Just for Fun: Dessert Words

In ancient Greek, ambrosia was the "food of the gods", and the word can be used to describe something sublimely delicious. It also refers to a specific kind of fruit salad often containing pineapple, orange slices, and coconut.

Literally meaning "white eat" in French, blancmange is a jelled milk pudding, often molded into shapes like other gelatin-based dishes.

When something is so sickly sweet that it makes your teeth hurt, that's cloying. It can also be used to refer to things that aren't food, like overblown romance movies or too-cute children's shows.

The latin verb conficere means "to put together," "to prepare." This became the French word confection, which we use today to refer to pastries and other sweets, especially those that are fancy or well-crafted.

A croustade is a kind of pie in French, and a crostata means the same in Italian; both words are related to our word crust. At some point in the fifteenth century, the word jumped to English in an altered form and came to refer to the filling —specifically one with eggs and cream — rather than the whole pie. Now custard refers to any cooked dessert where eggs provide the structure, including the base of many ice creams.

Ginger flavors a lot of tasty treats, especially gingerbread and ginger ale. It's the nubbly root of a tropical plant with beautiful flowers, and besides its potent spicy flavor and healthy properties — it reportedly helps with nausea and stomach ailments — it also gives us an excuse to learn the word rhizome, which refers to the horizontal underground stem that ginger grows from and uses to spread.

If you know the Italian word macaroni, you know the root of the word macaroon. The French changed macaroni to macaron, referring to small soft sandwich cookies with various flavored fillings. Macaroons are different, often made with coconut and egg whites and formed into little cones or pyramids.

Like cloying above, saccharine often refers to something, sometimes food but more often a story, song, or movie that's so sweet it's off-putting. The word originates in the Greek word for sugar sacharon. Saccharin was the name given to a synthetic sugar substitute derived from coal tar; saccharine with an e on the end refers dismissively to tacky or sentimental things.

Shariba means "to drink" in Arabic. In Persian and Turkish, sherbet came to mean a sweetened fruit drink often chilled with snow. In the West, a version of sherbet was sold as a powder that created a fizzy drink when mixed with water, but now it refers to a fruit-based frozen treat like ice cream but often without any dairy.

Sorbet derives directly from sherbet, above, via the Italian sorbetto.

You'll often see torte used to describe dense, sometimes flourless cakes like sachertorte, made with chocolate, or mandeltorte, with ground almonds.

A trifle is a dessert made by layering sponge cake — often flavored with liquor — with jam, custard, and/or whipped cream. A trifle can also refer to something small, insignificant, or unimportant.

It's unclear whether trifle derives from truffle, which describes a type of prized edible mushroom that grows underground. Chocolate truffles do refer to the fungus; since they're round and often somewhat irregular, the sweets look like the mushrooms they're named after.