Appetite For Instruction: A Culinary Vocabulary Sampler

You can see the word "acid" right there in acidulous, which is a good hint at its meaning. If you squeeze a lemon onto sliced apples or artichokes to keep them from turning brown, you're acidulating them.

Curdle is of unknown origin, but the verb derived from the noun curd. When milk is coagulated with rennet, it curdles, forming a curd, better known as cheese. Tofu is bean curd, made in a similar way with soy milk. The liquid byproduct from making cheese is called whey, seen below; you may recognize the phrase curds and whey from the Little Miss Muffet nursery rhyme.

While dredge has meanings in the mining and nautical worlds, in the kitchen it refers to covering food in a coating of some sort. If you take pieces of chicken and coat them in seasoned cornmeal before frying them, you're dredging them in cornmeal.

You may know the word emulsion from science class, but you may not know that mayonnaise and the vinaigrette you put on your salad are emulsions. In both cases, oil and water have been made to mix through a combination of blending and the use of emulsifiers: egg yolk in the mayo, and mustard and garlic in the vinaigrette.

What do bread, chocolate, vanilla, pickles, soy sauce, wine, and vinegar all have in common? They're all fermented in one way or another. Whether with yeast, mold, or bacteria, all of these foods are transformed through microbial metabolism into the products we know and love. In addition to making them taste better, most of these methods also preserve food, allowing it to be stored for long periods without spoiling.

Fondue means "melted" in French. Easy, right?

In France, julienne — presumably the name of its inventor — was the name given to a soup of finely chopped vegetables cooked in meat broth. Over time, the name transferred to the vegetables themselves. So when you cut carrots into matchstick-sized pieces, that's a julienne.

Lard is pork fat, and larding is a method of preparation, less common than it used to be, where small pieces of fat are stuck into a lean roast to add flavor and help produce a crisp brown exterior. There is a tool called a larding needle that's used to poke slivers of fat or bacon into meat.

Macerate comes from the Latin macerare, meaning "to soak" or "to weaken." Food that is macerated is soaked in liquid so that it transfers its flavor to that liquid. The food itself is often discarded after soaking; a good example is grapes, crushed to make wine, which sit in their juice for a while to give it flavor and color and are then strained out.

Where macerating generally results in a flavor transfer from a solid food into a liquid, marination does the reverse: food, often meat, is immersed in a strongly flavored liquid for an extended time, allowing those flavors to penetrate the food.

When you marinate a piece of meat, salt in the marinade causes the flavors to penetrate the cells and flavor the food. This happens because of osmosis, the process by which cells move water into and out of themselves.

Reduce means "lessen." In the kitchen, though, it has a more specific meaning. If you simmer a sauce for a long time so that much of the water evaporates, concentrating the flavor and thickening the liquid, you've made a reduction.

See curdle, above.

Something zesty has a bright, zippy flavor. The outermost part of citrus peel — the layer with the orange, green, or yellow color — is also known as the zest. A special tool for removing this outer peel is called a zester.