Petecure

Petecure (pronounced pet-i-kyoor)

Simple cooking; meals prepared quickly with a limited number of ingredients.

Circa 1430: From the Middle English coining petecure, the construct being the petit + cure.  Petit was from the Middle English petit, from the Old French petit, from the Vulgar Latin pitittus, a diminutive of the Latin pit-, possibly from the Proto-Celtic pett- (part, bit, piece) and related to the Latin pitulus & pitinnus (small), the forms said to be of imitative origin; a doublet of petty.  The alternative forms in the Old French were peti & pitet, the source ultimately of the Spanish pequeño.  Cure was from the Latin curāre (to care for) from cura (cure), from the Proto-Italic kwoizā, from the primitive Indo-European kweys- (to heed); the long archaic forms being coira & coera.

The word petecure seems first to have appears in print in Liber Cure Cocorum, an English cookbook published in the county of Lancashire circa 1430.  The literal translation of Liber Cure Cocorum (which the author titled as The Slyghtes of Cure) isn’t a great deal of help and it’s best understood as The Art of Cooking.  Very much a document of the working class & peasant cuisine of the age, it’s notable for its focus on the food of the common people which contrasts with many of the works by social historians which relied upon the much more extensively recorded recipes and menus enjoyed by royalty and the aristocracy.  There are useful entries about that famous delicacy haggis and the first known reference to humble pie, written at the time as nombuls (ie a pie made from offal) and a theme in the cookbook is what the unknown author called petecure (simple cooking), tips and tricks for the poor who lacked the expensive ingredients and even the exotic spices used by chefs who cooked a sophisticated fare for the elite.  “Of petecure I will preach” he declared and there remains in Cambridge a street named Petty Cury which in the fourteenth century was spelled Le Petycure, though to mean “small kitchen” and probably associated with some eating place once located there.

Despite the appearance there’s no etymological connection between petecure and epicure, the latter derived from the philosopher Epicurus (circa 340–270 BC).  In the popular imagination, the two words would be thought diametrically opposed, Epicureans now thought of as sybarites with diets characterized by rich, gout-inducing dishes but that’s a modern understanding.  In antiquity, the philosophical system of Epicurus held that the external world was but fortuitous combinations of atoms and that the highest good is pleasure, interpreted as freedom from disturbance or pain.  Epicurus’ school in Hellenic Greece, founded circa 307 BC taught a doctrine hostile to superstition and divine intervention and believed pleasure leads to the greatest individual and collective good.  The path to this, Epicurus held, was to study the world, live modestly and contain one’s desires so as to not succumb to self-indulgence.  A life such lived, he taught, would allow one to attain a state of ataraxia (tranquility) and aponia (a freedom from fear and pain) and to attain these two states produces human happiness in its purest and highest form.  Happiness therefore comes from the virtues of diligence and restraint; the avoidance of excess.  To be fair to Epicurus, he was not averse to the odd luxury and his school was known for the feasts it held on the twentieth of each month.  In the modern age, adherents came to focus on the feast and ignore the rest resulting in the meaning shift which sees Epicureanism now a synonym for hedonism and associated almost exclusively with fine food and drink.  By the late twentieth-century, the word in the sense of its original meaning was barely used outside academic circles but of late something of a cult has developed around his original ideas although all Epicurean societies do seem to have maintained the tradition of the feast.

Lindsay Lohan enjoying a pedicure, September 2007.

Nor should petecure be confused with the 1839 noun pedicure (one whose business is the surgical care of feet (removal of corns, bunions etc)), from the French pédicure, the construct being the Latin pēs (genitive pedis) (foot), from the primitive Indo-European root ped- (foot) + cure as a clipping of curāre (to care for).  The sense of the word shifted from the practitioner (1939) to the treatment itself (1890) before finally settling as a beauty treatment (1905) wholly separate from clinical medicine and thus a companion term to manicure.

Liber Cure Cocorum was barely known for centuries, sitting in the collection of Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), an Anglo-Irish physician & naturalist.  It was one of some 70,000-odd items he bequeathed to the nation, the works among the foundation documents of the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum.  Liber Cure Cocorum was deciphered and published in 1862.  Sloane is credited by some as having invented drinking chocolate but the evidence suggests there had been many recipes for such concoctions circulating for years before Sloane published his and the origins anyway probably lie in the Caribbean centuries earlier.  Sloane however, a physician to the aristocracy and three successive sovereigns, was a good publicist, lending his name to Sir Hans Sloane's Milk Chocolate, marketed in the 1750s by a London grocer as a “medicinal elixir” and Cadbury’s tins of drinking chocolate for years included a card detailing Sloane's recipe.

Royal Court, Sloane Square SW1W 8AS, London.

It’s after Sir Hans that Sloane Square, a part of London in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea which drips with money, was named, the reference due to him once owning the land.  Thus far the connection has survived the ripples of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement but in 2020 a bust of Sloane in the British Museum's Enlightenment Gallery was moved to become part of a display documenting his links to the "exploitative context of the British Empire", a reference to the financial benefits he gained from the Jamaican sugar trade.  To that, some Irish critics noted acerbically that nothing was said about the benefits Sloane’s family had gained from the confiscation of Irish lands and their exploitation.