Last week being Halloween (the eve of All Hallows or All Saints) I set about making a Barmbrack for my radio piece on WLR.
I researched various recipes and started to base mine on one of Darina Allen’s many versions in Irish Traditional Cooking.
She explains that the origin of the words are from barm for yeast and brack from speckled.
As I am an amateur etymologist with a ridiculous amount of dictionaries I wondered where we got the Barm bit from.
Darina gives an impeccable derivation that it comes from the Old English word Beorma meaning yeasted fermented liquor, and indeed my Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (edited by the delightfully named C.T.Onions) agreed entirely. (The very next entry, Barmy, deriving,he charmingly tells us, from the same root, he gives as; “frothy, empty-headed, daft”.)
However, hard as I tried I couldn’t find any evidence of the word “barm” being used in Irish for yeast. In fact the given Irish “translation “ for Barmbrack was Bairin Breac, bairin being the Irish for loaf.
Just last weekend I borrowed, from my sister in law, Florence Irwin’s book on early 20th century cooking in the north of Ireland; “The Cookin’ Woman”.(Now unfortunately out of print)
In this she is quite adamant in calling the loaf a Barn Brack rather than a Barmbrack and of course she is quite correct. The derivation comes from the Irish for loaf rather than from the English for yeast. The minute I heard Barn Brack I remembered that this was exactly what my mother had called it, so the borrowing of Barm from English, to explain the yeast rising, must have been a fairly recent one.

The etymology of food has been a fascination of mine for a long time.

When the Turkey was first introduced from America,the continent of Europe was most unwilling to acknowledge its Yankee roots.
The French opted to call it the “Poulet d’Inde” (nowadays Dinde) or Indian Chicken, as if they were clinging on to the myth that the discoverers of America had in fact found India.
The English decided on an even more exotic origin for the bird and decided it came from the mysterious depths of Ottoman Europe;Turkey.

Another derivation I enjoy is that of the Jerusalem Artichoke. The belief that it came from the Holy Land was so strong that Jane Austin refers to the soup made from the vegetable as “Palestine Soup”. The truth of the matter is that the plant when introduced from America, (again) in the early seventeenth century. It was recognised as a type of Sunflower (Italian Girasole) and the artichoke connection was just an assumed affinity of taste.
At the same time as it was introduced,(and for this thanks to Alan Davidson’s “Oxford Companion to Food”) some members of the Topinambous tribe from Brazil were brought back from Brazil to be paraded before the curious of Europe. Some cute French greengrocer decided to give the new vegetable some reflected glamour by adopting their name, and so the Jerusalem Artichoke, in France,even today, is known as the Topinambour

Sometimes this desire to know the derivation of the names of our food has led us into very murky waters.

A “fact” I have often come across in cookbooks is that the sirloin of beef was the loin knighted by Henry VIII for its excellence. The rather more prosaic truth is that it is named as the upper loin from the French “sur” meaning above.

I also remember an enthusiastic college lecturer telling us that the origin of Marmalade was that it was invented in Scotland (by an enterprising chef coming across a box of Seville Oranges floating ashore from a wrecked Spanish ship) and became a particular favourite of Mary Queen of Scots when she felt ill.
Thus:Marie Malade” !
In fact the word comes from the Portuguese for Quince, Marmello, and their penchant for making a jelly out of the same.

But back to true derivations, my undoubted favourite is the “Coccagee Apple”.
This one I came across all on my own while flicking , as is my wont, through Mr. Onions excellent dictionary.
This apple has long been a favourite in England for the making of Cider.
It apparently has a peculiar greenish-yellow colour.
At this stage it is impossible to tell who named it. I like to think that it would have been migrant Irish workers doing seasonal work in the orchards of Somerset.
Their name for the Apple was adopted by the cider makers, who certainly didn’t realise that the Irish (themselves obviously from farming backgrounds) had coarsely named the apple, from its colour,Caca Gheidh, or (not to put a tooth in it)
“Goose Shit”
.