What do biscotti and macaroni have in common?

‘Only one biscotto!’ exclaimed my husband, grabbing a little packet labelled ‘Biscotti’ at the station coffee stall. It fell from his agitated fingers and broke into two. ‘There you are, darling, two biscotti,’ I said cheerfully, to his annoyance. But singulars and plurals for foodstuffs are seldom simple. Take macaroni. It is an obsolete form of maccheroni in Italian, ‘tubular pasta’. But Italians hardly think of talking of one maccherone. It’s a funny word anyway. An origin is seriously proposed in the Greek makarios, ‘blessed’, and aionios, ‘eternal’, which together named a funeral chant. I suppose macaroni was consumed after the funeral, as we do ham sandwiches.

In the Spectator (no relation) of 24 April 1711, Joseph Addison wrote about maccaronies as ‘circumforaneous Wits whom every Nation calls by the Name of that Dish of Meat which it loves best. In Holland they are termed Pickled Herrings; in France, Jean Pottages; in Italy, Maccaronies; and in Great Britain, Jack Puddings’. (By circumforaneous, I think he meant ‘wandering about the public square’.) But Addison was writing half a century before the rise of the Macaroni, a kind of fop or dandy as exemplified by the Macaroni Club.

These fops were not the inventors of macaronic verse, alternating vernacular and Latin lines, or a jumbling of the languages, which began far earlier. The Liber Macaronices, a narrative poem of the kind, was published in 1517 by the gyrovague Teofilo Folengo under the pen-name Merlinus Cocaius. The OED learnedly points out an earlier book, Macaroneae, written in 1490 by Tifi Odasi of Padua, who called his own verse poesia gnoccolosa, after the knotty dumplings. If this were not enough pasta-based vocabulary, the macaroon began life in 15th-century English as a synonym for macaroni and was used by John Donne to mean ‘blockhead’. It later became the name for a biscuit with almonds or coconut, but now means a fashionable pair of almondy meringues sandwiched together.