postpast

Just as English now uses the word "antipasto" to refer to an hors d'oeuvre served before an Italian meal, it once used the word "postpast" to refer to a little snack following a meal. "Postpast," which derives from the Latin post, meaning "after," and pastus, meaning "food," was current in English only during the seventeenth century, but the custom of the postpast persists to this day: in France a morsel of cheese is often served as the postpast, while in North America it commonly takes the form of a delicious, minty toothpick.

what is an ort?

an ort was originally a scrap of food or leftover fodder not eaten by cattle or pigs. The word then came to be applied to leftovers from the kitchen table, leftovers that were also known as relief or relics. Ort appeared in the mid fifteenth century as a compound of the prefix oor, meaning not, and etan, meaning to eat; quite literally, therefore, orts are the uneaten scraps of a meal.

mark morton is the author of Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (Insomniac Press, 2004). His most recent books are The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp through the Language of Love and Sex and The End: Closing Words for a Millennium. He teaches English and Learning Technologies at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

previous orts:
frankenfood
pemmican
frangipani
aperitif
flummery
runcible spoon
mezzaluna
fletcherize
abligurition
cornucopia
banyan day
spurtle
appetite
plague-water
nym
spork