On Dubious Vittles

A steak is a steak and a roast is a roast, but ground meat--well, you never know. It wasn’t until the 1950s that hamburger mostly outgrew its reputation as a catch-all for nameless kitchen scraps. Before World War II, wisecracking lunch counter waitresses had called it “mystery” or “sweep up the floor.”

Stew, which also comes in anonymous chunks, has often been called “mystery meat” itself. However, the usual bad rap on stew has not been uncertainty but randomness. Hochepot was a perfectly respectable French dish in the Middle Ages (and hotchpot is still honored in Lancashire), but most of us only know the word as “hodgepodge.” For that matter, the Russian word for a mess, kabardak, comes from kavirdak, the name of a Tatar stew.

The Spanish stew olla podrida has the self-deprecatory meaning “rotten pot” (just like the French phrase pot pourri, though the latter has suavely managed to get out of the kitchen and into the boudoir). Spanish cookery had a high reputation in the 17th century, and English cookbooks proudly gave recipes for what they called olio. But within a few decades, it started sliding back down the approval scale; in theaters, an olio came to mean a miscellaneous collection of musical numbers, and that was the last meaning the word “olio” had before it died out in English for good.

And so it goes. The Latin word from which we get “satire” meant a dish of mixed ingredients (raisins, barley meal and pine nuts sprinkled with honeyed wine). Then it became the term for a poetic medley, and then a poem of criticism. What a farce! (Which, of course, means sausage stuffing.)