the Author

Preface

      Welcome to Eat Your Words—the most gloriously gluttonous glossary of all things grub and gastronomy.

      An advanced alimentary vocabulary for bon viveurs and verbivores alike, Eat Your Words brings to the table a cordon bleu compilation of six thousand often unusual and unfamiliar terms across twenty-one fact-packed courses, offering the reader a unique feast of learning as well as a fun and flavour-filled dip into the fascinating language of food and eating.

      Anyone with a hunger for weird and wonderful words, or simply consumed with curiosity about the wider world of cooking and cuisine, will assuredly find something to savour and devour on every page of this richly satisfying read and indispensable reference work.

      This is the one dictionary you will always be glad you swallowed.

      Spice up your lex life with a banquet of recondite and recherché words sure to make your mouth water—from abligurition, abrosia and abyrtaca to zomotherapeutics, zoosaprophagy and zuuzuus & whamwhams.

      Do you know the difference between macaroni and macaroon, macadamia and macedoine, madeleine and madrilène? What about mazagan, mazamorra and mazzard? All are items of food, and more manna than maw-wallop to the magirologist. Mind and apply your masticators to the manducation of said fare, or you may get maldigestion. And always consume in moderation, lest you bloat with the girth of a macrogaster.

      When would you use a frixory or a furcifer, and where would you find a boar-frank or a broilerhouse? What would you buy from an oporopolist or an opsonator, and whom would you meet at a parrillada or a poggle-khana? Why would you calver or caveach, concasse or consewe? How does your fave plate taste: saccharaceous, salsamentarious, subacidulous?

      Find out inside—and prepare to dazzle family, friends and all the foodies you know with your effortless eatymological erudition.

      Eat Your Words is no standard, straight-through A to Z, however. It is, rather, the first work to showcase the terminology of food, cookery, and stomach-stuffing across a number of discrete subject areas, covering curious meals from far and wide and their many intriguing ingredients, the craft and artifice of the culinarian, food science and technology, diet and appetite, the catering trade, dining in and out, the pleasures of the palate, and so much more besides. The result is a specially themed and structured encyclofeedia no word buff, food lover or good writer will want to be without.

      Here’s what’s on the menu.

      Our starter section, Of Flora, Fauna, & Food, addresses the very substance and source of food itself. Chapter 1 treats of food groups and food in the general sense—classes and categories, qualities and quantities. Chapters 2 and 3 provide a modest inventory from the myriad basic stuffs and staples found across the plant and animal kingdoms, respectively, alongside some of the many primary food products humankind has derived therefrom. Finally, Chapter 4 deals with food production, processing, and provision—from primitive hunting and harvesting to early agriculture and animal husbandry to modern farms, fisheries and factories.

      The following section, Dainty Dishes & Choice Cuisine, then presents a smorgasbord of the finest prepared fare anywhere for the reader’s delectation. Chapter 5 offers a generous serving of old concoctions and odd confections from the good kitchens of the Anglosphere. This is complemented in Chapter 6 by a wide selection of delicacies honouring the culinary traditions and diverse cuisines of communities across all four corners of planet Earth.

      Our next main section asks, What’s Cooking? Chapter 7 answers by way of a comprehensive digest of cooks and chefs, domestic and professional alike, along with a treasury of tips, tricks, and techniques used in the kitchen. Chapter 8, meantime, considers the properties and particularities of foods both fair and foul, itemizing the different tastes, textures, and so forth of the multitudinous victuals and viands cooked and eaten by man.

      By way of a side, Something to Digest shifts our lexical focus away from cookery and cuisine onto consumption and chemistry. Chapter 9 is devoted to matters pertaining not to what, but rather to how we eat and digest, cataloguing the full gamut of gastric processes—and problems—running from gob through gullet to gut. The themes of nourishment and human dietary health are developed further as Chapter 10 delves into the language of food science and safety.

      You Are What You Eat examines our eating habits both good and bad, listing the wealth of dietary choices and lifestyles commonly available today (Chapter 11) and, contrariwise, those cravings best considered downright crazy or depraved (Chapter 12). As an accompaniment to the above, the feeding practices and preferences of assorted vores, trophs, and phages across the natural world are also classified (Chapter 13).

      Our subsequent courses enjoin you, dear reader, to Whet Your Appetite. Moving swiftly from feast to fast to famine, Chapter 14 expresses the lexicon of gluttony and excess, Chapter 15 explores the idiom of aversion and disgust, while Chapter 16 outlines the language of hunger and want.

      The penultimate section, Catering for Every Taste, looks at the vocabulary of provisioning and purveying—covering the retail and restaurant trades, merchants and markets, food stores and eating establishments (Chapter 17)—before kitting out the kitchen and setting the table, checklisting the profusion of utensils and utilities used internationally in the several acts of cooking, serving, and eating (Chapter 18).

      We round our wordfest off with an invitation to Come Dine with Me. Here, we take an all-inclusive lexical tour of dinners, the fine dining experience, and finally diners themselves. Chapter 19 dishes up a gallimaufry of meals and mealtimes, light bites and courses, and occasions for feeding and feasting. Chapter 20 embraces eating matters and manners and all things epicurean—encompassing the faculty of (good) taste, the gratifications of gastronomy, and popular food philias and phobias. In closing, in Chapter 21 we consider ourselves: presenting a veritable thesaurus of trencher folk of every stripe—gourmets and gourmandisers, foodists and faddists, buzguts and belly-gods all.

      All entries have been carefully selected from the most exhaustive unabridged dictionaries and extensive word troves available, as well as a wide range of specialist resources and learned monographs in both print and digital formats.

      There is no scholarly apparatus—parts of speech, variant spellings, etymologies or phonetics—to burden the text. The entries are defined in the compiler’s own words with