The Entrée: when do we eat it?

Here I am now again to show you another of the most typical dilemmas related to food that you can find in Great Britain, the United States and also in France. That is not a dish or a misguiding name of some recipe, as usual. But today the problem is in any menu of any restaurant.

The word “entrée”, which you can easily translate into Spanish as “entrante”, refers to a dish served before the main course, as we logically thought. It is actually its original meaning, since it literally means “entrance”. The problem arises when you go to America and see the menu of any restaurant. You will find a three-course meal consisting of appetizer, entrée, and dessert, which leads us to the next question: how can a word which was created specifically to separate two concepts have changed so dramatically, turning its meaning into “main course”?

Analyzing its etymology more deeply, we find out that it exactly meant a hot meat course eaten after the soup and before the roast. Then, while the word was travelling around all this modern languages, it was losing its “sense of entrance”, since the soup was considered the entrance, suffering from a kind of transition to what it means nowadays in America. The complete change came in the middle 20^th century because, as every single cuisine in every single part in the world is so different, the disappearance of main course such as a roast as a common part of the meal in some areas has produced that change in the original meaning of the word at that point.

Leaving America and France aside, England had to perform a distinguished role from these countries, as usual. There, the word entrée has been disappearing from the common vocabulary of common people. This way, the English borrowed another French word to name it: hors d'oeuvre, more complex than the American one, but of course different. Anyway, appetizers, starters or the first course are also common names in the English-spoken language to refer to the food items served before the main course.