It’s blueberry season in Maine. The abundance of blueberries got me thinking about my mom’s blueberry buckle recipe. What, pray tell, is a buckle? Buckles Fruit buckles are very much associated in my mind with New England, but my quick check of southern recipe collections suggest that that’s not the case historically. Southern recipes for buckles feature apples and plums Almond-Plum Buckle recipe rather than blueberries Blueberry Buckle Recipe. A buckle, for the curious, is an old-fashioned style of single layer cake, typically cooked in a flat pan, round or square (rather than , and includes fruit and streusel-style crumb topping. Some recipes call for mixing the fruit into the…

The corn in the phrase corned beef refers to salt-curing, or brining beef to preserve it. The corn refers to the large grains of salt used in curing the beef. The meat is placed in a crock and liberally covered with large grains (or corns) of salt. Etymologically, the English word corn comes from the Germanic root kurnam, used to refer to small seeds or kernals, cognate with kernal and with Latin grain. Corned beef, traditionally made with a brisket of beef in Eastern European and Jewish traditions, is fairly simple to do at home. Here’s a recipe from Alton Brown for making your own corned beef.

Olives, deliberately planted and tended for thousands of years, are intimately tied to the early diets of ancient humans, who carefully cultivated them wherever we roamed, so much so that a plant with Afro-Asiatic ancestry is now grown even in Washington state. It’s no small thing, that, and it marks the importance of the olive tree in human history, given that the plant is used not only for the fruit (the olive), but for the oil, pressed from the fruit, and the leaves, and even the wood. English, etymologically speaking, obtained the word olive via Old French, olive, from Latin oliva, “olive, olive tree,” from Greek elaia “olive tree, olive.”…