My grandson James, who has the family trait of insatiable curiosity and knows where to turn for inquiries about linguistic matters, asked me why poaching an egg is called “poaching.” The answer is interesting enough I thought I’d share it here. The OED (entry revised 2006) defines it as “To cook (an egg) without the shell in simmering, or over boiling, water; to simmer or steam (an egg) in a poacher” (first citation c1450 “Pocched egges,” earlier than I would have guessed); the etymology:
< Middle French pocher to cook (an egg) without the shell in simmering, or over boiling, water (1393; earlier in Old French as past participial adjective pochié: see poached adj.¹) < poche (see poke n.¹).
Notes
French pocher, in sense 1a, is usually explained as referring to the enclosure of the yolk in the white as in a bag.
The “put yolks in the pockets formed by the whites” derivation is plausible and satisfying, and if you know French (poche ‘pocket’) is easy to remember. And poke ‘bag’ (from Anglo-Norman poke, northern Old French poque, pouque) is a nice doublet. As for the other poach (‘to steal game’), well, it’s complicated; OED (entry revised 2006) says:
Origin uncertain. It is also uncertain whether the material below shows the development of a single word or of two or more, and whether (if a single origin is assumed) the original meaning should be taken to be ‘to shove’, ‘to poke’, ‘to thrust’, ‘to trample’, or ‘to thrust into a bag’. Branch I [‘shove, poke, thrust’] perhaps shows a variant (with palatalized consonant) of poke v.¹, but if so sense I.1b [‘thrust at or poke out (the eyes)’] must be of independent origin, < Middle French, French pocher to poke out (an eye) (1223 in Old French; specific use of pocher poach v.¹, perhaps arising originally from an analogy between the empty eye socket and a bag or pocket); with the early uses at sense I.1a, and perhaps also with branch III [‘take game, etc., unlawfully’], perhaps compare also French pocher poach v.¹ in the sense ‘to put in a bag’, although this sense (although apparently a primary one) is not recorded in French until later (1660, unless implied slightly earlier by the idiom recorded by Cotgrave in quot. 1611 at sense III.8a) and is apparently rare at all times. Perhaps alternatively compare poke v.² [‘put in a bag or pocket’], of which the present word could perhaps show a variant (perhaps compare early forms at pouch n.).
I had just assumed that the ‘steal’ sense was straightforwardly from ‘put in your pocket,’ but the history of words is rarely straightforward.
“By and by, when that was finished, he came upon Kolokolo Bird sitting in the middle of a wait-a-bit thorn-bush, and he said, ‘My father has spanked me, and my mother has spanked me; all my aunts and uncles have spanked me for my ‘satiable curiosity; and still I want to know [the etymology of] what the Crocodile has for dinner!’”
A timely WaPo story by Martin Weil: Police say they may have cracked egg theft case in Takoma Park. Key quote: “It might be accurate to say that, in at least one sense of the word, they were poached.”
‘Poached’ eggs has in my family always meant what I believe is properly called ‘coddled’. That is, the egg broken into a metal cup placed in a water-bath/bain marie. Illustration at Sur La Table Egg Poaching Pan, although we cooked them Sur La stove-top.
How widespread is that incorrect(?) usage? ‘theStrategist’ cookware seems to be NY-based. You can buy similar so-named “egg poachers” in NZ homeware stores; so it’s not just my family.
What is a kolokolo bird? (Kòlókòló means “turkey” in Mooré and Gulimancema, but that’s a long way from the great grey-green greasy Limpopo river, all set about with fever-trees.)
(Kusaal has tolotolo for “turkey” instead, no doubt borrowed from Hausa tàlotàlo. It there any way that word could come from the Nahuatl totolin? That would be so cool … Obviously the word cannot be onomatopoeic.)
No fever-trees in West Africa, either …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vachellia_xanthophloea
Though there are Elephant’s Children (wabbibis.) And crocodiles …
@AntC: My mother made ‘poached’ eggs the same way. If I remember right, she used a metal frame, with a handle, that had four circular holes in it. These holes accommodated metal saucers for the eggs to sit in, while the whole contraption was held above a pan of boiling water.
I didn’t learn until many years later that there were refined and sophisticated people who floated the egg directly in the water. Seeing as my mother had three rambunctious boys to feed, I cannot criticize her.
“ (Kusaal has tolotolo for “turkey” instead, no doubt borrowed from Hausa tàlotàlo. It there any way that word could come from the Nahuatl totolin? That would be so cool … Obviously the word cannot be onomatopoeic.)”
A quick and shallow Google search tells me that totol is indeed a name used for turkey in Mexico but I don’t remember if I have heard it before. I suppose that its a regionalism. The two most common names used in Mexico are guajolote (also from Náhuatl) and pavo (standard Spanish) but I’ve also heard of pípila. In Durango the common name for it is cócono so that’s the word used in my family.
I wonder who actually introduced turkeys to West Africa? Unlikely to have been the Spanish themselves. WP tells me that turkeys came to Europe quite early: the Pilgrim Fathers brought their turkeys with them from England, they say.
North Africans? Trans-Saharan turkeys?
A question for ROGER BLENCH!
I see that Dyula has the kòlókòló type rather than the Hausa-ish tolotolo, which goes regionally with Mooré and Gulimancema. Northern turkeys.
Humburi Senni has the excellent word fìràʔúná-gòŋgò “unbeliever-chicken”, where the first element is from the Arabic form of “Pharaoh.” I may take to calling turkeys unbeliever-chickens myself. It just seems so right, somehow.
The WP article also has a explanation of why turkeys are called turkeys: apparently the “turkey-fowl” name originally meant guineafowl*, and West African guineafowl were first brought to Europe via Turkey. (Their explanation does not seem altogether consistent with what they say about the English colonists in North America bringing their own turkeys, though.)
* Unlike turkeys, guineafowl actually taste pretty good.
I wonder who actually introduced turkeys to West Africa?
Could it have been the Portuguese? Maybe they introduced them on the coast and trade brought them into the interior.
Portuguese is indeed the source of the oldest stratum* of European loanwords in West Africa, and even Kusaal, hundreds of miles inland, has a few. There don’t seem to be any current Portuguese words for “turkey” that look much like tolotolo, but maybe there were in the relevant time period.
Some of these loans have undergone strange mutations in the course of their migrations from language to language, too. It’s not immediately obvious, for example, that Kusaal saafi “lock”, daka “box” and kukur “pig” are of Portuguese origin …
* They are beat out by a couple of stray words ultimately from Latin, via Berber: e.g. Hausa takarda “letter”, linzami “horse’s bit.”
The kolokolo in question lived by the Limpopo, about as far in Africa as you can get from the Atlantic Portuguese ports. But anyway, it’s just a funny name.
I grew up with several translations of the story. I see that Hanania Reichman’s wonderful rhymed translation is online. It is just as funny and charming as I remember. Reichman was a genius at comical verse.
@DE: i’m going to have to try to introduce פּאַרע־הון | pare-hun!
the usual yiddish is אינדיק | indik, which turns up as the exemplar for alef in occasional learning contexts, including the class-consciously seasonal alef-beys song that begins “alef – indikes frest der noged / beys – beyndelekh grizhet der oreman” [alef – the rich man gobbles up turkeys / beys – the poor man gnaws on little bones]. is the alef silent? you bet! do the pedagogues care? naah.
Thanks for that comment, Pancho!
It seems that the development of cócono ‘turkey’, apparently somehow from Nahuatl pl. cōconeh ‘children’, and of pípila, apparently from forms like pl. pīpiltin, pipilpipil ‘muchachuelos’, is like that of pollo, French poulet, etc., from Latin pullus ‘young of an animal, foal, chick’.
For those of us like me (and AntC’s family) who have never managed to learn the knack of poaching eggs ‘naked’, various devices for containing the egg in the water have been marketed.
The Scandinavians (and the Dutch, apparently) call the turkey ‘kalkun’ or variants thereof; supposedly derived from Calicut in India (!?)
This year I encountered several Youtube clips showing eggs being poached, or even “baked” all the way through, in hot oil. Water is for mollycoddles. Poached eggs in nut blankets.
Colo Colo is one of the leading football clubs in Chile, never out of the 1st league. It takes its name from a Mapuche warrior called Colocolo, a name that in Mapudungun means mountain cat — not a bird, certainly, but a member of the animal kingdom anyway.
Papas arrugadas are a characteristic food in the Canaries, potatoes boiled for a long time in very salty water. Instead of making them soggy the salt draws the water out from them, so they end up like baked potatoes.
The Pampas cat, Leopardus colocola. More pictures at the end of the article. Other Leopardus species include the ocelot (L. pardalis), but not the leopard (Panthera pardus), of course, of course.
Turkey in French: dinde, in Polish: indyk…
The late and much missed Yusuf Gürsey made a study of the weird names of turkeys in different languages:
https://ygursey1.blogspot.com/
AC-B: I remember we’ve discussed Yusuf Gürsey before, and it turned out that that was when you mentioned that webpage.
I’m sorry to hear he passed. He was fully both a scholar and a gentleman, and I hope his final years went well for him.
@AC-B:
Very interesting link indeed: thanks!
It seems that the English colonists may not have actually brought turkeys with them, but would certainly have been familiar with the bird long before they came to America. Makes more sense.
So it’s Peru that’s actually called “Turkey.”
There is a pleasing symmetry between Europeans calling the bird basically “exotic Muslim chicken” and the Songhay calling it “exotic infidel chicken.” Though both groups seem in fact to have tagged Egypt as the relevant exotic place. I Did Not Know That Mameluke Egypt was officially called “Turkey” (اَلدَّوْلَةُ ٱلتُّرْكِيَّةُ.)
Yes, I’m sad to hear about Yusef Gürsey.
(In the unlikely event that anyone was wondering about the “oscillated turkey” at the end of Yusef’s blog post, it should be “ocellated”. You can see the supposedly eye-like spots clearly here.)
So that’s “turkey” sorted.
Sadly, “guinea pig” seems to be more or less a complete mystery:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinea_pig#Guinea_pig
It is interesting to how how various “guinea” lexemes remain in common use even as “Guinea” as an African toponym has perhaps become increasingly marginal – since it no longer refers to a vaguely defined but largeish stretch of coast but to very specific-yet-obscure nation-states. Guinea-Bissau is trying its best to get back into the headlines by having had a coup d’etat earlier this week, but I don’t know that it will do very much. I have however now learned the very sonorous Portuguese name of the new regime there, viz. the Alto Comando Militar para a Restauração da Segurança Nacional e Ordem Pública.
If I had to coin a new classical-style binomial for this bird I would call it cottornis peturis (the dumb tail-spreading bird). And for guineafowl cottornis corythina (the dumb helmeted bird). Of course, the two birds aren’t in the same genus but then again it’s debatable whether the idea to come up with standardized genus names at all was any good. The binomial system makes sense only as a way to come up with a catchy descriptive term in order to standardize the appellation of a species and put an end to the chaos of regional names. But while doing that we should remember that the term ‘species’ cannot be defined very strictly because the lines between ‘species’ are often more blurry than commonly imagined. The idea, or at least the pretension that things like ‘species’ and ‘genus’ are entirely objective categories is built into the official classification system and has basically made the whole thing feel bloated and even ludicrous.
Good enough for me. German Meerschweinchen – “piglet [from across the] sea”.
Pancho: “The two most common names used in Mexico are guajolote (also from Náhuatl) and pavo (standard Spanish)”
pavo is descended from the Latin for peacock (as is the “pea” in “peacock” itself). Previously quoted from the Penguin Companion to Food: “peacocks seem not to have made good eating … when the turkey arrived from the New World it rapidly displaced the peacock.”
I saw a goat eating a peacock’s tail feathers at the zoo once.
Were they attached to the peacock?
Indeed they were. One of the free-strolling peacocks, as are found at many zoos, got skittish and backed up against the fence around the goat pen. It tail feathers were fanned out, and some of them poked through the fence’s coarse wire mesh. A nearby goat came over and started nibbling on them.
So complicated that it was also quoted here in full in 2012: POCHADE, POCHARD, POACH. Discussion of that poach and the equally complicated French pocher didn’t lead to any more clarity, as far as I can see.
It tail feathers were fanned out, and some of them poked through the fence’s coarse wire mesh. A nearby goat came over and started nibbling on them.
OK, that’s rude, and not really herbivorous.
That’s weird. Goats usually subsist on empty tin cans.
Probably it just wanted to eat the wire mesh and the feathers just got in the way.