Salt is sprinkled everywhere in food names. Before the fridge was invented, salt was the key to stop food from rotting. To preserve meat or fish, you’d add lots of salt and dry it out. Salt pulls the water out of the flesh and need bacteria won’t grow. That’s how you make salami.
Salt is also fundamental to so many early foods that it shows up in names like salad to salsa.
Sausage and salami both come from the Latin sal, because they’re seasoned or cured with salt. Sausage comes up through French, saucisse, and salami from the Italian word salame. And just like salt has pepper, salami has it’s partner pepperoni, pepper seasoned pork.
Salad began as herba salata, a bowl of vegetables in salt water or brine that Romans ate. The herba gets dropped, the name is shortened and the French call it salade.
In Latin a salted food or condiment was salsa. That gives us our sauce, and goes directly to Spanish as their generic sauce word, salsa. In American Spanish salsa gets narrowed to refer to sauces of chopped tomatoes, onions, peppers and more.
Akin to salt is the sea. The Latin for sea was mare which gives us marine. To marinate a food probably began as soaking it salted sea water or brine.
Italian sailors are marinaio and they got a sauce named for them, the well known marinara. This could be because the sauce either didn’t spoil on long sea voyages or was made in celebration up their return. Italian miners of coal, carbon, have a similar story about their namesake pasta sauce, carbonara.
Rosemary combines mare for sea with word for dew, ros. Together they become rosmarinus, dew of the sea.
Returning to pasta, that itself was probably originally from a word for something salted from the Greek pastos. It referred to a salted mess of food, probably a bowl of salted, mushy grains like barley. It got refined in Latin as pasta, becoming the name paste or dough. You can immediately see other food names that rise from that including pastry, paste and the English pasty.
The French take it up a level and we get the patisserie where you buy doughy things, and well as their with that very expensive dish made from duck livers, pâté de foie gras, or paste of liver fattened.
The very salty deli meat pastrami may also come from the same Greek pastos as it passed through Romanian. It may also have originated with Turkish name, to press.
So think of all the salts sprinkled across pasta with marinara sauce, especially if the cook has added rosemary, sausage and extra salt.
related words
- salt
- sausage
- salami
- salad
- salsa
- sauce
- marine
- marinate
- marinara
- rosemary
- pasta
- pastry
- patisserie
- pate
- pastrami
the journal of gastroetymology 