Jarring Changes

These days a surprising number of recipes call for “jarred” ingredients. It’s rather jarring to read; don’t they mean “bumped”?

Of course not. They mean ingredients stored or sold in jars. In ancient times--until about three years ago--these might have been referred to as “bottled,” but evidently recipe writers are now thinking of the distinction between a bottle, which has a narrow neck (the famous bottleneck), and a jar, which has a wide neck. You wouldn’t actually try to bottle beets in a bottle.

There was a time, believe it or not, when “jarred” beets would have been referred to as canned, though they were literally put up in special glass jars known as canning jars, not metal cans. “Canning” was the procedure of sterilizing and sealing the jars.

What we have here is another case of the declining knowledge of cooking in the general reading public, which makes recipe writers believe they should describe everything in terms of visible physical objects, rather than now-mysterious procedures such as canning.

Well, the history of words is enough to make your head spin. “Jar,” the wide-necked one, comes from the name of an Arab pottery jug with a narrow neck, and “bottle” comes from the late Latin word buttis, which referred to a sort of barrel. And the vial, the very smallest, most narrow-necked bottle of all, used for perfumes, comes from phiale, the Greek name for a shallow drinking vessel more like a soup bowl than anything else. It’s a shock to go to Central Asia and find people drinking green tea out of china bowls called phiales.