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Updated: May 22, 2025
A very pretty whim, to count the jewellery of his famous sonnets as second in importance to the nomenclature of a vegetable! I in my turn was delighted with his ayacot. How right I was to suspect the outlandish word of American Indian origin! How right the insect was, in testifying, in its own fashion, that the precious bean came to us from the New World!
While still retaining its original name or something sufficiently like it the bean of Montezuma, the Aztec ayacot, has migrated from Mexico to the kitchen-gardens of Europe. But it has reached us without the company of its licensed consumer; for there must assuredly be a weevil in its native country which levies tribute on its nourishing tissues.
They are still known as ayacot, especially the red haricot, spotted with black or violet. One day at the house of Gaston Paris I met a famous scholar. Hearing my name, he rushed at me and asked if it was I who had discovered the etymology of the word haricot. He was absolutely ignorant of the fact that I had written verses and published the Trophées."
Our native bean-eaters have mistaken the stranger; they have not had time as yet to grow familiar with it, or to appreciate its merits; they have prudently abstained from touching the ayacot, whose novelty awoke suspicion. Until our own days the Mexican bean remained untouched: unlike our other leguminous seeds, which are all eagerly exploited by the weevil. This state of affairs could not last.
See now: I found some information respecting the haricot while studying that fine seventeenth-century work of natural history by Hernandez: De Historia plantarum novi orbis. The word haricot was unknown in France until the seventeenth century: people used the word feve or phaséol: in Mexican, ayacot. Thirty species of haricot were cultivated in Mexico before the conquest.
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