I had always assumed that the horse chestnut had something to do with the horseradish, and I’m therefore deeply saddened to discover that I was, essentially, wrong. I had nurtured a lovely mental image of a proud horse tending his vegetable patch—perhaps humming gently as he weeded his radishes and …
It’s a pleasing little reversal of expectations that sodium is actually derived from soda—not the other way round. Soda was already doing the rounds in the fifteenth century as the name for a mysterious alkaline substance, well before sodium was isolated and given its modern name in 1807. The word …
Brown sauce…. It is hardly the most evocative of names, is it? And yet, it is an indelible part of the British psyche. Supermarkets up and down the land have shelves groaning with the stuff, and every self-respecting roadside caff or pub offers its illegitimate offspring in those impossible-to-open little …
