roast, bake and broil

Sometimes it is the simple words that we use all the time that surprise us when we find that we are not entirely sure of the meaning. In a recent discussion the trouble started with broil, which is not a common word in Australian English. It is an item of American English. But that led to bake and roast and grill.

 So let’s begin with roast. This has a Germanic root and is basically to do with cooking meat over a fire. The word entered Old French during the late Roman period.  Picture the venison on a spit over the fire and you have roasting.

 But what is the difference between roast and bake. Roast lamb, roast chicken, roast turkey are all meats but you can roast apples or eggplant or coffee beans.

 In a similar way, baking used to be something that you did to make bread but has now extended so that you can bake other things, like chicken, capsicums, potatoes.

 The difference between roast and bake is that meat was roasted by placing it in front of or over a source of radiant heat, the fire, whereas the dough for bread was cooked by convection, either by enclosing it in a small oven or in the ashes of the fire, or by placing it on a bake stone or griddle. With the advent of the modern oven, these distinctions broke down.

 Both bake and oven have a long history in Indo-European languages, and find their place in Old English as a Germanic language.

 And so we come to broil. This is a synonym for grill.  Chaucer in the Prologue to Canterbury Tales says of the Cook:   He koude rooste and seethe and broille and frye, make good thick soup and wel bake a pye.   Roast, boil, grill, fry and bake. An all-round professional.  To seethe food, by the way, was to cook it by boiling or stewing.

 We might still talk of the broiling sun. Perhaps not as often as we used to.  But the word is still going strong in its basic cooking sense in American English whereas British and Australian English prefer grill.  Sadly no one knows the origin of broil.

 Grill  is from an Old French word for a gridiron, in this instance the one used to cook over a fire.