Hot caffeinated beverages, more than any other kind of food in fantasy worlds, come with made-up names. Kavage, from Elizabeth Vaughan‘s Dagger-Star (and her other work, apparently), is one of them. It’s the only word for a food or drink which doesn’t exist in our world, in a novel containing, among other foods, raisins, turnips, and saffron.
It’s made by boiling water in a small copper pot, and then putting beans into it. (Are they ground? It’s not mentioned.) Despite this, at one point in the novel (p. 180), in what is possibly an error in the text, a pot of tea arrives. Immediately afterward, everyone is drinking kavage from cups. Whatever it is, it can be over-brewed, and is a dark and bitter. (p. 107) It’s drunk in a mug, and frequently had in the morning.
As a caffeinated beverage word, kavage struck me as one of the least intuitive I’ve encountered, because the letters made me think of so many other things instead. (The tea/coffee confusion in the text didn’t help either.) I kept thinking it might be cognate with “cabbage”, or perhaps a relative of the Vanuatan pepper-family drink “kava”, or perhaps related to the French “cavage” (excavation, hollow). But it’s not. It’s one of the many names for caffeine in one the many worlds of fantasy.
A recurring theme at this weekend’s Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery was the way food words are passed off to other languages and acquire new meanings there. One of the more straightforward of these is “brioche”. In France – as, indeed, in most places – it is a yeast bread made with eggs and milk, with a richly golden brown crust. It is the baked good which Marie Antoinette supposedly mentioned when, in translation, she said, “Let them eat cake.”
In Italy, however, it means a kind of croissant, usually one filled with jam. It is a morning snack commonly available in bars and pastry shops. The dictionary at Garzanti Linguistica translates the French word “brioche” first as “(cuc.) brioche, brioscia (panino dolce di pasta lievitata con burro e uova)”. In other words, although it starts with “brioche”, it must elaborate further, calling it croissant-like before giving it a recipe for clarity. The definition for “brioscia”, in turn, explains that Italian croissants differ from French ones in both shape and type of dough.
Sicilian brioches are different again, more like the usual French ones, but with further locally-integral variations, such as candied lemon peel. (To be clear, there are variations on it in France too.) In Italian, it’s all good, so long as one likes sweet baked goods.
In French, colloquially, it’s also a word for stomach, as in, “prendre une brioche”, to get a potbelly. Another variant, from the Wiktionary, offers “avoir une brioche au four” as “to have a bun in the oven” in the English colloquial sense. Older dictionaries (1922, plus Garzanti Linguistica) have it as slang too: when masculine, it’s a “mistake”. Given its lack of presence in more modern sources, I wonder if it’s now old-fashioned and has died out. The current online Larousse dictionary doesn’t include it; nor do the first few slang dictionaries I checked.
The OED puts its earliest attested use in English at 1826, when, delightfully, in Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (Vol. II, p. 298) the narrator observes that her cousin “left it to my good senses to discover the merits of brioche and marrangles and eau de groseille”, beginning the process of teaching the twelve-year-old viewpoint character to find learning French a worthwhile project, and not a mistake at all.
Flunec is an also-ran among fictional wines. Jonathan Swift wrote, in Gulliver’s Travels,
I had, the evening before, drunk plentifully of a most delicious wine called glimigrim, (the Blefuscudians call it flunec, but ours is esteemed the better sort,) which is very diuretic.
Glimigrim, the more esteemed wine of the Lilliputians, has gone on to very minor fame and fortune as a word (there’s a real wine named for it), but flunec, the wine of the Blefuscudians, has not. Leaving aside what the wine is used for in the story, and leaving aside too the interesting ramifications of preferring – by satirical analogy – early eighteenth-century English wines to those of France, I will merely observe that the drug company Nortech missed a lovely opportunity when it named an anti-fungal cream (and not a diuretic) Flunec.
It’s common advice, if not universally agreed, that large meals right before bedtime are bad for one’s health. This conviction has been around for quite a long time. Middle English educational texts warn again eating “rere sopers”, or late suppers. “rere” is the same word as the modern “rear”, evolving out of Anglo-French. (See OED rear-, comb. form) These meals were a sign of gluttony (a vice) in food and therefore, quite likely, a sign of overindulgence in life in general.
In “How the Goode Man Taght Hys Sone” (“How the Good Man taught his Son”), the fifteenth-century author warns,
And loke thou wake not to longe,
Neydur use no rere sopers to late;
For were thy complexion never so stronge,
Wyth surfett thou mayste fordo that.
(“And mind you don’t stay awake too long / nor eat rere sopers too late, / for were your complexion ever so robust, / with excess, you might do it in.”)
Other authors are no more approving, with John Lydgate, in his fifteenth-century bestseller, The Dietary, advising that his reader should “Suffre no surfitis in thyn hous at nyht, / War of rer sopers and of gret excesse.” (“Suffer no excess in your house at night, / beware of rere sopers and of great excess.”)
Finally, Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s early fourteenth-century work, Handlyng Synne, warns that “Rere sopers yn pryvyte, / with glotonye, eachone they be”. You may eat your rere soper in private, but that doesn’t make each of them any less gluttonous. Unlike the other authors, however, he continues on in more obliging detail, explaining some of the other problems with eating rere sopers, such as the danger of eating after midnight on Thursday, when Friday is a day of fasting on water and bread only. (lines 7279-7290) Really, Mannyng is an advocate of every meal in its place. Early dinners are no better than rere sopers, he believes. (l. 7292)
Rere sopers are only mentioned in order to tell the reader to not eat them, but at least, as a result, these Middle English authors provide their label for late suppers, a mealtime which, however deplored, was common enough to earn a fixed name.
© S. Worthen 2009