num_pages: 254
description: Outside of Italy, why is a dish with spinach called “Florentine”? Why is the fish John Dory known as Saint-Pierre in France, and how, for that matter, did it come by its peculiar English handle? How did spaghetti alla puttanesca, or whore’s spaghetti, acquire its name? And why, after working to “put bread on the table,” do we “bring home the bacon” instead?Jay Jacobs serves up the answers to these and innumerable other puzzlers that pepper the language of food. The Eaten Word is his exploration of the nomenclature of the kitchen and the table, and of the pervasiveness of culinary and gastronomic metaphors, similes, and figures of speech in everyday language.Jacobs invites us on his quest to explain many of the food-derived expressions we use unconsciously in conversation, writing, and the visual arts (such as calling a car a lemon or decorating the front door with a pineapple). He speculates about every seemingly unaccountable or obscurely derived culinary term that comes across his plate—hundreds of which are listed in a glossary called, quite appropriately, “Alphabet Soup.”
language: English
title: The Eaten Word: The Language of Food, the Food in Our Language
titlecomplete: The Eaten Word: The Language of Food, the Food in Our Language
genres: Food
ratings_count: 14
publisher: Birch Lane Pr