"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 30/08/17 (hotchpotch, potpourri, balderdash)

I have a whole hotchpotch of things for you today, Nick, quite literary because I'm going to talk about the ogirin of hotchpotch and also other terms in English that mean some sort of medley of ingredients in some way. And hotchpotch is an earlier form of hodgepodge, which we still can hear today as well. It goes back to a very old French word, hochepot - actually, it was "po", "hoche-po", I guess - from which the English is derived. It's from hotcher, which meant to shake, and pot or "po", which meant thse same as we have it, a pot. So a hochepot was a stew with many, many different ingredients and they were all shaked, obviously, when cooked together in one big pot and then simmered for hours. An early English cookbook - so many wonderful cookbook you can find around the medieval times - and this one from the 14th century - contains the recepe for goose in hochepot. So you can see actually it was around as, as I say, a sort of stew of different ingredients from around the 15th centery. That, of course, gave a rise to the figurative sense that we know today of a whole assortment of ingredients. Anr thre's another one word in English that means pretty much the same thing although it has a more fragrant resonance to it, I suppose, and that's a potpourri. And a potpourri, again, can be useed figuratively to mean a whole assortment of things. You might talk about a potpourri of influences, or it can be a medley of music as well. Actually, that's got a really unsavoury begining because it  actually goes back to the Spanish meaning putrid pot and, again, it was a cooking term and it was just lots and lots of different ingredients thrown in and kept over the stove for a very long time. Quite why it was putrid and smelly by the end of it, we're not sure, but certanly, it was cooked for a very long time. Perhaps that's why, perhaps eventually it turned and gave of a not very nice smell. Today, of course, we use it very differently. Potpourri is a quite nice smelling. And finally, balderdash. Now, balderdash today means nonsense, piffle, etc, but actually that two was once a medley of different ingresients cooked in a pot, only this time the ingredients were really quite disgusting. Milk and beer, beer and wine and, if you look at one novel by Tobias Smollett, he talks about a wine merchant of Nice that added to his particular bottles pegeon dung and quicklime. But bulderdash, again, was a kind of confused mixture of ingredients and eventually it became known as something which is not particularly nice ingredients, appropriately, and complete nonsense.