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To get more specific in the oven and on the stove, English borrowed sauté, roast, blanch, boil and others. Leave it to the French to have a handy array of nuanced kitchen words.
John McWhorter: For our bonus segment, there are some interesting things about French when it comes, as might not surprise you, to cooking. A lot of our words — in fact, really, most of the words that we use for cooking — are not original English words, but they're French words.
And it's kind of weird.
In Old English, you just cooked things. Cook. That's pretty much all there was. And even that word was borrowed.
English borrows lots of words from Latin, starting in the middle of the last millennium. But actually, there were various words that English, before it was English over on the continent, borrowed from Latin early, early on. One of those words is street, for example. And that was what happened with the cook word. It's as if they were doing all these things with food, but just didn't feel like having a word for it.
And you never know what this sort of thing. You're tempted to think that, well, the French are more into cooking than the Old English people were, or something like that. But then again, you never know what a language is going to pull.
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