‘It makes me hungry,’ said my husband when I mentioned the word salmagundi. That is his reaction to many words. But he liked the sound of it.
I think in its sound, suggestive of something impossible to pin down, it resembles serendipity. The obscure French original of salmagundi, a dish of chopped up meat and whatnot, must have become known in English through Rabelais’s gluttonous epic. Thomas Urquhart’s translation of 1653 speaks of the ‘Lairdship of Salmigondin’. Various rationalising respellings emerged, such as Sallad-Magundy (1710). Salad, by origin something salty, was not limited to raw greenery. ‘Sallet,’ wrote Randle Holme, the herald painter, ‘is either Sweet Herbs, or Pickled Fruits, or Cucumbers, Samphire, Elder-Buds, Broom-Buds, &c. eaten with Roasted Meats.’
In Samuel Foote’s comedy The Patron (1764) one character mentions salmagundi in a different form: ‘By your account, I must be an absolute olio, a perfect salamongundy of charms.’
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