What were your favorite foods growing up?
I grew up on a farm in the Canadian prairies, so not surprisingly the foods that my mom made were of the "stick-to-your-ribs" sort. I especially enjoyed her johnny cakes. Her rice pudding, made with milk from Spot, our dairy cow, was especially good, and my siblings and I would squabble over who got to eat the browned "skin" that formed on the pudding. Everyone once in a while my dad would cook, and I remember enjoying his creamed peas on toast. I tried making that for my kids just last week, but somehow it just wasn't the same as his.

When did your interest in culinary history begin?
I acquired my interest in culinary history back in the early 1990s. I was writing and broadcasting a column for CBC radio about word origins, and I quickly realized that many of the most interesting words in English come from the domain of food and cooking. Eventually I wrote a book devoted to the origins of food words called Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities (which was nominated for a Julia Child Award in 1997). This interest in the history of food words then dovetailed with my interest in Shakespeare (I did a PhD in Renaissance English literature), and the result was a book about English food culture in the sixteenth century, called Cooking with Shakespeare and published in 2007 by Greenwood Press.

How did living in France shape the way you experience food?
In the 1990s I moved to the French Riviera to teach. I went a vegetarian and came back a carnivore. It just didn't seem feasible there, given the abundance of great food, to avoid eating beef, chicken, and endless seafood. I think, too, that my exposure in the south of France, to ancient buildings and ruins deepened my appreciation for the material aspects of history; how people actually lived, what they actually ate, how they filled their hours, and so on.

What made you decide to write Cupboard Love: A Dictionary of Culinary Curiosities?
All words have interesting origins, but especially food words because the English language has acquired them from so many different cultures. Avocado, for example, comes from an Aztec word meaning testicle, and bagel comes from a German source meaning bracelet. Other food words are interesting because of the other words to which they are related. Baguette, for instance, is a cousin of bacteria. Once I started to explore those origins and histories of food words, I couldn't stop, they were just too interesting; before I knew it, I had compiled enough etymological research to write a book.

What was the most interesting thing you learned while writing Cupboard Love?
At a very specific level, I was astonished to discover that people would stuff a chicken inside a duck and then the duck inside a turkey, and call the whole thing Turducken; as a general rule, it's not advisable to give a food a name that starts with the syllable turd. At a broad level, I was intrigued by the number of food words that have, over the centuries, become obsolete -- such as blobsterdis, blaundsore, bouce jane, clapwype, and slumgullion, to name only a few.

How did you research Cupboard Love?
Anyone working in the area of English etymology or word origins has to use the Oxford English Dictionary. That's the twenty-volume tome that you still see on the shelves in some libraries. Since the early 1990s, though, the OED has also been available in electronic form, which means that it's possible to do searches in seconds that would have taken years with the old paper-based version. For example, if I want to find all the English words that have ever been used as names of drinks, I can run a query and have that answer in a jiffy. But if the OED was primary source for my research, I used countless other resources to supplement it. Some were food-based, like the Larousse Gastronomique. Some were language-based like the three-volume Dictionary of American Slang, and some were actual people, like the professor at the University of Edinburgh whom I emailed to ask about the origin of the word haggis.

What is your favorite definition of a culinary term?
My favorite culinary term is a fanciful one invented by Gelett Burgess in the early twentieth century: fidgeltick, which refers to food that takes tremendous effort to prepare but gives little gastronomic satisfaction (like most fondues). I also like trollibags, which is a word from northeast England that refers to the edible parts of an animal's digestive system, such as tripe.

What topics do you tackle writing for the food journal Gastronomica?
My column, which comes out four times a year, is called "Orts and Scantlings," and it focuses on the intersection of food, culture, and language. For example, I've written columns about food puns, brand names, foods with "mascots," foods that derive from Native American words, the faux-Asian font that's sometimes found on menus in Chinese restaurants, and so on. For me the language of food is a way of exploring our culture.

What do you eat while you are writing?
Carbohydrates. When I write, I tend to get wound up, and carbohydrates -- like a baked potato or a warm bowl of rice pudding -- seem to have a tranquilizing effect on me. If I tried to snack on something like raw carrots while writing, I would get so jittery I wouldn't be able to type straight.

What is your least favorite food?
I hate food that looks beautiful but lacks flavor -- for example, sometimes tomatoes or strawberries will look lovely, but will be about as tasty as a lump of sawdust, thanks to the manner in which they've been grown.

What is your drink of choice?
I like European beer, especially dark ales. I also enjoy many of the craft beers produced by the micro-breweries that have emerged in Canada over the last decade.

What was the most spectacular meal you have ever had?
All of my top food memories involve "found" food. I remember plucking a plum from a tree in the Canadian prairies, biting it, and being astonished by the clarity and vigor of its flavor; I remember driving down a country road in Southern Ontario with one of my sisters and her husband, spotting a wild pear tree, and eating its fruit while we stood in its shade in the ditch; I remember walking down a sidewalk in San Antonio, Texas, that was covered with nuts that had fallen from the nearby trees. I cracked one open, tried it, and realized it was a delicious pecan, which for someone who grew up in Canada, was an astonishing treat.