Sunday, September 9, 2012

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.





 

28 comments:

  1. Oh, fun stuff. Loved the literary references, and sort of want to try coddled eggs...if I can figure out how!

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  2. Thanks, Kathleen--the literary aspects were fun for me.

    As for the coddled egg recipe, well, here you go.

    I'd think you and yours need to be coddled right well for a bit.

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  3. Can we expect posts on curdle and cradle soon?

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  4. Well, I did discover a possible answer to this, but it was too much for this post.

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  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  6. But not too much for the next or the one after that, I trust.

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  7. The last time I read the word "mollycoddle" was in a quotation attributed to the composer Charles Ives who, in response to a "hissing conservative" who assailed the work of Ives' fellow radical American composer Carl Ruggles, is said to have said: "You gosh-darned sissy-earred mollycoddle! When you hear strong, masculine music like this, stand up and use your ears like a man!"

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  8. Molly coddled was a piss take when I was kid. Meant pretty much the same thing as 'mommy's boy.'Not well thought of.

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  9. veeeerrry interesting stuff..as per usual..and for posterity's sake i do not like half cooked runny eggs....that slimy stuff makes me gag...give em to me well done people...coddle me with non-coddled eggs :)

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  10. I could do a new post on mollycoddle, but it has really already been done so very well here. Molly apparently has come to take on several different associations of 'low living' but the article says that it mostly comes to us from the eighteenth century slang for a gay man. Although it's other meaning of a female prostitute apparently ended up on these shores as the "gangster's moll". Always the kind of stuff that I find interesting.

    I think I would like coddled eggs, but the little dish and all always reminds me of Bertie Wooster being served in bed by Jeeves as played by Hugh Laurie on the TV show.

    A more mollycoddled individual you'd hope to meet!

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  11. Well, one could do worse that to live as Bertie Wooster did.

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  12. I think one could hardly do better, actually. I could use a Jeeves, big time.

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  13. We could all use a Jeeves, even those of us who have more of a brain than Bertie Wooster gives himself credit for.

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  14. If someone can get someone else to willingly serve them coddled eggs in bed of a morning, then they definitely have more brains than I do.

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  15. Anyone with money can get someone to serve coddled eggs in bed. Not everyone would have the good sense to hire Jeeves.

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  16. Not just sense, though--it would also require extraordinary luck. I have actually met a Jeeves type of worker and knew him for a long enough period of time to know that he was the real deal. However, he wasn't working for me. Although I benefitted from his extraordinary character on many occasions.

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  17. Did he materialize when needed most, not so much entering a room as shimmering into presence? Did he eat lots of fish?

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  18. Kind of. Well,not sure about the fish.

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  19. That makes you like Bill Towcester, among the friends of Bertie's who occasionally benefited from Jeeves' services.

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  20. Very much so. Of course, he is not a very memorable figure.

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  21. Who, Bill? Well, he pales next to Bertie and Jeeves, of course, but who doesn't, except for Claude and Eustace and Aunt Agatha and Aunt Delia and Uncle Fred and Mr. Mulliner and the Oldest Member and Augustine Mulliner and Lord Emsworth and a few others?

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  22. My point exactly. Actually, he might be memorable if I could go by storyline rather than name. I assume he had at least one storyline where he either begged Bertie to help him get married or begged Bertie to help him escape the snares of matrimony.

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  23. This will prove your point: I remember him from back-cover material that said: "Book X finds Jeeves on lend-lease from Bertie Wooster to Bill Towcester." I found "lend-lease" amusing in that context, but I don't remember which book it promoted.

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