![]() ![]() ![]() So for someone of “higher station” to have to eat umble pie might be seen as belittling and humiliating. It is hard to be sure that the equating of umble pie to low class was widespread enough to have been responsible for the pun, but it does seem likely that numble or umble pie was for poor folks, and the higher class, of course, ate the actual deer meat or that it came to be seen that way. Robin Hood and his men ate their venison and their numbles, and like Pepys they did not think it belittling at all. This, even though they claim that umble pie was the more common name for the pie in the 1600’s, so don’t quote me on that timeline, or I might have to eat crow! However, Websters claims that the basic timeline has nombles passing into English as numbles by the 1300’s, which by the 1400’s became umbles, which became humbles by the 1500’s. Peacock presumably used numble because the spelling was more appropriate to Robin Hood’s time. Humble was then revived at some point, and Webster attributes it to Americans, although this is not substantiated. According to the Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories, humble pie was recorded from before 1642, but then was not seen for quite a while, with umble pie being common. Peacock used the N spelling in 1822 but, curiously, this spelling was already widely out of use, having already been replaced with umble and then humble. The appearance of the knight, however, cheered him up with a semblance of protection and gave him just sufficient courage to demolish a cygnet and a numble-pie, which he diluted with the contents of two flasks of canary sack. …of which all the flasks and pasties before him could not give him assurance. Later, Friar Tuck, fretting over the loss of his valise full of treasures and fear for his safety caused him to lose his appetites during a feast: Robin helped him largely to numble-pie and cygnet and pheasant, and the other dainties of his table… Little John came before a melancholy young man upon a horse and went and told Robin Hood about him, who told his man to fetch the young man back to dine with them where: Numble pie is mentioned in Thomas Love Peacock’s Maid Marian and Crochet Castle (Robin Hood). Turner came in, and did bring us an umble pie hot out of her oven, extraordinary good. Its value as an historical document is vast. Although the diary is lighthearted and amusing, it is considered an “inadvertent masterpiece” and Pepys the greatest diarist in the English language. It describes scenes of everyday life, and also chronicles the the Great London Fire. 1 The diary of Samuel Pepys, which he began on January 1, 1660, records the everyday life of a seventeenth-century London man who was engaged in business and who came in contact with all sorts of people. Steak and kidney pie is still around, after all and according to Samuel Pepys, a well-to-do and upwardly mobile city dweller who dined with such notables as Sir William Penn, an umble pie was quite good. One way of cooking umbles was to bake them into a pie. The prevalent theory was that people heard someone saying “a numbles” and thought they were saying “an umbles.” So the word numble became umble. Not every one of the time seems to have agreed.Īt some point, the N got dropped. The numbles were reserved for the huntsmen and his companions, or for the servants, while the venison itself was served to the more wealthy household to which he sold the deer. ![]() The numbles were eaten as early as the 1400’s. This is also where we the get the word lumbar from. It came from the Old French nombles which came from the Latin lumbulus meaning “a little loin.” The word for loin was lumbus. Removing the liver, heart, entrails, and other organs from a deer and cooking them to eat used to be a common practice, and these innards were called numbles. Now, if you were forced to eat the entrails of a deer, that would for sure be humiliating, wouldn’t it? Well, it would be today, but there was a time when “waste not, want not” was taken more seriously, and the eating of organ meats or offal was more common than it is today, although it still survives. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |