Potage

potage a French term which has become international, denoting nowadays a thick soup. However, the word, which has an interesting history, originally meant in both French and English simply ‘what is in the pot’, often a ‘meal-in-itself’ dish of the pot-au-feu type. In English the term became Anglicized to pottage and then developed its own history. In French it retained this original meaning up to the 18th century. Whole capons, jarrets de veau, shoulders of mutton, and so on could all be potages. In every such instance, there was solid matter (including grain) and liquid (sauce). What happened next was that the liquid sauce usurped the title of the whole dish, so that potage in French came to mean what would now, in English, be called soup.