Etymology of Bisque

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is John Pizzoli. I’m a ceramic artist from Stanford, Connecticut.

Hi, John. Welcome.

Hi, John.

So, I use the word bisque nearly every day.

And the more I think about it, the more the word bothers me.

The word bisque?

Bisque.

And you’re not ordering soup every day?

No.

Okay. Tell us why this word bothers you.

The word means so many different things.

It has many definitions, and I can’t quite figure out how it came to mean an unglazed piece of ceramic work.

Aha.

Yeah, it’s kind of crazy-making, isn’t it, how many different definitions it has?

Yeah, it’s got a ton of them.

Let’s just separate two of the major paths right now and just say that the bisque shellfish soup is unrelated etymologically to all the other bisques, okay?

Okay.

When I was in the Louvre, Europe, I guess they don’t call it bisque.

They call it biscuit.

But I still, either word just doesn’t make any sense to me.

No, no, no.

You’re on top of it.

The pottery, right?

The pottery.

Well, okay.

Bisque in pottery making is also sometimes still called a biscuit in English, not just in French.

Do you use that?

Do you know anybody that uses that?

No, everybody.

All the ceramic people I know, we all call it bisque.

Well, the bisque is a shorter form of biscuit,

And it comes ultimately from Old French,

B-E-S-Q-U-I-T, or biscuit,

Which means twice cooked.

So it’s about the process, you know,

Because you do, first you harden it,

And then you glaze it, right?

So you cook it twice.

Usually, bisque is that it’s only done once.

Oh, really? Is that true?

Yep.

The first firing, when you load it up,

You put the raw clay into the kiln,

And the first firing that’s done to a lower temperature

Is the bisque firing.

Right, okay.

But the thing is, there’s still a history there,

A connection between the cooking.

So maybe the count is off historically.

I mean, this word here is hundreds of years old,

So it’s had plenty of time to change.

But it’s still about the cooking, right?

It’s about the cooking of something.

And then there’s the natural borrowing from French into English,

And then the corruption of the word from biscuit into bisque.

And then we also have the other offshoot, which is the color bisque, which is a pink to yellowish-brown color, which comes much later, much, much later.

And it refers to the unfinished, unglazed look of some ceramics or pottery.

So, John, so the bisque is the pottery that actually comes out of the kiln, right?

And it’s unglazed and all that.

And then you glaze it, and then do you put it back in and cook it some more?

Exactly, to a hotter temperature.

Okay.

So maybe it’s ultimately cooked twice.

Sort of like biscotti.

That’s what I was just going to say.

It will make me hungry now when I work with it.

Yeah, they’re definitely all connected.

The biscotti and biscuit are all connected etymologically.

It’s a nice little tangle, a pleasant tangle, I think,

Of really interesting tactile things like pottery

And really interesting yummy things like food.

Yeah, and Zweibach.

Did you ever eat those little things when you were a kid?

That’s twice cooked as well?

Yeah, in German, I think.

How about that?

How about them apples?

How about them apples?

Well, thank you very much.

Thanks for calling, John.

We’re glad to take your call.

Excellent.

Thanks so much, John.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Language is interesting.

There should be a show where they talk about these connections.

There should be.

And they could have a whole line of bobble-headed serenity.

And then they could have the phone number, 1-877-929-9673.

And then possibly people could call to ask them language questions.

Yes.

Or they could email to words@waywordradio.org.