mimosa

The first item I looked up in 2023 was mimosa, because I was shown the following recipe.

I had a lot of questions, the first being what the author thinks the word mimosa means, especially because the only reference I have for this is cocktail. The drink, which is yellow, takes its name from the similarly colored flower of mimosa plant, which gets its name because some species fold their leaves when you touch them, seemingly mimicking animal behavior, according to Etymonline. You see, mimosa comes from the Latin mimus, “mime,” plus an adjectival ending. This was a surprise to learn.

The other puzzlement in this recipe is the direction “place under salamander until golden brown,” which apparently is telling you to put the dish in the broiler. I’d never heard this turn of phrase before, though a simple search shows that it’s one people still use today, though it can also be a similar but more specific cooking device as well. It can also refer to various other tools or machines that get hot. So what’s the connection to the animal? Back in the day, there was a belief that salamanders were either immune to fire or created in fire. This an old association that goes back to at least ancient Rome, and Wikipedia theorizes that people made the connection because salamanders sometimes live in rotted logs. When those logs were burned, the salamander would run out.. (No, I don’t think this makes too much sense, but people have believed sillier things about the natural world.) The sixteenth-century philosopher Paracelsus described elemental beings representing the four natural elements — earth, air, fire and water — and named the fire one Salamander, though I’m not clear if he imagined them to be just literal salamanders or something more fantastic. 

According to Etymonline, salamander goes back to the Greek salamandra, “a kind of lizard supposed to be an extinguisher of fire,” which itself comes from an unknown source, either “eastern origin” or something pre-Greek. Curiously, it seems that it also meant “cricket” in Old French.