Thelate, great Tommy Cooper once quipped: ‘My wife said, “Take me in your arms and whisper something soft and sweet.” I said, “Chocolate fudge”.’ I doubt many of us would be disappointed by anyone bringing us a sweet treat once in a while: as the saying goes, the only thing better than a friend, is a friend with chocolate.
How strange then that the name of this delicious confection that has sustained me for years began with a word from the Aztecs that meant something like ‘bitter water’. But if there’s one thing I have learned as an etymologist, it’s that the origins of our words seldom go the way we expect them to. And the lexicon of food is no exception.