Thursday, May 25, 2006
It's time for another edition of words that used to mean one thing, and now mean the opposite. In today's episode: "gourmand". A gourmand is a chowhound, a glutton. A gourmand is not an epicure, an aficionado-- that would be a gourmet. The words have opposite meanings, or, at least, they used to. In today's paper I encountered a syndicated article from Knight-Ridder by Jane Snow. Ms. Snow was writing about Caesar Salad, and I thought I'd have a look to see if she made the anchovy error. Many food writers insist that mashed anchovies are an essential part of a classic Caesar, but in fact the classic recipe calls instead for Worcestershire sauce, which has an anchovy base. I'll never know if she got that detail. In the second paragraph Ms. Snow announces: "The Caesar used to be glamorous. From its birth in 1924 in a swanky restaurant in Tijuana, Mexico, through the 1970s, it dripped with class. Maitre d's made it tableside in fancy restaurants from California to Maine. For the home cook, an oversized wooden salad bowl used to be the sign of a gourmand." Wrong, dear, unless the individual in question used the vessel in question as his personal trough.
// posted by Bill @ 8:42 AM 
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