coddled

Man, there is a backlog of ignorance built up here! I think that to start digging myself out from under, I'll go back to the post of a couple of weeks back on codling. Because I never did exactly address the homophone, "coddling". It came up a little, tangentially, but I haven't exactly got my head around it. Does it mean to envelope as in a nice sack, as the word codling might lead you to expect? Or, as I am guessing, is there a completely different derivation?

Before we get to it, I wonder if everyone else here thinks that "coddled" is a slightly pejorative term. Not that I think any of us minds much if we are coddled ourselves. It's just when someone else gets the treatment that we get restive...

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All right. Coddled eggs are not just eggs that have been treated in a pampered sort of way, they are actually eggs that have gone through a particular process of cooking. To be precise, to coddle is to cook them in water at  a temperature just below boiling. Or to immerse them briefly in boiling water. I was going to give you a coddled egg recipe, but frankly they are contradictory. One person says use only very fresh eggs because the whites thin out over time, while another says it is best to use older eggs, because they are easier to peel. I suppose you will have to judge the advantages and disadvantages yourself.

Although not certain, the best guess about the origins of the word coddle seems to be that it is a variant spelling of "caudle", which was a warm drink of weak gruel fortified with wine or ale. It goes all the way back through the Anglo French (of course--when does anything I ever write about here not go back through the Anglo French?) to the Latin calidium, which, in a remarkably consistent way,was also a warm drink, often of wine and water. The root word is calere, be warm, which connects it to another modern and anxiety invoking word, calorie.

A cool, but probably little known fact is that the first instance of its use in writing was by Jane Austen in Emma. It is spoken by John Knightly, the more famous Mr. Knightly's brother, to Isabelle, his wife and Emma's sister, after the invalid Mr. Woodhouse, Emma's father, has said that he doesn't look well.

"My dear Isabella,"--exclaimed he hastily--"pray do not concern yourself about my looks. Be satisfied with doctoring and coddling yourself and the children, and let me look as I choose."

The interesting thing to me, though, is that Austen may not be thinking of coddle in quite the way we do yet, because this bit of dialogue comes right in between two different discussions of, you guessed it, gruel. Thin gruel, but not too thin. This is all in the vicinity of page 88-89, if you happen to want to look it up on Google's ebook.

I'm guessing that coddle first meant to pamper in a particular, medicinal sort of way, and only gradually extended its meaning to more general applications. I see that Thackeray uses it in The Newcomes (which is my favorite Thackeray novel--a minority opinion, I know):

"How many of our English princes have been coddled at home by their fond papas and mammas,walled up in inaccessible castles, with a tutor and a library"  

This seems to be more along the lines of our contemporary meaning, though Thackeray is writing only 40 years after Emma.