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The origin of the word culinary, part of the name of this website, really doesn’t require a lot of explanation. It has a very direct origin from the Latin word for kitchen or cookstove: culina. Culina itself is derived from the Latin word coquere, meaning “to cook.”
The words concoct, precocious, and concoction also come from coquere. Concoction means to “cook up something by mixing ingredients.” We get this by combining the prefix con-, meaning together, with the root word, to get a word that basically means to cook together.
A decoction, which is a word you probably never used unless you are an herbalist or similar, means to “cook something down.” It comes from combining the prefix de- with coquere. The term usually applies to boiling down something in water, such as leaves, roots, or other plant parts, to obtain an extract.
So, although we can use the word culinary to describe anything to do with food or the cooking of food, the word really signifies cooking. This is why a culinary school is a cooking school.
To say is a child is precocious means if you understand the origin, that he is “cooked before his time.” Literally, it means precooked. What we are really saying, of course, is that he seems to have developed certain abilities or characteristics at an earlier age than normally happens.
The word kiln also comes from the Latin culina. A kiln is a brick-lined or earthen oven used for baking and drying things like bricks or pottery. Interestingly, although most of us pronounce the word kiln by sounding the n at the end, those who work with kilns professionally often drop the n and just say kil.
The dropping of the n is something that used to often happen in English. Another example is the word mill, which was originally milne, having come from the Latin word molina.
Origin of Cuisine
Culinary can be used to refer to anything to do with food, the kitchen, or cooking. It’s a flexible word. Interestingly, the word cuisine, which we get from the French, comes from the same Latin roots and is similar to the Spanish word cocina, which means “kitchen.” La cuisine literally means “kitchen” in French but the word has a plasticity that causes it to be used to mean “a style of cooking,” or even “to cook”
Allez Cusine!
Many people know the word cuisine from the popular Japanese cooking show Iron Chef and its American version. On that show a fictional “chairman” played by an actor, begins the cooking competition between chefs by shouting “Allez cuisine!”
The original Iron Chef Chairman, Takeshi Kaga, was played by the real-life stage and screen actor Shigekatsu Katsuta. He is supposedly saying “Go to the kitchen.” To be more precise, the original Chairman Kaga said something more like “Alleh-Kizeen!”
If he meant to say “go to the kitchen” this would be incorrect French. To the kitchen would actually be “À la cuisine.” However, apparently, even native French speakers cannot quite decide if he is breaking any rules, as there could be other intentions, such as the imperative allez, cuisine: “Come on, let’s go do some cooking,” or “come on, let’s get to the kitchen.”
This just goes to show how plastic the word cuisine is. Since I don’t speak French, despite my three years of trying to study it, I don’t know what anybody is saying, only that I never use the word cuisine and only chose the word culinary for this site because it has “cool” in it.
What Is The Kitchen Brigade?
References (Culinary, Cuisine, Haute, Nouvelle)
