Food Names

 December 26, 2008
Interview with Martin Elkort, author of Secret Life Of Food

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Mike Carruthers:
Food names have some very interesting origins. Like the word - BEETS.

Martin Elkort:
It means beast. It's from the French word bête. And the reason they call it beets is because the early cooks - when they cut a beet in half, it looked like a living animal and it was bleeding and so they called it a beast.

Martin Elkort author of the book Secret Life Of Food

Caesar Salad. A lot of people think Caesar Salad is made with Romaine lettuce. Romaine lettuce sounds like Roman lettuce so we assume that it came from Rome. But in actuality, the Caesar Salad was invented in Tijuana, Mexico by Alex Cardini. He named it the Aviator Salad. But because he worked for his brother Caesar, he re-named it the Caesar Salad. Cheese is another one. When the ancient Greeks took the whey from the curds while they were making cheese, they put it in a wicker basket to strain the whey. And the basket was called a "formose." The Romans changed that to "forma" and the Italians changed it to "formaggio" which no longer describes the basket but is the word for cheese.

Catsup says Martin is originally a Chinese word meaning pickled fish sauce.

In Malaysia they changed it to k-e-c-h-u-p from c-a-t-s-u-p. And when ketchup arrived in the United States early on, we stopped making it with fish and we started putting tomatoes into it. And then we changed the spelling to k-e-t-c-h-u-p.

Complete interview not available.