We got the latest issue of Cook’s Illustrated recently, and on the cover was a teaser for “Sheet-Pan Chicken, Schmaltzy Potatoes.”
I was amused by the double meaning of “schmaltzy,” but it also got me to wondering about words we have for fat. And about schmaltz.
Warning: This post talks about animal parts and non-vegetarian cooking.
I started by looking into the word fat itself, which per Wiktionary refers to “specialized animal tissue with high lipid content.” There’s specialized animal tissue for fat, and as we’ll see, there are specialized words for various versions of it.
Fat is an old word in English, going back to a Germanic root, and therefore has cognates in German (fett), Danish (fet), and Dutch (fat, hey). For that initial f- in fat you might expect to find a p- in Latinate languages, and so you do (kind of)—in Latin, there’s the word pinguis (Spanish pingüe) meaning “plump.” If you look up the word penguin, they’ll say that one possible origin among several for penguin is classical Latin pinguid. (Douglas Harper: “A similarity […] has been noted.”)
Another kind of fat is suet. You might know this word because suet is used to create “cakes” with embedded seeds that you can offer at bird feeders. Suet is a solid fat at room temperature, which comes from around “the kidneys and loins of beef and button” (M-W). We got the word suet from Norman French sywet, ultimately from Latin sebum, which we still see in medical contexts in English.
It’s possible that in your fridge you have a different type of solid fat: lard. This refers to fat that comes from pigs, which makes sense because the word goes back via Old French to the Latin word lardum, a word for bacon. We also have a verb to lard; in cooking, this means to add fat to meat for cooking (“larding a roast”). The cooking sense extended to mean “embellish” in general, which then led metaphorically to the notion of adding unnecessary content or frills, as in this nice quote courtesy of Wiktionary: “Volkswagen avoided the fins and other frills with which U.S. manufacturers larded their vehicles”.
Many people think of lard as a bit dodgy—I certainly did when I was growing up—and this turns out to be no accident. With the spread of electricity in the early 20th century, the demand for plant-based oil declined as oil lamps disappeared. So Procter & Gamble marketed a new form of these oils as a cooking ingredient: hydrogenated vegetable oil, also known as shortening, which was eventually touted as “healthier” than lard.[1] But why the word shortening? Because adding fat to flour “shorts” the dough, which is to say, it “prevents long strands of gluten from forming as the dough is handled” (source)—think crumbly cookies instead of chewy rustic bread. Any solid fat will work to shorten dough, including lard and butter, but the word shortening got attached specifically to hydrogenated oils.
A widely used fat is tallow; it’s used for food[2], for soap and candles, for fuel, for lubrication, for cosmetics, and more. What is tallow, exactly? In the old days, it was fat that was rendered from cows or sheep. These days, it has a more technical definition that addresses its chemical structure. (Thus in the modern definition, lard can be tallow as well.) The origins of the word tallow are unknown, other than that there’s a related word talg in various Germanic languages, so it’s presumed to come from Proto-Germanic.
And speaking of butter, another solid fat, the word has or might have an excellent origin. Butter is fat that’s extracted from milk. One theory therefore is that butter comes from ancient Greek boutyron, which is bous (“cow”) and tyros (“cheese”). A substitute for butter is margarine or oleomargarine (hold that thought), which got its name from margaric acid, a pearlescent component of animal fat—Greek margarite means “pearl”.[3]
When you’re baking, you might grease a pan using a solid fat like butter or shortening. Grease is a generic word for a lubricant, “oily matter” (M-W), or animal fat. Historically it’s been associated with hunting (“bear grease”), and there used to be an expression “in the time of grease” meaning a good time to hunt game, i.e., when the game is fatted. English got the word from French, where it goes back to the Latin word crassus. We still see the Latin root in the word crass (“coarse, crude; dense”), and the French one in Mardi Gras (“fat Tuesday”) and foie gras (“fat liver”).
Let’s turn now to the sea. Marine mammals like whales and seals have blubber, a special layer of subcutaneous fat that insulates them against the cold of the sea.[4] The verb to blubber meaning “to cry” probably goes back to the idea of forming bubbles. As a noun, the word was then applied to jellyfish (bubbles again) and as of the 1600s, to whale fat, probably via “figurative use in reference to anything wanting firmness, substance, or permanence.”
The word oil today is a generic term for a liquid fat. It came to us via Latin oleum, from Greek elaion, which referred to olive oil. It confused me when I was young to see margarine, which I saw all the time on labels, referred to as oleomargarine, its original name. Now of course I understand that oleo is a combining form of oil, which goes back to the versatile olive.
These days we get edible oils from many sources: some are intuitive, like avocados or fish, and some are not, like corn. One type of oil on supermarket shelves is canola oil. An older word for this is rapeseed oil, where rapum is the Latin word for “turnip.” Rapeseed oil is edible but has drawbacks, specifically color and taste. In the 1970s, scientists at the University of Manitoba bred a version that addressed these issues, and the improved oil was marketed by the Rapeseed Association of Canada under the tradename Canola (“Canadian” + “oil, low acid”[5]).
And finally let’s return to schmaltz. In German, Schmaltz refers to any melted fat or grease used for cooking. In northern European Jewish culture, hence in Yiddish, schmaltz more specifically became associated with chicken or goose fat, because it was forbidden to cook in pork fat (lard) or mix meat and dairy (butter).
How did this term come to also mean “mawkish, over-emotional, esp. in show business use,” as Johnathon Green defines it? One source has a good, if speculative, explanation:
Schmaltzy has a relatively broad meaning and can apply across the full schmaltzy spectrum including to things that are a bit tacky, somewhat corny or excessively sappy. Schmaltzy, of course, is a play on the term “schmaltz,” alluding to schmaltz’s culinary effect. Just like schmaltz is the x-factor ingredient that elevates a meal to mouthwatering moments, schmaltziness is the x-factor performance that elevates a show to heartwarming heights.
In the world of theatre, the hope is that schmaltziness, no matter how corny or exaggerated, will hit the audience with waves of emotion and leave them tearfully begging for more.
The origin of this meaning therefore seems to be in Yiddish theater, but it crossed entertainment boundaries and by the 1930s showed up in musical contexts, especially jazz. There it was used in a pejorative way to refer to “commercial” music as distinct from “real jazz.”
I suppose that the appeal to popular taste has been derided since approximately the time people first performed art. Are there contemporary commentators on ancient Greek theater who dismissed a rival’s play as popular or commercial? Probably. If so, I wonder whether we have an excellent Greek word for that.
One thing I cannot report just yet is whether the sheet-pan chicken with schmaltzy potatoes is any good. But I’m definitely going to try the recipe.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.
[1] If you enjoy food history and don’t already know the story of how shortening largely replaced lard in the US, you might like an article in Mashed and another in The Conversation about how shortening was created and marketed.
[2] McDonald’s French fries were originally cooked in 93% beef tallow, which gave them a prized flavor and texture. But of course it made them non-vegetarian. The company switched to vegetable oil in the 1990s, not to everyone’s delight. Ironically, cooking in hydrogenated vegetable oils—shortening—proves to be unhealthy.
[3] Margarine is white and was originally sold with a dye pack that homemakers mixed in themselves to make the fat look more like butter. Why couldn’t margarine be pre-dyed at the factory? Politics and interest groups.
[4] Interestingly, blubber provides vitamin C to humans in an environment where there are not many (any?) other sources.
[5] Thus it’s an example of a syllable acronym.