In any case, in 21st-century Britain, though we no longer understand Latin, we can comfortably put our tongues to a name for the paste in that Virgilian poem. Pesto we call it (a contraction of the Italian pestato, ‘crushed’, as with a pestle), unless we take our holidays in Provence, in which case we call it pistou.

Fashions in food change as quickly as those in dress. Pashmina figures in this edition, though absent in 1997. The big 20-volume OED has caught up with it too, fetching from the archives an advertisement from the Times of 1865 for ‘the poshmina cloth coat’. Poshmina is nice, a version tailored for Mrs Beckham. All this pashmina philology is just in time, for I saw two pashminas for £5 being hawked hopefully from a barrow off Oxford Street for the austerity Christmas market.

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