Word of the Day

adjective

The restaurant is famous for its cornbread, which is the product of a generations-old recipe that calls for unbolted cornmeal and buttermilk.

"[Sylvester] Graham advised everyone to eat bread made of coarse, stone-ground, unbolted flour, and he believed that bread should be baked at home." — From Andew F. Smith's 2009 book Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine

Flours and meals of the unbolted variety are no longer a staple of most pantries, but the occasional recipe does call for them. The adjective "unbolted" comes from a somewhat obscure verb "bolt," meaning "to sift (as flour) usually through fine-meshed cloth." This "bolt" — which dates to the 13th century — comes from Anglo-French "buleter," itself of Germanic origin. "Unbolted" was once common enough to have been employed in figurative use as well as literal. In Shakespeare's King Lear a character is described as an "unbolted villain."

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