Meat processing in French

The twenty-eighth entry is la farce à saucisse, and a reader who knows the English word will pick up the wrong noun. « A farce », in English, is a comedy of slammed doors and mistaken identities, and from there anything hollow that pretends to be serious — « the hearing was a farce ». Nothing edible about it. French kept the word in the kitchen. La farce is stuffing of any kind: the mixture pushed into a chicken, into a tomato, into a courgette, and here into a casing. The verb that goes with it is farcir, so une tomate farcie is a stuffed tomato and not a ridiculous one, and le farci is a dish in its own right in the south-west. The comedy exists too, une farce en un acte, and beside it sits a third sense English has no use for at all: faire une farce à quelqu’un is to play a practical joke, and the shop that sells false noses is un magasin de farces et attrapes. One word, then, for a filling, a prank and a play. On a butcher’s label it is always the filling.