Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 177

The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored….

Kissing Crust

Sometimes Grose gets a bit obsessed with murder, crime and fornication, but with this definition it’s more playful, it’s “the part where the loaves have touched the oven”. There’s some debate, and there are probably more important things to talk about, about whether this is correct, as others have defined it as “the part where the loaves have touched each other”. This sort of makes a difference, at in Grose’s definition it would be a hard bit of bread, whereas with the second definition, it would be a soft piece of the bread.

I don’t think I’ll over-worry about who is correct (although I’m not sure it’s Grose), but it’s a quite warming little term and a few bakeries around the world have used it as their name.