I’ve always smiled at the French expression of endearment mon petit chou. You might say this to your kids or your partner but the literal meaning is “my little cabbage.” I’ve managed to find two explanations as to why being a little cabbage might be a nice thing to be for a French person.

One relates to the old story of how kids come into the world by being found under a cabbage leaf. Now I don’t find this very satisfactory. And in fact neither this or the other explanation I’ll tell you in a minute come with the regular authority I’m able to offer having the Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, American Heritage and other dictionaries behind me. I use the French sources less often and so this is mostly anecdotal.

The explanation I find more credible is that there is a kind of French dessert desert like an éclair called chou à la crème and it is after this sweet treat that loved ones are called little cabbages. The French were calling their loved ones petit chou from before the mid 1700s. I find this explanation credible not only because there are so many great French desserts deserts, but I also find in the great French dictionary Robert that just like you might call a kid “a chip off the old block,” there is a French expression bout de chou that literally means “an end of cabbage,” but figuratively means “sweet little crumb.”

But why all this focus on French cabbages you ask? Of course because English took the word cabbage from French. In French the original full name of a cabbage wasn’t chou but choux cabus. The choux part being a whole family of plants including broccoli and cauliflower but most closely etymologically related to the green kale. Actually if you listen for it you can hear kale in cauliflower, the word I mean.

So that original French choux cabus meant “kale head.” It’s easy to see how the cabus part relates to the Latin caput meaning “head;” and we do buy our cabbages by the head.

So by sometime after Chaucer in the 1400s, when English was gaining strength over the imposed French after the Norman invasion, a cookbook appeared with our first citation of cabbage that the is believed to have grown from that cabus part of the French name.

I see that Mark Morton in his book Cupboard Love feels that the latter part of the word comes from an Old French word boce that meant “swollen” so that cabbage would literally mean “swollen head.”

So if someone calls you mon petit chou maybe you can let it give you a swelled head.