Fennel & Finocchio: Origin of the Plant's Name at Bill Casselman's Words of the World at www.billcasselman.com

When you hear a mafioso on the TV series “The Sopranos” call someone a ‘finoc,’ what does it mean?

Find out in the column below.

FENNEL / FINOCCHIO

Posted October 10, 2007

Would you like to try a new vegetable available in the winter? Then go shopping some late fall day in a good neighbourhood Italian market ― if you are lucky enough to live near one. Seek out neat piles of bulb fennel looking a bit like cut celery stalks. Ask the grocer for finocchio and be prepared for a couple of jokes (see below). The blanched stalks have a unique aroma and a light, sweet, subtle licorice taste. This works raw in a salad or cooked as a vegetable to gently support a main dish. The word lore of fennel is first, then recipe suggestions follow.

Genus: Foeniculum, Botanical Latin < faeniculum Latin, fennel <

faenum Latin, hay + iculum Latin, diminutive ending, meaning

‘little,’ ‘little hay’ in reference to the fancied resemblance

of fennel to hay or because it grew as a weed in hay fields. The

Indo-European root in the Latin word for hay, faenum, is *fe

‘making offspring’ which appears in other words like fecund,

feminine, and fetus. Much reduced, faeniculum entered Old French

as fenoil, then was borrowed into Old English as fenol,

eventually to produce the modern English spelling of fennel. The modern

French word is delightfully sinuous on the tongue, fenouil, a serpentine

coil of a word, helixing softly from tongue to palate.

yellow umbels of fennel flowers in a garden

Species: Foeniculum vulgare (vulgaris, Latin, ‘common’)

Belonging to the plant family Umbelliferae, the carrot or parsley family, fennel is a tender perennial commonly reaching a metre or more in height. Its feathery, green, faintly licorice-scented leaves and its seeds are among the oldest known culinary herbs, used particularly to flavour fish. In Italy, a related but smaller species, Foeniculum azoricum (Botanical Latin, of the Azores islands), Florentine fennel, is used as a vegetable. Its bulbous leaf base is used raw in salads or cooked as an individual vegetable serving. Fennel seeds are used in baked goods, sauces, and to flavour some European liqueurs. Italian hot and sweet sausages, the freshly made kind, often sing with fennel seed.

Swish That Stalk!

The Italian for fennel is finocchio, which is also the common

and insulting slang term for a homosexual male in Italy, making

it the equivalent of English putdowns like fag, fairy, and

queer. It originally denoted the stereotype of the homosexual

male who was overdressed or cross-dressed, all feathery and

plumaceous like fennel leaves. In some episodes of the TV series “The

Sopranos” the viewer can hear it shortened to its Italian street slang form

of “finoc.”

Finocchio Recipes

These are recipe suggestions. You’ll have to grab an Italian cookbook to discover the culinary details of preparation.

Fenoci in Salada – In spite of the recipe's name, the bulb fennel is cooked in this winter recipe from the northern Italian province of Vicenza.

Pisci di Terra is a Sicilian joking name (literally ‘land fish’) for this dish where the fennel bulbs are fried to a golden hue.

A salad with arugula, fennel and zucchini

Fenecchìjdde is a Pugliese dialect word for fennel soup, a favourite in Puglia on Christmas Eve. In the thick broth are small fennel bulbs, anchovy fillets, garlic, olive oil and salt.

Sformato di Finocchio is a creamy fennel delight, like a timbale, into which grated parmigiano has been melted. Yum!

There are un centinaio di ricette, about a hundred recipes, for fennel. It’s a winter treat for those whose weary summer taste buds cry out for something to brighten the senses on a cold day.