Why seasoning?

This is seasoning?

why do we use the same word to describe these very different activities, and what does any of it have to do with the seasons? well, like many things about human language and culture, it all goes back to farming.

Farming is the root cause of just about everything that you and I do together, and such is the case here. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "season" came to English, like so many things, via the Norman Conquest. "Season," as both a verb and a noun in English, comes from the old French word "saisonner," common ancestor of the modern French verb "assaisonner," which as far as I can tell, means exactly what "to season" means in modern English. Totally just guessing on the old French pronunciations, by the way. But the old French word "saisonner" and the related word "seson," meaning time of year — they have the same likely common ancestor, which is an old Latin noun "satio," which means "a sowing." . And by "sowing," I mean a planting — the act of putting seeds into the ground. This Latin word may in turn have Indo-European ancestors all basically meaning the same thing — planting seeds in the ground to grow food.

You got to remember that up until the industrial revolution — which was like last week in terms of the broad scheme of human history — up until about last week, most humans organized everything about their lives around the agricultural calendar. "A time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted." "To everything there is a season," and a season is literally a planting. In West Asia, where that beautiful ancient Hebrew poem was probably written, you don't just plant your staple grains once a year. You have a spring planting that you harvest in the fall, and you have a fall planting that you harvest in early summer. So from about 10,000 years ago until about a hundred years ago or two, most humans thought about the entire division of the year in terms of what planting are we working on right now, which planting we're in, that is the season, which is why season means planting and planting means season. Season is which part of the agricultural calendar are we doing right now? Therefore, our word for planting became our word for the time of year, the seasons. Over on the Germanic side of our anglophonic linguistic ancestry, you see a similar mingling of concepts in the word "tide.". These days, tide refers to the daily rise and fall of sea levels, but it used to refer to all kinds of divisions of the calendar, including plantings and indeed time itself.

"Tide" and "time" sound similar because they are closely related words. They have the same proto-Indo-European root of "da-," meaning "to divide." To organize your entire life and all of the things that you have to do in your extensive time here on this planet, you have to divide that extensive time into smaller chunks. Mentally, you got to divide it, and you will naturally do that in relation to external benchmarks — things that happen around you at regular intervals. In terms of divisions of time of minutes and hours, we naturally do that in relation to the transit of the sun across the sky. That's a convenient benchmark for time spans within that scale of minutes or a few hours. For a slightly larger scale, like weeks or months, or even a few years, we tend to define time in relation to the seasons, and the seasons are the plantings. The seasons are defined by when we plant, what and where. And so the word season came to describe other things that we do within that general kind of timeframe of a few months or maybe a couple of years.

For example, seasoning firewood. When you cut down a living tree, you have to let it dry for a few months before you can burn it — maybe even a year or two. This is a duration of time that can be reckoned in terms of plantings — two or three plantings, AKA seasons, before we can burn this firewood. Therefore, we say we are seasoning the firewood. Now, the Old. French verb "saisonner "probably meant "ripen" around the time that it entered English — to let fruit mature on the plant by the passage of time that can be reckoned in relation to the plantings, a few months. Or maybe people thought about it in terms of a process that is enabled by the forces of nature that unfold over such a time scale of a few months — the lengthening and the shortening of the days, the weather getting colder or warmer or dryer or wetter, the forces of nature that determine when you plant or season, because that means the same thing.

You might come to consider those forces as being one and the same with the concept of seasoning, and therefore to season something is to subject it to those forces.

It's rather similar to the concept of work. Work is a thing that we do, but it's also the case that when we've been working really hard, we might say, "Oh, the boss has been working me a whole lot." Similarly, a person who has done a whole lot of work, someone who has seen many seasons, planted and harvested many crops, lived through a lot of good weather and bad weather, lived through many years, gotten a little bit of seasoning in their beard, a little salt and pepper there, they might be said to be seasoned.

A person is well seasoned when they have seen a lot of years and they have been made stronger by it because whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger, except that's not really true.

But nonetheless, experience is generally a good thing.

And a person who's had a lot of experience is said to be seasoned. And that brings us back to cast iron or carbon steel pans. This is not what it means to season a pan, though I'll admit that's the kind of thing that I would probably do. Now, to say that a pan is well-seasoned is to say that you have used it through many plantings, many seasons, a period of months or a few years.

People notice that a well-used cast iron pan just seemed to work better than a brand new one and they refer to that concept as seasoning. This is a well-used or well-seasoned pan. Through repeated use, you end up burning a lot of oil on the pan and this causes the oil to polymerize into a shiny plastic-like coating called a patina. This patina resists sticking to some extent. It stops the iron from rusting to an extent, and to an extent it stops the iron from reacting with acidic foods, giving you gross metallic flavors. A well-used and therefore better pan was called seasoned, just as a well-used and therefore better person was called seasoned. Same concept. They've seen a lot of stuff.

And then at some point people figured out you could develop that patina instantly by rubbing on a layer of oil and heating the pan empty to intentionally burn it. This only takes a few minutes, but it replicates a process that used to unfold over a series of distinct plantings and harvests, so we still call it seasoning. And thus, seasoning has evolved to mean getting something ready, getting anything ready, just as you get food ready by sprinkling some salt or some spices on it. That's one potential route by which seasoning came to mean sprinkling flavors over food. It could also have been an extension of the seasoning that we do to fruit. Leave the fruit on the tree until you do your next grain planting and the fruit is going to taste better — thus seasoning is a thing that you do that makes stuff taste better. Those are the basic etymologies that you see described in places like the Oxford English Dictionary, and the experts are probably right about it. You should believe the experts over some guy on the internet.

But this guy on the internet does note that there is a striking similarity between the physical act of seasoning food with salt and such — this is identical to the physical act of sprinkling seeds into the ground, which is what seasoning originally meant. I'm not saying that's the direct reason why people came to describe flavoring food as seasoning it, but maybe it was some kind of unconscious association people had in their minds and it influenced how their language developed.