their protein and starch are locked up in inert
storage granules. Meat is thus mouth-filling in
a way that few plant foods are. Its rich aroma
when cooked comes from the same
biochemical complexity.
Food Words: Animals and Their Meats
As the novelist Walter Scott and others
pointed out long ago, the Norman Conquest
of Britain in 1066 caused a split in the
English vocabulary for common meats.
The Saxons had their own Germanic names
for the animals — ox, steer, cow, heifer,
and calf; sheep, ram, wether, ewe, and
lamb; swine, hog, gilt, sow, and pig — and
named their flesh by attaching “meat of” to
the animal name. When French became the
language of the English nobility in the
centuries following the Conquest, the
animal names survived in the countryside,
but the prepared meats were rechristened
in the fashion of the court cooks: the first