Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

If you are a typical Canadian consumer, you probably have slurped java
from a zarf, eaten a type of bread that shares its name with bacteria,
carved meat with an instrument named after a flower blossom, and turned
up your nose at a delicacy that has been variously called trollibags,
mundungus, slumgullion, and tharm.

This is a book that invites lovers of the English language to sit at
the same table as lovers of food. Mark Morton is an assistant professor
at the University of Winnipeg and a CBC radio personality with a weekly
column on word origins. In this book, Morton examines hundreds of
gastronomic words, both common and obscure. The results are often
surprising and hilarious.

Although scholarly and literate, Morton’s prose is decidedly
unstuffy. For example, on the subject of fumosity (a word used to
describe the potential a certain food has to cause flatulence) Morton
writes that “no standard has been established, although one based on
logarithms, like the Richter scale for earthquakes, would seem most
appropriate.”

Once picked up, this book is as hard to put down as an open bag of
potato chips.