'Quiche' wasborn on the Franco-German border — French pastry shell, Germanic egg filling, Alsatian name.
Definition
A baked flan or tart with a savoury filling thickened with eggs.
The Full Story
French20th centurywell-attested
From French 'quiche,' borroweddirectly from Alsatian German 'Kuche' or its diminutive 'Kuchelchen' or 'Kiechle' (a small cake, a little tart, a small baked pastry), regional Alsatian forms of standard German 'Kuchen' (cake, pastry). 'Kuchen' descends from OldHigh German 'kuocho' (cake), from Proto-Germanic *kokaz (a round baked thing, a cake), which connects plausibly to PIE *gog- or *kok- (a ball-shaped mass, a round lump of dough). This PIErootproduced
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'Quiche' comes from Alsatian German 'Küche' (a small cake), from the same Germanic root as 'cake' and 'cookie.' The most famous variety — Quiche Lorraine — is from the Lorraine region of northeastern France, which bordersGermany. The dish reflects the culinary borderland: French pastry technique (the tart shell) meets Germanic heartyfilling
, produced both the dish and the word: the open pastry shell filled with egg and cream custard (later extended to bacon, cheese, and vegetables) was a regional Alsatian speciality that Paris
to the world under its Alsatian name. English first recorded 'quiche' in the 1920s but the dish became widely familiar in Britain and North America only after the Second World War, partly through the championing of French cuisine in the Anglophone world. A quiche is etymologically a 'little cake from the borderlands,' one of the clearest linguistic traces of Alsace's uniquely bilingual cultural history and its position at the crossroads of the European food tradition. Key roots: *kōkǭ (Proto-Germanic: "cake").