On Food and Cooking

The English word pastry, Italian pasta, and
French pâte and pâté all go back to a
suggestive group of ancient Greek words
having to do with small particles and fine
textures: they variously referred to powder,
salt, barley porridge, cake, and an
embroidered veil. A later Latin derivative,
pasta, was applied to flour that had been
wetted to a paste, then dried; it led to
Italian pasta and to pâte meaning “dough.”
Pâté is a medieval French word that was
given originally to a chopped meat
preparation enclosed in a dough, but
eventually came to name the meat
preparation itself, with or without
enclosure. Pie was the near equivalent of
the original pâté in medieval English, and
meant a dish of any sort — meat, fish,
vegetable, fruit — enclosed in pastry. The
word had less to do with doughs than with
odds and ends: it came from magpie, a bird
with variegated coloring that collects