De Factoid the Ninth: Shut your PIE-hole...

In this De Factoid one addresses a subject close to every northern-Englishman’s heart – slicing across the social, cultural and linguistic history of the grandest and humblest of deep dishes: pie.

Pie has been with us for a long time. Archeologists (diggers of old things) discovered etchings of a pie-like dish on the walls of the tomb of King Ramesses II (who we know to have rather enjoyed his pepper from De Factoid the Eighth) which was likely to have consisted of honey, nuts and fruit wrapped in a primitive dough/pastry. Pastry, as a word, is French (from Old French, pastaierie) and is linked through late-Latin, pastāta (from where we get the name of the Italian mainstay: pasta) to the word paste – another substance originally made using flour and water – and also linked to the word pasty: the popular meat-pie-like dish popular in Cornwall, England. Pasty entered the English language as the Middle-English word paste(e) through Old French, pastée – a corruption of the Latin paste-word. The ‘paste’ element of the pasty is in the minced meat and vegetable filling, rather than the flour and water of the surrounding pastry. Back in France the word continued to evolve and from Old French pastée, Modern French was granted the similarly minced word, pâté.

The equivalent ‘native’ English word for the Old French, pastry – dough – came from Old English dāg and is, from the point of view of language(s), even further reaching. The word is linked to the process of kneading (another Old English word, cnedan) the flour and water together to make the dough, and shares linguistic links across Northern Europe with most Proto-Germanic languages. Proto-Germanic (proto- from Ancient Greek, prôtos meaning ‘first’: think ‘prototype’) is the name given to one of the several off-shoots of language groups from which nearly all European and Asian languages are thought to originate (Proto-Germanic languages are German, Dutch, Norwegian, Danish, Flemish, Frisian, Swedish and English – as well as many other languages now considered ‘dead’). The hypothesized ‘central’ language has been labelled Indo-European and was thought to have been brought to Europe and Asia by the first tribes of Homo sapiens (the ancestors of modern man: Latin homo-, ‘man’ – think, ‘homosexual’ ; sapiens, ‘knowing’ – think, ‘sapient’) to arrive from the Middle-East/North-Africa, replacing the languages of Neanderthal man (an earlier sub species of humans, named after the German valley where remains were first discovered, ‘Neander Thal’ – Neander being the classicised German name ‘Neumann’ + thal, meaning ‘valley’) as well as the people – though Finnish (North Eastern Europe) and Basque (in Northern Spain/Southern France) are the exceptions, thought to have evolved from Neanderthal language elements, surviving due to the isolated nature of the regions. As a result of a shared language heritage, many words seem to echo across languages. ‘Dough’ is one such example, with Indo-European roots dhoigh-, dheigh-, dhigh, relating to the kneading, smearing and form/forming of clay. The root spirals across Europe and Asia giving us (amongst other things) dih (‘smear’) and dēhas (‘body’) in Sanskrit, relating to the word diz (‘mould’) used by Xenophon (another clever Greek person) combined with pairi (‘around’), when describing the walls around the desert gardens of Persian Kings. These gardens, as well as the word created to describe them, became an ever-lasting symbol when taken into the Greek Bible: parádeisos in Greek became paradise in English. The language hypothesized to have preceded Indo-European has rather ingeniously been dubbed, Proto-Indo-European, or PIE for short.

Pie is another word related to the mashing of languages and miscellaneous meats, but not as straightforwardly as one might think. When pie, as a word was first spoken in English, it wasn’t a pastry-surrounded lump of meat: it was a bird. In English bird names we still have the Magpie, though the ‘Mag-’ element (likely to be an abbreviation of ‘Margaret’) is from a later tradition of adding personal names to animals (similarly, Americans can still be heard talking of Jack-rabbits). The root of this pie in English is in the magpie’s Latin name, pica (relate to the Latin for woodpecker, picus). The adjective pied comes from the bird, originally referring to something with black and white elements (think piebald horses – the ‘bald’ bit refers to the white patches) before moving to mean ‘multi-colours’ (as in the multi-coloured robes of the ‘Pied Piper’). As well as its colouring, the magpie is noted for its kleptomanic (i.e. ‘thieving’: from Greek, kléptēs, ‘thief’ related to Gothic, hlifan, ‘steal’ – think ‘shoplifter’) gathering tendencies, often creating a jumble of different items in its nest. The pie we eat today is reasonably assumed to have taken its name from the nest arrangement, itself a jumbled assortment of ingredients. The meat or fish pie chewet has been similarly linked with French, chouette (‘jackdaw’ – another personal-named bird), and an alternative 16th century English name for the magpie, haggess, suggests a similar origin for the Scottish food-jumble, haggis.

Before this move, pies were referred to in writing as coffins/coffins: resembling their body-housing namesakes, with tall sides and a lid. These large coffins were often used as centre-pieces at Royal banquets and would conceal exotic birds and animals, or even people (I can only assume they were lightly baked). The nursery rhyme ‘Sing-a-song-of-sixpence’ is based on the practice. Jeffrey Hudson (1619-1682), a famous 17th century dwarf, was served up as a child in a cold pie to King Charles I and his Queen. Hudson climbed out of the pie clad in a miniature suite of armour and was later dubbed Lord Minimus, before going on to serve as the Queen’s trusted companion. He was twice kidnapped by pirates and fell from his high position as court-favourite to eating humble pie as a slave in Africa.

Humble-pie is the punch-line to a joke which long preceded Lord Minimus, based on word-play that might not be recognized now that the word umbles has fallen out of common usage. Umbles, as a word, came to England with William the Conqueror and his French lords and originates in Latin, lumulus, ‘loin’. ‘Umble pie’ was made from the heart, liver and other off-cuts of deer: eaten by huntsmen and servants while their lords ate venison (see: De Factoid the Fourth). Umble pie was thus associated with people of a more ‘humble’ position (‘humble’ comes from another Latin word, humilis, ‘low’, ‘slight’ from where we get humility and humiliate) and was probably helped toward the current association by the southern verbal tendency to drop the ‘h’. The lads of the Essex-born super-group ‘Humble Pie’ may have shared in this linguistic practice while painting the town red in the 1970’s. That colourful phrase is claimed to have originated with the paint brush practices of the ‘Mad Marquis’ Henry de la Poer Beresford in the great English pie town of Melton Mowbray. The town’s pork pie tradition arose as a by-product of its cheese industry when the whey from its famous stilton was discovered to make excellent pig-feed. The Marquis was supposed to have painted the town the aforementioned colour after getting pie-eyed (i.e. ‘drunk’, from the wide-eyed, blank expression likening to a pie-top) on too much booze. One thinks a nice pie might have done him some good…

De Factoid the Tenth: coming soon...

De Factoid the Fourth: Have a butchers…

An interesting little fact bubbled to the surface during the frying session of De Factoid the Third: namely that ‘bacon’ – the greasy-spoon mainstay of million – is (as a word at least) French. The British grease-gastro may well swallow his pride as well as his meat and accept bacon’s Gallic origins as little more than a mildly bitter additional flavour; or even savour carving it up with a well made piece of Sheffield steel – but the language of meat in English is recognisably, with but a few fleeting (and we shall see ‘flighting’) exceptions, the product of Monsieur Grenouille: the forever linguistically-pervasive, Frenchman.

To take a step back from bacon (and a step even further back from back-bacon) we get the humble pig: an animal that Churchill regarded as his equal (a sentiment, I feel, which may well have been more-than-readily shared by German nationals of the period). But a pig, when slaughtered (a fantastically Old Norse word – you can practically hear the blade going in to the cow/pig/monk) becomes pork. Something here isn’t kosher…

Cows as well may have some beef with their French carver. To ‘have beef’ with someone is interesting and probably refers to the type of conflict arising between ‘beefy’ combatants. The origin of the phrase is recorded as 18th century American, but ‘beefing up’ has earlier origins. The bovine body has been eaten as a good source of muscle-building protein for as long as cows have been there to provide it. One need only consider the short title for British soldiers garrisoned (from 1485 to present) at the Tower of London who recieved payment, in part, with the meaty-equivalent of the energy bar. The full title of these men – The Yeomen Warders of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London – may have been shortened out of kindness as well as dietary considerations: the locals called them ‘Beefeaters’. Etymologists who may be thinking too hard about the subject have noticed the analogy to the Anglo-Saxon compound word for a menial servant, hláf-æta – literally translated as ‘loaf-eater’. The label, however, is unlikely to have applied to the Yeoman Warders: their social position denoted more beef than bread. Interestingly the hláf-æta’s Anglo-Saxon master the hlaford gives us the term ‘land-lord’ (though literally meaning ‘loaf-lord’): the owner of the fields and produce that the hláf-æta tended and relied upon – quite literally the original ‘bread-winner’. To ‘use your loaf’ – a call for the application of common sense – has its origins in Cockney rhyming slang (the phrase ‘loaf of bread’ rhyming with ‘head’). The title of this De Factoid comes from ‘butchers-hook’ rhyming with ‘look’. Cockney as a title links itself to food from an Anglo-French mixture of French cokene – a ‘cock’ (in the sense of a male chicken) and ay from the Old English æg – ‘egg’. Cockneys were literally a diminutive individual liking relatively to a small-misshapen egg when compared to other Londoners. Other food-related social labels have been applied further north with the ‘Scousers’ of Liverpool originally noted for their consumption of the lower-class sailors’ soup: lobscouse (poss. from lob - in the sense of a lump of meat - hence 'ear-lobe'). Cockney rhyming slang itself may have arisen as a cryptic language to allow illicit communication without the ‘pork chops’ (i.e. cops/coppers – hence ‘pig’ in reference to a policemen) being able to understand. But the pork chops we is interested in today come from the four-legged variety, rather than its two-legged namesake.

The pig, we have seen, becomes pork under the knife, and cows become beef. But why is this? The answer, it seems, lies in the languages of differing social classes after the Norman conquest of England in 1066. The French may have ruled the Royal house (royal is a word of French origin from a Latin root that also gives us the word regal, and monarchy is also French), but the country outside the courts did not cease to speak English with the crowning of a new monarch. The words we have for certain meats are the produce of those words being chewed over in different circles of the new English society. To the conquered Saxon farmer tending their animals a cu was still a cu whether calf or carved (the English, indeed, were strained to find why the French monarchy had granted a title to the cut of meat now called sir-loin); and a picga was a pig whichever way you sliced it. But not to their new hlaford. It had happened before with previous invaders, though to the slightly opposite effect of the preservation of the Saxon word ‘orchard’ (‘farmer’s yards’ – consider Gothic aurtja – ‘farmer’) over the Norse apaldgarðr (‘apple-yard’), as whilst the Norseman ate an apple, the Saxon’s still gathered them in their orchards. But in the now French court the mooing bovine animal (bovine itself being a French word from Latin bovum and Bos) was a boef (roughly translation as ‘ox’ in English) and the picga was a porc. The same is true of English deer and French venison; English sheep and French mutton. There is no French equivalent to the Old English clucking cycen however, though the French-rooted word poultry suggests they owned them in sufficient quantities. Perhaps they were more game for rabbit – introduced to Britain by the conquerors after 1066 and only actually becoming wild in the country after escaping from captivity in the last few hundred years. This may be why a chicken is ‘chicken’ whether clucking or ‘clucked’: where there is no class division between consumer and producer, there is no difference in the language. The French words then did not refer specifically to meat, but became associated thus because, ultimately, while English speakers raised cows, their French lords ate boef.

De Factoid the Fifth: coming soon