Many of our food terms comes from the French, such as menu, short for menu de repas ‘list of what is served at a meal’. The term a la carte means ‘food ordered as separate items’ as opposed to a table d’hôte, ‘meal served at a fixed price’. Haute cuisine is high-quality cooking in the traditional French style, and maître d’, meaning ‘head waiter’, is short for maître d’hôtel, the person in charge of the restaurant’s dining room.
However, the person in charge of the kitchen is of course the chef, which comes from the French chef de cuisine ‘head of the kitchen’. Both words chef and maître had already been introduced into English as ‘chief’ and ‘master’, before being reintroduced with reference to dining. Another French term is the sous chef, the ‘under chef’ or the second in command in the kitchen.
The traditional uniform of a chef in the western world consists of a white double-breasted jacket, black and white trousers in a chequered pattern and the chef’s tall white hat known as a toque, short for the French term toque blanche. Toque was an Arabic word from Old Persian taqa meaning ‘veil, shawl’
The toque is not only to keep hair out of the way, the number of pleats used represented the number of recipes the chef had mastered. This dates back to the 16th century and the more accomplished the chef, the taller his hat was. A toque also singled out the chef from the dishwasher or mere kitchen assistant.
Nowadays, male or female chefs might wear a skull cap or hairnet instead of a toque and often wear black aprons.
The word apron came from the French naperon ‘small tablecloth’ from nappe ‘cloth’, the same source as napkin and napery. The word napron became a victim of misdivision, in which the mishearing of ‘a napron’ turned it into ‘an apron’.
We have borrowed many more dining terms from the French language, such as omelette, café, vinaigrette, sauté, aperitif, crudités or entrée.
Bon appétit!
