Kevin, a longtime vegetarian in St. Louis, Missouri, queasily recounts how he accidentally ordered sweetbreads in a fancy restaurant, thinking they were some kind of deep-fried bread, only to discover that it’s a kind of meat — a thymus gland, or the pancreas of a lamb. The origin of the misleading term sweetbreads is uncertain. In his book Cupboard Love, Mark Morton suggests that this name is a marketing ploy to make organ meat more appealing, like the similarly euphemistic terms Cape Cod turkey for codfish, Welsh rabbit for a cheese-and-toast dish, and Rocky Mountain oysters for deep-fried bull testicles. This is part of a complete episode.
More from this show
According to Gobsmacked: The British Invasion of American English (Bookshop|Amazon) by Ben Yagoda, the word smarmy, meaning “unctuous” or “ingratiating,” may come from a 19th-century magazine contest, in which readers sent in...
Mary Beth in Greenville, South Carolina, wonders: Why do we say four-oh-nine for the number 409 instead of four-zero-nine or four-aught-nine? What are the rules for saying either zero or oh or aught or ought to indicate that arithmetical symbol...