Treacle pudding is one of my all-time favourite foods, especially on a cold winter’s day. Mind you, I did go off it a bit after I discovered where treacle, that thick, sticky, sweet liquid, actually came from. Can you guess which of these stories is the real one?

A. Treacle was originally the sticky, yellow goo left behind by a giant snail from Roman times.

B. For hundreds of years, treacle meant ‘medicine’, usually one with an extremely yucky taste!

C. Treacle comes from a very old Arabic word meaning a ‘weird-tasting drink’.

 

ANSWER: B!

The earliest form of the word ‘treacle’ meant ‘a poisonous animal’. That animal might be a snake, or even a wild lion. The victim of a poisonous bite from one of these deadly beasts needed medicine as an antidote very quickly. Over time ‘treacle’ began to mean the antidote itself — medicine so horrible-tasting that it needed a teaspoon of sugar to help it go down — just like Jane and Michael in Mary Poppins! Eventually ‘treacle’ came to mean the sugar instead of the medicine. And that’s how it came to top my favourite pudding list!

Did you know …

If you were tempted by answer C, it wasn’t the word ‘treacle’, but ‘syrup’, which came over from Arabic more than 400 years ago. And it actually tasted very nice — a bit like sherbet, in fact, which comes from the same root as syrup! All very sweet.