The story starts with a Facebook posting from Ned Deily, who’s currently in Rome:
Fagolosi is a product name, for breadsticks made by the Grissin Bon company of Reggio Emilio. Phallic, and with fag in the name. Gay food. (On gay spaghetti, see here.)
There’s a lot I don’t know about the product name Fagolosi — in particular, what associations the name might have for speakers of Italian, though what comes first to my mind are the words fagotto ‘bassoon’ and fagottini (for a type of pasta), which suggest sticks or reeds and bundles or purses, respectively.
Before I get to that, a bit more about the Fagolosi (note that the word is plural). One site says, in somewhat rocky English:
Special breadsticks with a very particular shape, exclusive creation of Grissin Bon (patented name ®) that competitors are trying to copy but with no success.
Differently from the classic breadsticks, Fagoloso [the singular form] has a flat and undulating shape with grains of salt that make it very appetizing.
Careful preparation, long leaving and thorough cooking make Fagolosi crumbly and crunchy.
Flavours available: CLASSIC, ROSEMARY, SESAME and ONION.
Now to bassoons, or fagotti (abbreviated fag. in musical scores, which always entertains young English-speaking musicians). My sources are unclear about the etymology, but ‘bundle of sticks’ (which combines ‘stick’ and the ‘bundle’ components; the bassoon looks like two sticks — tubes — bound together, a connection made by Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary in 1913) is a possibility.
Fagotto ‘bassoon’ was borrowed directly from Italian into English; OED2’s first cite is 1724. Meanwhile, faggot or fagot had been in English since the 14th century, for ‘a bundle of sticks, twigs, or small branches of trees bound together’, for use as fuel or for sweeping (a sense from which the slur faggot developed via a chain of semantic shifts); OED2 gives its etymology as from
French fagot, of unknown origin; compare Italian fa(n)gotto
which leaves the connections unclear.
The word fagottini (again, a plural) is more straightforward. The Wikipedia description:
Fagottini is an Italian pasta. They are typically pasta shapes filled with vegetables, typically steamed carrots and green beans, ricotta, onion and olive oil. [note the shift from singular syntax in English to plural]
And the more extensive description in George Legendre’s Pasta by Design (Thames & Hudson, 2011):
A notable member of the pasta ripiena (filled pasta) family, fagottini (little purses) are made from circles of durum-wheat dough. A spoonful of ricotta, steamed vegetables or even stewed fruit is placed on the dough, and the corners are then pinched together to form a bundle. These packed dumplings are similar to ravioli, only larger. [also in the pasta ripiena family, in addition to fagottini and ravioli: agnolotti, cannelloni, cappelletti, conchiglioni rigati, creste di galli, galletti, lasagna larga doppia riccia, lumaconi rigati, saccottini, tortellini]
So fagottino is the diminutive of fagotto ‘purse’. An apt name for the pasta. Here’s a photo of fagottini just like the one pictured in Legendre (p. 61):
The accompanying text tells us that the purses are filled with ricotta and radicchio (red “Italian chicory”).
There are other variants. Here’s one with pronounced handles on the purses:
The text:
These tiny parcels have a meat based filling and as they are fresh [from the Florence market] take next to no time to cook. Combined with a good chicken stock you have a most nourishing meal in a flash. (link)
(In a flash if you can get fresh meat-filled fagottini from your market.)
Finally, the handles can be tied off, by scallions (scalogni) as here:
These are fagottini di crêpes agli spinaci, with a spinach and caprino (goat cheese) filling (recipe, in Italian, here).
Yum.
(More about Legendre’s fascinating book and on Hildebrand & Kenedy’s 2010 The Geometry of Pasta in a later posting.)
January 31, 2012 at 4:57 pm |
Several commenters on Facebook have asked about the British food fag(g)ots. From OED2, first cites:
(The OED treats this as a development from the ‘bundle, collection’ sense of faggot.) It’s thrift food.
More detail from the Wikipedia entry:
The best-known commercial brand is Brains Faggots.
Senses of fag other than the clipping of sexual faggot come either from a ‘hard work, drudgery’ sense (from the verb, of obscure origin, meaning ‘flag, droop, decline; labor, strain, toil’), as in
or from a clipping of fag-end (fag ‘bit of cloth that hangs loose; last part or remnant of anything’, from fag ‘droop, decline’, plus end), giving, ultimately ‘cigarette’.
February 1, 2012 at 2:56 am |
And then there’s the interesting Italian food connection, that the pejorative (fag) in Italian is finocchio, or fennel. (I learned that fact over 40 years ago, in my earliest days of fennelhood; I’m not sure I even encountered the vegetable until a good ten years later.)
Wikipedia gives the morbid etymology that fennel fronds were used to perfume the pyres of the executed. That seems a stretch. http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finocchio_(disambigua)
February 1, 2012 at 7:11 am |
Clearly a piece of etymythology. There’s no hint of evidence for the story, and the slur isn’t attested until long after the Middle Ages. I see some suggestion of a ‘worthless’ sense of finocchio (perhaps because of its commonness; it grows wild in many places), which would provide a natural route to the ‘male homosexual’ sense. But someone would have to comb through evidence of vernacular speech in Italian to nail down any account.
February 5, 2012 at 3:59 pm |
[…] on pasta (following up on fagottini, here): on two recent books surveying types of pasta, with attention to their physical form: Hildebrand, […]
February 5, 2012 at 10:43 pm |
[…] on pasta (following up on fagottini, here): on two recent books surveying types of pasta, with attention to their physical form: Hildebrand, […]
February 29, 2012 at 8:21 am |
[…] here, and a smaller list of words (98 of them) that begin with FAG, here. And on this blog, there's my posting on Fagolosi (a brand name of Italian breadsticks), the pasta fagottini (fagottino 'little purse', […]
April 8, 2013 at 8:50 am |
[…] We find the poster funny today, especially if we’re American, because of the intrusion of the sexual slur fag, which can contaminate any word with FAG in it, even food names (see “Fag food”). […]
October 2, 2013 at 9:40 am |
[…] “Fag food”, on Fagolosi brand pasta and on […]