My 23-y.o. son returned from a Montreal music festival telling us of the regional dish poutine, describing it as nasty-looking, hard to digest, and delicious.

In trying to trace the word origin, I find myself bounced back & forth from English to French a couple of times, & from there back to both German and Latin. The French-Canadian word, common in both Acadia and Louisiana, is said to have been borrowed directly from the English "pudding", although the 'forcemeat' or savory sense holds in the Canadian version, whereas 'poutine' in Louisiana French is used in the 'sweet' dessert sense.

Heading backwards from the English "pudding" (which is also used in French 'pudding' and 'pouding'), I find a common sense to the German and French origins: an early Germanic/English term meaning 'to swell' loosely related to 'stomach' in the words 'pud' and 'pudgy', and the French word 'boudin' (sausage) probably related to 'bouder' (to bud or swell). However, the French word is equally thought to have derived from the late Latin 'botulus' (sausage), related to the French word 'boyau' (intestine) [from which 'botulism' (literally 'sausage disease') was coined by a German in the 19th c.].

Does anyone know if there is a Latin word which ties this all together, perhaps meaning stomach or intestine?.. I have more than once found myself stymied when trying to make a German-&/or-English-to-Latin connection.

And while you're at it, word-rooters, tell me why 'bottle' (botella, bouteille) is not part of this puzzle? The visual of a sausage (stomach or piece of small intestine stuffed with a food mixture) seems to me related to the idea of making a swelling or pod within blown glass (or perhaps naturally occurring in wood) and using it as a vessel.

Did you look at the OED entry? The etymological note is quite long and includes everything you said and more.

goofy, is there a way to get OED online free? I think you told me before but I neglected to keep a link..

I am looking for that, too, Bethree. I think our local library might be able to help with that. I am dying to get it again.

I get access through my library. The long entry I was talking about was the entry for pudding. But it's not clear that poutine was borrowed from pudding. This is what the OED says about poutine:

quote:

< Canadian French poutine (1978 or earlier in this sense (compare note below)), spec. sense of poutine , denoting various kinds of cooked pudding (1810), further etymology uncertain and disputed; apparently either a variant of French pouding (see pudding n.), or directly < English pudding n. (although in this case the change of d to t would be difficult to account for), or perhaps < a French regional form with subsequent semantic influence from French pouding or English pudding (see pudding n.; although an exact match has not been identified among dialects of French).

The dish is said to have been first sold in the ‘Lutin Qui Rit’ restaurant in Warwick, Quebec, in 1957, although the version with gravy was not sold until 1964, and documentary evidence is not found until later. The restaurant's owner, Fernand Lachance (1918–2004), is generally credited with naming the dish.

Thanks, goofy! 'The Laughing Imp' is a suitable birthplace for this comical yet devilishly delicious dish.

I'm glad to learn all this. Heretofore I thought poutine was a hooker from Quebec.

As for the OED, I went to my local library and asked the librarian about getting the online OED free. Do you know what she had the audacity to say? "What is the OED?" The librarian, for heaven's sake! I couldn't believe it. She sent me to the reference librarian who told me they used to provide the OED free to their patrons, but there was "no interest" so that was discontinued.

That's where I live!