I was delighted the other day to come across a new and
distinctly odd food term: salmagundi. What could it be, I hear you ask?
According to the OED it’s ‘a dish composed of chopped meat, anchovies, eggs,
onions with oil and condiments’ – a sort of salady mixture, in other words. (Solomon
Gundy in Jamaica is similarly a fishy pickle.) The first recorded use of the
term is from 1674 and identifies it as ‘a dish of meat made of cold Turky and
other ingredients’. What first interested me about the word – quite apart from
the pleasure to be had from pronouncing it – is its resemblance to the nineteenth-century
nursery rhyme figure Solomon Grundy:
Solomon
Grundy
Born on a
Monday
Christened
on Tuesday
Married on
Wednesday
Took ill on
Thursday
Grew worse
on Friday
Died on
Saturday
Buried on
Sunday.
That was
the end
Of Solomon
Grundy.
And indeed
the OED confirms that the variants of 'salmagundi' include Solomon Gundy
and Solomon Grundy, as well as salmagondi, salamongundy and salad-magundy (the
last of which must be a sort of ‘backwards corruption’ in which the word has
been adapted back to fit what people think it ought to be, rather than its
actual origin). Etymologically ‘salmagundi’ comes from the French salmigondis,
which, it is suggested, comes either from salami conditi (pickled salami) or
Old French salemine (salted food) + condir (to season), and means mixture –
what we might call a hodge-podge, or dog’s dinner.
Is Solomon
Grundy related to salmagundy because his eventful week is such a mixture of
different things? Or is it simply that the word 'salmagundy' is so fun to say
that the sounds evolved into a character?
