Change of Seasonings

When you season scrambled eggs, you sprinkle them with salt and pepper. When you season a piece of wood, you just let it sit around for a couple of years. What’s going on here?

It goes back to that other meaning of the word “season,” a division of the year. Originally, “season” meant the act of sowing seeds, and then it meant the time of year when you sowed your fields. Eventually the word was used for any recurring time of year characterized by a particular kind of activity. That’s how we have such things as baseball season and the fall television programming season, not to mention the four seasons of the calendar.

Then people started using “season” as a verb with the sense of letting something last through a season--or a whole year, or even longer. So we have seasoned wood, which has dried out and become suitable for building with, and seasoned (experienced) actors and so on.

From letting something last a season, it was a short step to treating it so that it would last, and that’s how salt came into the story. You season a ham by salting it.

Now “to season” meat meant to salt it for the winter. But why couldn’t it as easily mean to salt it just before eating it? And if that was OK, couldn’t you say you were seasoning something with black pepper? Or even red pepper?

But the history of the word seems to have ended there. We don’t season foods with cinnamon or sugar or Parmesan; we sprinkle those flavorings. There may be new seasons to come, but apparently not new seasonings.