I stumbled across an odd word yesterday. Completely in the dark about the meaning, saying it aloud tickled my lips, which stimulated interest and, like digging into an ice cream sundae, made me want to get to the bottom of it.
The word is trencherman. Sounds military – sort of World War 1-ish – doesn’t it? At first glance, I got the image of some doughboy hunkered down in a trench gripping a Stokes mortar while, over yon hill, advanced 10,000 Huns wearing spiked-helmet pickelhaubes.
But trencherman isn’t connected to bloody acts of hostility at all. Instead, it’s deliciously food-related. In its most prosaic form, a trencherman is a fellow who is quite happy to eat and drink to burping excess.
(Please note: There is no such thing as a trencherwoman. As a matter-of-fact, my spell check just blazed red. Holding fast to its scarlet-lettered denial, the spell check insists that trencherwoman is definitely not a word.)
So trencherman remains the exclusive purlieu of the male sex. And like that big robust dude who brags that he can eat a 96-ounce T-bone in less than an hour, trencherman has come down to us with a feast of historical reference under its loosened belt.
Before it became a man, the word trencher was used to describe a dinner plate made from a flat round of usually stale bread. Food was piled on top of the bread – usually very saucy food – and at meal’s end, the plate or trencher was also devoured. Eating one’s plate was considered good table manners in the past; yet should someone become too full to proceed with plate eating, the mushy bread was given to the poor, which was considered philanthropic.
In the Middle Ages, long before the world discovered bone china or Pyrex, the practice of clearing the dinner table via one’s mouth was de rigueur. But origin of the word trencher pops up even earlier than the darkly aged pubescent centuries of yore.
Whether you believe him mythic or as seriously weighted in undeniable reality as one of Queen Elizabeth’s hats, the great King Arthur himself was a trencherman. If we peek through the faerie dust and mist that shrouds the earliest days of the first millennium we can see Arthur Pendragon seated at his legendary table, surrounded by his knights, and all are wolfing down their vittles as if they’d hadn’t eaten since Tuesday.
With a sneer, Mordred (Arthur’s dreaded bastard son) says to his father, “Thy trenchermen, with mouths wet as questing hounds, snuff up the steam thy anointed cooks fling noseward.” But Arthur, determined not to be intimidated by his intimidating son, leaps up, grabs Excalibur and attacks the pudding:
The king then drew his shining sword,
Most like a trencherman,
And in he plunged it to the hilt,
When out the gravy ran.
Gravy was – and is – extremely important to men. What male does not love his sop?
According to a Biblical report (John 13:21-30) Jesus gave Judas Iscariot a wedge of bread soaked in gravy. Unfortunately when Judas ate the sop, Satan possessed him and that was all she wrote for Judas.
In his book The Life of Samuel Johnson, biographer James Boswell described the renowned man of letters as “a very valiant trencherman.” (The phrase, nipped from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, was Boswell’s attempt to be complimentary while still being honest about Johnson’s enormous girth, born of a fondness for eating like a peach-orchard hog.)
When at table he (Johnson) was totally absorbed in the business. His looks seemed riveted to the plate. He would not pay attention to what was said by others till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce the veins in his forehead swelled and he perspired.
Once upon a time the world had nothing but praise for masculine over-eaters. The Victorian poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, for example, was called “a doughty trencherman” in honor of his fearless passion for food and drink. When offered a cup of tea in a lady’s parlor, Tennyson insisted he must drink his tea from a bowl – “A tea cup is such a meager allowance” – which undoubtedly made his hostess swoon, but met the poet’s obligation to always be regarded as vividly unrestrained.
Keeping doggedly to the subject of this piece, I found that the trunk word trencherman inspired a few interesting offshoots. In the long ago, a trencher knight was a waiter; a trencher mate was the sort who’d steal your purse and your wife; and a trencher buffoon was, as you might expect, a dinner guest who thinks everything he says is witty and wonderful, but instead he’s a bore and the hostess is pulling her hair in horror and people are leaving the dinner party claiming their babysitter has just absconded with the silver and the plasma TV.
Then we have the sardonically named trencher friends, or more to the point, trencher flies. They are the boys who show up at your house right at dinnertime (think Eddie Haskell in Leave It to Beaver) to sponge a meal. In Yiddish, a trencher fly is a schnorrer – in American patois, a mooch.
Finally, I am able to report that trenchermen have not lost their place in the modern buffet line, but are still pulling up to the table with large fork in hand. In 1963 one Eddie “Bozo” Miller ate 27 chickens at Trader Vic’s in San Francisco, which not only won him a place in the Guinness Book of Records, but the feeding feat saw Bozo named The World’s Greatest Trencherman.