I have pulled something sweet out of my random hat of obsessions, which contains more pointless oddities than an old yenta's apartment in Bayridge. Actually, let me rephrase. Obsession is a poor choice of words, it is more like Things I Temporarily Look Up on the Internet and Talk About Profusely for a Span of Usually Two Hours to 2-3 Days, Sometimes Longer if the Topic is Really Cool Like Bengali.

Food-related Etymology. Every morning I delight that Merriam-Webster sends me a Word of the Day. It is educational and fights of the loneliness of an empty inbox :( Today's word: gallimaufry, which is synonymous to hodgepodge. Two words deriving from stew. Galimafree is a 16th century French recipe for an meat stew. Hotchpotch also means a jumble of things and is the big brother to hodgepodge, the aberration of a little brother who made it big in the literary world.

Hash- I hear this more as a verb, but initially it is a meat and potato dish. If you replace the ingredients with numbers, you have a hash function, which is when you turn a message into a hodgepodge of numbers.

Potpourri- translated to "rotten pot" which is the French name of a Spanish stew called olla podrida (again, "rotten pot") which is a slow cooked stew of rice, beans, and a million other ingredients.

Then I started looking to the ways people name food:

Halibut sounds like it was named after a city in Iceland or one of those weird Canadian Islands. BUT it actually comes from butte, which is a flatfish. And "holy" because it was only eaten on religious occasions. Holy butte- Halibut.

Avocado sounds like it just leaped from the mouth of a beautiful women in a colonial style kitchen in Mexico. It comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl which means testicle. I love avocados so much I would still name my firstborn avocado despite this revealing information.

In French, la veneson translates to "game we just hunted" which I suppose was usually deer meat rather than other animals that might be stored longer because of their size, like cows.
I am convinced that the 1066 Norman Conquest civilized the English. Actually I think that is a pretty well established theory if I remember correctly back to my History of the Middle Ages class. The French nobles HATED going to barbaric England and therefore the English nobles wanted to be French, just like a 6th grade crush. The old-school Anglo Saxon, would march into the mead-hall but down his axe and order a pig, a sheep, or an ox. Dead or alive, same word. Then suddenly nobles started ordering in French: pork (porcine), mutton (Old French- mutoun), beef (boeuf). HOWEVER...."steak" comes from an old Norse word, steik, which means "roast." Steak is an old word and shows up in some weird languages including the West Nordic language Faroese, spoken by the people of the Faroe Islands, which I didn't know existed until this post.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroe_Islands

The Stevie Nicks/Madonna of the Faroe Islands: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DrY2rnx1m4&feature=related

BACK TO OMELETTE: Une Amelette is the French word for the thin frying pan used to cook omelettes. Amelette comes from the Latin word lamella, which means "thin sheet or blade of metal," from what blacksmiths used to hammer out the first frying pans. Lamella is used in science to mean "thin layer of tissue" or "thin bone". The word laminate is derived from lamella. Somewhere someone is eating an omelette on a laminated dish, clueless as to their relationship.

And it is all full circle. My new personal hero is Anu Garg, a computer science graduate student turned etymologist. I have been dying to read his book. After I finish goddamn 2666. wordsmith.org to get his info and sign up for A.Word.A.Day.