[Loch-Ruadh] Word of the Day, March 1, 2002

[Bill Osterheim]

OK, feast people! We have a new dish to try out!

Cait O'Hara wrote:

> Starry-gazzy-pie
>
> A pie made of [herring-like] pilchards and leeks, the heads of the pilchards appearing throughout the crust as if they were studying the sky.
> -- James Halliwell’s Dictionary of Archaic and Provincial Words, 1855
>
> Fest Day of St. David, the patron saint of Wales.  He cleverly employed leeks to defeat the fifth-century Saxons by fastening these members of the onion family to his warriors’ hats to distinguish them from their enemies in hand-to-hand combat.  Heroics aside, William Turner’s Herbal (1568) cautioned would-be consumers of the leek’s dark side:  “The leek breedeth wind and evil juice, and maketh heavy dreams; it stirreth a man to make water and is good for the belly.  But if you would boil a leek in two waters, and afterwards steep it in cold water, it will be less windy than before.”  More recently, “to eat the leek” indicated the embarrassed retraction of a statement, much like “eating crow,” and was used in this regard in Shakespeare’s Henry V.
>
> 2,000,000,000 Web Pages--you only need 1. Save time with My Lycos.
> http://my.lycos.com
> _______________________________________________
> Loch-ruadh mailing list
> Loch-ruadh at ansteorra.org
> http://www.ansteorra.org/mailman/listinfo/loch-ruadh