Use your head: eat cabbage

Cabbage – the ornamental kind in our gardens or the edible kind on our plates – is a sign that fall is upon us. Medieval English-speakers called it “cole” or, in the North of England, “kale”, since restricted to a particular curly-leaved type. But the ruling Norman French and their cooks used for this bulbous brassica a slang word for “head”: caboche, derived from the Latin caput (head). As French words were more prestigious, it won out, but “cole” can still be seen in “coleslaw” derived from the kool-salade (literally “cabbage salad”) brought by 17th-century Dutch immigrants to America.