As I was passing by our pasta shelf, my eye fell on a box of macaroni that carried, below the legend ELBOWS, the Italian equivalent CHIFFERI. Wondering what this meant other than ‘elbow macaroni’ and wanting to make sure my tentative pronunciation /’kifferi/, with initial stress, was correct, I looked it up; I confirmed the pronunciation but could find nothing more about the word. Having dug around in Google Books, I’ve come up with the answer, and in the best traditions of Languagehat I am sharing it here so future generations will not have to hack their way through the uncharted jungle.
In the first place, unlike other pasta names (e.g., farfalle ‘butterflies’), it does not in fact mean anything other than ‘elbow macaroni.’ According to somebody writing in the Universidad de Chile’s Boletín de filología Vol. 32-34, p. 429, chiffero is the standard Italian equivalent of the Lombard dialect form chifel ‘croissant,’ and according to Giovan Battista Pellegrini, “Noterelle linguistiche bisiacche” in Günter Holtus, Z̆arko Muljac̆ic̆, and Johannes Kramer (eds.), Romania et Slavia Adriatica (Buske Verlag, 1987), p. 229, that is borrowed from the German (Austrian, according to my large German dictionary) Kipfel, also meaning ‘croissant,’ which in turn is from Latin cippus, which according to Robert Sedlaczek, Das österreichische Deutsch: wie wir uns von unserem grossen Nachbarn unterscheiden, p. 197, meant ‘stake, post.’ I’m pleased that Google has allowed me to assemble these obscure sources and present a coherent story, but once again I shake my head at the lack of scholarly attention paid to food and cooking terminology.
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