What's on your mind right now?

Post Reply New Topic

I wonder why cow becomes beef and pig becomes pork but lamb stays as lamb
I'm talking about when they become food

Beef, pork and mutton for prepared meats come from French words for the animals themselves - boeuf, porc and mouton. They arrived with the Normans. In them days the people raising the animals - the peasantry who were mainly Anglo-saxons - would never have gotten to eat that kind of food, it was reserved for the fancy-pants Norman overlords.

So that's why we have separate words for the animal and the meat. Because the people raising the animals kept using the Old English words and the people eating it used the French words.

Cooked sheep was originally just mutton. It was only when people got a taste for the less chewy younger animals that 'lamb' starts to be a thing. So they called it lamb to convey that it's young meat and differentiate it from mutton.

I'm not keen on lamb me

Me neither.

It's got a funny taste I think

I love lamb. A roasted lamb leg with rosemary and garlic is about as good as it gets for me, meat-wise.

We do eat lamb in this house but I only have it for my daughter's sake

I only eat it once or twice a year. It's too expensive.

Yeah and plus if you have it too often it won't be so special

I might switch to a small toastie loaf

I hate to discriminate but "ships biscuits" sound a bit boring based on the ingredients

Crikey are they selling those things as a feelgood delicacy now? I remember the days when boring food was allowed to be boring, but now you can't even get a bit of kale without it having a Superfood label. They must think we've all fallen off a Christmas tree.

I enjoy a Fruit Shrewsbury.

Yeah well

An Old English word for cattle was 'beeves' (beefs). LOL.

I really should have said 'older English' as the word derives from French via the Normans (as an earlier poster pointed out), and is not of Anglo-Saxon origin.

Last edited by DeepHour on 04 Jun 2025, 12:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Then there's venison. That one always sounds like a criminal offence to me for some reason. Mind you it practically is in the UK.