The term “baker’s dozen” dates back to 13th-century England. But why does it mean 13? During Medieval times, bread was a staple food, and King Henry III introduced a law in the 1260s to regulate the size and cost of bread loaves. A common story suggests bakers added an extra loaf to a batch of twelve to avoid penalties for underweight bread. However, historians argue that this explanation lacks evidence. Instead, the phrase likely originated from transactions with “hucksters,” or bread middlemen, who sold bread on the streets. The law controlled prices for both bakers and retailers, leaving no profit margin for the latter. Thus, a 13th loaf, known as the “in-bread” or “vantage loaf,” was added as a bonus for retailers to earn some profit. This extra loaf incentivized street vendors, allowing bakers to sell more bread through them.
Fast forward to today, and you might find yourself at a bagel shop, unexpectedly ordering a baker’s dozen. Some culinary mysteries, however, remain unsolved.
When the Spanish arrived in the New World, they observed indigenous people using wooden frames to cook meat and fish. These frames, called “barbacoa,” could be placed directly over a heat source or near a fire for indirect cooking. The term evolved into “barbecue” in English. Some suggest the “Q” comes from the French phrase “barbe à queue,” meaning “beard to tail,” referring to cooking a whole animal, though this is likely more folklore than fact.
Umami, a Japanese term meaning “deliciousness,” is difficult to translate into English. In the early 20th century, Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda identified umami as a distinct taste. While enjoying a bowl of dashi, a savory broth made from kombu (kelp), Ikeda realized there was a fifth taste beyond salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. He discovered that glutamic acid crystals formed on the kombu, which, when added to food, produced the savory flavor he noticed. This taste, umami, is often described as meaty or earthy and is found in foods like Parmesan cheese and Bloody Marys.
Japanese cuisine features unique terms like “zatsumi,” which describes an undesirable flavor, often in sake. It translates to “miscellaneous taste.” Other onomatopoeic terms include “hoku-hoku,” describing the experience of biting into something hot and dense, like a sweet potato, and “shuwa-shuwa,” which refers to carbonated beverages. “Zuru-zuru” is the sound of slurping ramen, while “churu-churu” is a quieter slurp.
“Al dente” refers to pasta cooked with a slight bite, literally meaning “to the tooth” in Italian. Contrary to popular belief, throwing spaghetti at a wall doesn’t determine its doneness, as both overcooked and al dente pasta can stick. Instead, a taste test is recommended.
Some Italian pasta dishes have intriguing origins. “Pasta alla carbonara” translates to “in the manner of charcoal makers.” Legend suggests it was first made by workers over campfires. The dish, consisting of eggs, cured pork, and pasta, was a practical, high-energy meal. The name might refer to the charcoal fire or the pepper resembling coal dust. Some believe it originated with the carbonari, a 19th-century secret society of Italian revolutionaries.
Carpaccio, raw and thinly sliced beef or fish, is named after Italian painter Vittore Carpaccio. Venetian restaurateur Giuseppe Cipriani created the dish for Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo, who was advised to avoid cooked meat. The dish’s red color reminded Cipriani of Carpaccio’s artwork.
Cipriani also named a cocktail after Renaissance artist Giovanni Bellini. He mixed prosecco and peach, likening the colors to Bellini’s work.
“A la” means “in the style of” in French. “Chicken a la King,” despite its royal name, likely originated in America. One story credits the dish to E. Clark King II, proprietor of the Brighton Beach Hotel, while another attributes it to Philadelphia chef William King.
“A la nage” means “in the swim,” describing seafood simmered in broth. “A la boulangère” refers to dishes baked with meat, potatoes, and onions, named after the practice of using neighborhood bakeries’ ovens in rural France.
“Amuse-bouche” refers to complimentary appetizers that “entertain the mouth.” Unlike hors d’oeuvres, which can be shared and aren’t necessarily complimentary, amuse-bouche are small, individual servings.
To “brunoise” is to finely dice vegetables into small cubes. The technique is named after Brunoy, a commune near Paris. “Mirepoix,” a mix of sautéed carrots, onions, and celery, forms the base of many French dishes. It is named after Duke Charles-Pierre-Gaston François de Lévis, duc de Lévis-Mirepoix.
The Holy Trinity is the Creole and Cajun equivalent of mirepoix, using bell peppers instead of carrots. It originated with the Acadians in Louisiana, where bell peppers thrived in the swampy soil. The name reflects the region’s Catholic roots.
Tandoori chicken is named after the tandoor, a clay oven used for cooking. Archaeologists found similar vessels in modern-day Pakistan, dating back 5,000 years. The dish gained popularity in the 1930s at Moti Mahal restaurant in Peshawar. After India’s Partition, it spread further, even reaching First Lady Jackie Kennedy in the 1960s. Tandoori chicken inspired variations like chicken tikka masala.
If you know of any other fascinating culinary terms, feel free to share them. Until next time, happy cooking!
Choose one of the culinary terms discussed in the article and conduct further research on its historical and cultural significance. Prepare a short presentation to share your findings with the class, highlighting any surprising or lesser-known facts you discover.
Organize a cooking demonstration where you create a dish that emphasizes the umami flavor. Use ingredients like Parmesan cheese, tomatoes, or mushrooms. Explain the science behind umami and how it enhances the taste of your dish.
Engage in a workshop where you explore Japanese culinary onomatopoeia. Create a list of sounds associated with different foods and try to match them with their corresponding Japanese terms. Discuss how these terms enhance the sensory experience of eating.
Participate in a debate about the origins of the term “barbecue.” Form teams to argue for different theories, such as the Spanish “barbacoa” or the French “barbe à queue.” Use historical evidence and cultural context to support your arguments.
Invent a new culinary term inspired by the article. Define its meaning, origin, and potential use in modern cuisine. Present your term to the class and explain how it could become part of the culinary lexicon.
Here’s a sanitized version of the YouTube transcript:
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The phrase “baker’s dozen” can be traced to England in the 13th century. But why is a baker’s dozen 13? In Medieval England, bread was a basic staple for the population, and in the 1260s, King Henry III enacted a law that controlled the size and cost of a loaf. One popular story explaining the baker’s dozen suggests that bakers would add an extra loaf to a lot of twelve to avoid penalties for selling underweight bread. However, food historians note that there’s little evidence for this explanation. Buying 12 loaves of bread at a time would have been excessive for a medieval peasant. Instead, the phrase likely comes from transactions with bread middlemen, known as “hucksters,” who would buy bread from bakeries and then sell it on the streets. Since the law controlled how much the baker charged a retailer and how much the retailer could charge the customer, there wasn’t a way for the retailer to make a profit, so a 13th loaf—sometimes called the “in-bread” or “vantage loaf”—was included as a freebie for the retailer to earn some money. It made sense for bakers to incentivize street peddlers with this extra loaf, as they could sell more product through roaming retailers than if they had to sell all the bread themselves.
Fast forward a few centuries: I find myself at a bagel counter, caught off guard yet again and somehow deciding to get a whole wheat oat bagel to round out my lucky 13. Who is this hearty bagel for? Some culinary questions, alas, are destined to remain unanswered.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd. Welcome to Food History. Today I’m sharing the backstories behind some of the words and phrases we use when cooking and eating, from umami to amuse-bouche.
When Spaniards landed in the New World, they observed indigenous people using raised wooden frames to cook their meat and fish. These apparatuses could be placed directly on a heat source, similar to how Americans grill hamburgers and hot dogs today, or they could be propped near a fire and heated indirectly, like how barbecue pitmasters slow-cook their meat. The word for these tools was “barbacoa,” according to a Spanish account recorded in 1526. This became “barbecue” in English, and some sources suggest the “Q” comes from the French phrase “barbe à queue,” or “beard to tail,” referring to a whole animal being cooked, though this explanation is likely more folklore than fact.
Umami means something like “deliciousness” in Japanese, but the true meaning of the word is hard to capture in English. In the early 20th century, a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda boiled down umami to its pure essence—literally. He was enjoying a bowl of dashi, a savory broth made from kelp called kombu, when he realized there must be a fifth taste beyond salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. Determined to get to the root of dashi’s unique flavor, he conducted experiments. Chemically treating the seaweed used to make dashi caused small crystals to form on its surface. These crystals were concentrated glutamic acid, a non-essential amino acid, and after some tinkering, when Ikeda added them to food or liquid, he experienced that same full, savory flavor he noticed in his soup. He dubbed this fifth taste umami, which has been described as a sort of meatiness or earthiness. It’s responsible for the savory depth of flavor in many beloved items, from Bloody Marys to Parmesan cheese.
Umami isn’t the only hard-to-translate food term used in Japan. The word “zatsumi” describes an undesirable flavor, usually in sake. It doesn’t refer to any specific bad flavor—the word translates to “miscellaneous taste” in English. So next time you taste something funky in leftovers that have been sitting in your fridge for weeks, just call it zatsumi and don’t think about it too hard.
The Japanese language also employs some evocative culinary onomatopoeia. “Hoku-hoku,” for example, describes the experience of biting into something hot, such as a sweet potato or winter squash, with a dense texture that fills your mouth with “a starchy steaminess.” “Shuwa-shuwa” describes carbonated beverages, and “zuru-zuru” is the sound you make when you slurp ramen. If you prefer a quieter slurp, you would use the more discreet “churu-churu.”
Pasta that’s cooked al dente still has some bite to it—some resistance you wouldn’t get from an overcooked noodle—hence the Italian phrase’s literal meaning, “to the tooth.” And by the way, throwing spaghetti at a wall to see if it’s done doesn’t actually work. Overcooked pasta and al dente pasta can both be sticky enough to adhere to surfaces, so this trick isn’t useful for timing your tagliatelle. Do your walls and your roommates a favor and do a taste test instead.
The names of some Italian pasta dishes tell you more about their origin stories than their ingredients. Pasta alla carbonara, for example, translates to something like pasta “in the manner of charcoal makers.” According to legend, workers first made the dish over campfires to fuel their long days. Consisting of eggs, cured pork, and pasta, carbonara makes sense as a low-maintenance, high-energy, working-class lunch. However, there’s no way to confirm the validity of this explanation. The name carbonara could refer to the charcoal fire the dish was prepared over or to the generous gratings of pepper placed on top, which might have looked like coal dust. Some believe that pasta carbonara originated with the carbonari, a 19th-century secret society of Italian revolutionaries. Though I challenge anyone to eat a bowl of carbonara and then see if you have the energy to pursue the unification of Italy.
The origins of other Italian culinary terms are easier to identify. Beef or fish that’s prepared carpaccio style—raw and thinly sliced—is named after Italian Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio. He wasn’t the person who invented it, however. Venetian restaurateur Giuseppe Cipriani first served the dish to Countess Amalia Nani Mocenigo after she had been instructed by her doctor to abstain from cooked meat. Raw meat isn’t for everyone, but the sight of it inspired romantic feelings in Cipriani. Upon noticing the red color of the dish, he named it after Carpaccio, who used similar shades in his artwork.
This wasn’t the first time Cipriani took inspiration from Renaissance-era artists in coining a culinary term—according to legend, at least. He’s said to have once mixed together prosecco and peach into a cocktail whose colors he likened to the work of Giovanni Bellini.
“A la” is a phrase that appears frequently on French restaurant menus. It literally means “in the style of.” Food served a la king comes in cream sauce with mushrooms and pepper. Despite its royal name, chicken a la king didn’t originate within the walls of a palace. Most plausible origin stories attribute the name to an American with the last name King. According to one legend, the head chef of the Brighton Beach Hotel first served the dish to the hotel’s proprietor, E. Clark King II, in the early 1900s. He liked it so much that he requested seconds, and the dish appeared on the menu as chicken a la King the next day. According to an early 20th-century account, the King in question was Philadelphia chef William King, who was asked to invent a recipe for a difficult customer. When the customer asked who invented the dish, the waiter responded, “Bill King, he works in the kitchen,” to which the customer replied, “chicken a la King.”
The phrase “a la nage” is French for “in the swim.” Chefs use it to describe food, usually seafood, that’s been simmered lightly in a flavorful broth. When meat, potatoes, and onions are baked together in an oven, they’re prepared a la boulangère. The name means “in the style of the baker” or perhaps “the baker’s wife.” Historically, people in rural parts of France didn’t have access to ovens at home. To make something a la boulangère, they had to take a dish of ingredients to their neighborhood bakery and pick it up when it was done cooking. Bakeries in 19th-century France were like Airbnbs for meat.
Amuse-bouche is fun to say, and if the food lives up to its name, it should be fun to eat. The French term for small, complimentary appetizers served at the beginning of a meal translates to “entertains the mouth,” though it remains unclear if the phrase comes from France or is just an English phrase using French words. Either way, they shouldn’t be confused with hors d’oeuvres, which aren’t necessarily complimentary and can be shared between guests. The term hors d’oeuvre is French for “outside of work,” as in outside the work of the main meal, either figuratively or in terms of its literal placement on the edge of the table, depending on the source.
If you want to develop some impressive knife skills, learn to brunoise. The standard brunoise cut in France gives you vegetable cubes that are just one-eighth of an inch in size, while a fine brunoise produces pieces twice as small on each side. The name for this technique comes from Brunoy, a commune located 12 miles from the center of Paris. The chefs of Brunoy popularized the method for dicing vegetables as finely as possible, and the name stuck.
Speaking of chopped vegetables, mirepoix is a mixture of sautéed carrots, onions, and celery used as the foundation for many French dishes. The name likely comes from the 18th-century French aristocrat Duke Charles-Pierre-Gaston François de Lévis, duc de Lévis-Mirepoix. It’s believed that the duke’s chef named a flavor base after him, though what that base originally consisted of is unclear. Fortunately for future generations of chefs, he didn’t use Mirepoix’s full title when naming the recipe.
The Holy Trinity is the mirepoix of Creole and Cajun cuisine. Instead of carrots, it uses bell peppers, along with onions and celery, as the base for various recipes. It originated with the Acadians who emigrated to Louisiana in the 18th century. Carrots didn’t grow in the region’s swampy soil, but bell peppers flourished. With one simple ingredient swap, the Holy Trinity and the flavor profile of a new cuisine was born. The biblical name reflects Cajun country’s Catholic roots, though it may date back only to the late 1970s.
Tandoori chicken is named after the cylindrical, charcoal-fired clay oven it’s cooked in. It’s also one of the oldest dishes on this list. In modern-day Pakistan, archaeologists unearthed 5,000-year-old clay vessels similar to tandoors along with charred chicken bones. This may technically be the remnants of an early chicken tandoori dinner, but it would take thousands of years before the dish became what people know today. The details are somewhat disputed, but the most popular story goes that in the 1930s, a restaurant called Moti Mahal opened in Peshawar, modern Pakistan. After the Partition of India, a new version of the restaurant opened in India, bringing the dish to widespread popularity. In the early 1960s, First Lady Jackie Kennedy was served tandoori chicken on a flight from Rome to New Delhi, and today you can order tandoori chicken in restaurants around the world. The success of the dish spurred many variations, including chicken tikka masala.
If there’s a great culinary term I left off this list, leave it in the comments below. Until next time, thanks for watching.
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This version maintains the content while removing any informal language and personal anecdotes that may not be suitable for all audiences.
Baker’s – Relating to or characteristic of a baker or baking – In medieval England, a baker’s guild was responsible for regulating the quality and price of bread.
Dozen – A group or set of twelve – The historian discovered a dozen manuscripts that shed new light on medieval England’s social structure.
Medieval – Relating to the Middle Ages, a period in European history from about the 5th to the late 15th century – The medieval period was marked by the rise of feudalism and the spread of Christianity across Europe.
England – A country that is part of the United Kingdom, with a rich history that includes the medieval period – Medieval England was characterized by the Norman Conquest and the signing of the Magna Carta.
Umami – A category of taste in food, corresponding to the flavor of glutamates, often described as savory – The umami flavor was a significant aspect of medieval cuisine, often achieved through the use of fermented fish sauces.
Cuisine – A style or method of cooking, especially as characteristic of a particular country, region, or establishment – The study of medieval cuisine reveals much about the dietary habits and social customs of the time.
Italian – Relating to Italy, its people, or their language, especially in the context of culture and cuisine – Italian merchants played a crucial role in the trade networks of medieval Europe, bringing spices and other goods from the East.
French – Relating to France, its people, or their language, especially in the context of culture and cuisine – The influence of French culture and language was significant in medieval England, particularly after the Norman Conquest.
Culinary – Relating to cooking or the kitchen – The culinary practices of medieval Europe were heavily influenced by the availability of local ingredients and the preservation methods of the time.
History – The study of past events, particularly in human affairs – Understanding the history of medieval Europe requires examining the political, social, and economic changes of the period.
