GANACHE, the rich chocolatey mixture used to top cakes, takes its name from a French word for an empty-headed fool—which in turn derives from an old word for a horse’s lower jawbone.
How did that happen? THREAD! ➡️
How did that happen? THREAD! ➡️
Trace it back far enough and you’ll find that GANACHE derives from ‘gnathos’, the Greek word for a jaw. That’s the same root found in words like AGNATHAN (a jawless fish) and COMPSOGNATHUS (the tiny chicken-sized dinosaurs that see off Peter Stormare in The Lost World).
That Greek root fell into use in Latin, then Italian, and finally French in the mid 1600s—where, for some reason, it came to be used of horses’ jawbones in particular.
How it then came to be used of empty-headed fools is debatable, but it’s likely the change was motivated by the same image conjured up by the word SLACK-JAWED: i.e. someone staring vacantly and unthinkingly, with their mouth gaping wide open.
The word remained unchanged for another 200 years, until in 1862 the French playwright Victorien Sardou wrote a four-act comedy called ‘Les Ganaches’. The play, which ridiculed out-of-touch Parisians for holding old-fashioned and non-progressive views, soon proved a hit...
...and so to celebrate its success, renowned Paris patisserie house Maison Siraudin (owned by fellow playwright Paul Siraudin, incidentally) began selling rich chocolate bonbons called GANACHES on the corner of the Rue de la Paix and the Place Vendôme.
(It’s likely Siraudin chose the name GANACHE both as a tribute to Sardou’s success, and as a satirical swipe at several French politicians who had recently opposed changes to sugar import duties—a decision that would have undoubtedly affected Siraudin’s business.)
English, meanwhile, had already adopted the word GANACHE as an insult in the 1800s, but the popularity of Siraudin’s chocolates was not lost on the Brits. By the early 1900s, the confectioners’ use of the word had fallen into use on the other side of the Channel too.
Eventually, it was this meaning that won out. All the earlier negative connotations of the word disappeared and (in English, at least) GANACHE has remained a purely culinary term ever since.
