Food lovers may spend hours mulling over the contents of their dinners, or angling a camera at their favorite pizza slice just right. But it's not often we give much thought to the words we use to describe our food. I'm not talking about flowery adjectives—what about the very names of foods themselves? In her new book, Words to Eat By: Five Foods and the Culinary History of the English Language, English professor Ina Lipkowitz explores the linguistic history of meat, bread, leeks, apples, and milk. She explores the origins of these words, their changing connotations over time, and what they have come to represent today.

The idea of a history of the words used to describe different foodstuffs is a bit odd, but I was intrigued to see what such a history would entail. Lipkowitz traces the modern-day words to their roots in Germanic, Celtic, Greek, and Latin languages, and discusses why the words evolved in the way they did. Sometimes it is fairly evident that the word hasn't changed much over time, and sometimes there is little similarity between the origination of the word and its current form.

She provides a handy chart at the beginning of each chapter which makes it easy to see how words compare across languages. The word for "apple", for instance, sounds similar in many time periods and languages—"abal" in Irish, "appel" in Dutch. But the word for "meat" changes dramatically across time and place. This latter phenomenon is related to the difference between the words "meat" and "flesh", and how each culture distinguishes between the two.

There is some discussion in the book of the reasons why certain word pronunciations took hold and others did not. Sometimes this is attributable to the customs of a dominant or invading culture, butin some instances language and custom makes a jump that historians can't quite figure out. The leek is an interesting example of a food that history forgot. Once incredibly popular and widespread across many countries, the leek fell out of favor around the 1700s and disappeared from cookbooks. Of course these days, leeks are enjoyed by food lovers and sell for a good price—but the humble vegetable's return to favor is poorly recorded or understood by historians.

Lipkowitz is a scholar, and the book is therefore filled with details of different cultures, events, and battles that shaped our current food semantics. But her tone is not academic or inaccessible; she provides ample factual basis for her arguments about the history of certain words, without overwhelming the reader. That being said, this is not the most compelling book on my bookshelf. If you're a word nerd and love linguistic history, then this book will certainly add another layer of depth to your cooking exploits. But for my part, I could have easily done with preparing a nice leek soup and apple cobbler dessert, and called that my culinary education of the day.

About the Author: A student in Providence, Rhode Island, Leah Douglas loves learning about, talking about, reading about, and consuming food. Her work is also featured in Rhode Island Monthly Magazine.