French culinary expression: ROLL IN FLOUR
You have no sooner heard it than the image of food so well turned and turned over in flour before being thrown into frying oil that one no longer distinguishes its exact nature.
But is it really in the kitchens that we must look for the origin of this expression?
Already, in classical Latin, the expression ejusdem farinae, from the same flour, was used to designate two things or two people of the same nature, and the French of the sixteenth century put it back into circulation, with the pejorative idea that these things, or people, were not worth one more than the other. But this nuance of denigration is not enough to explain the flour of our expression, even if the idea of deception is already carried by the familiar verb "to roll".
Quitard provides us with the key, recalling that, in the past, in the theater, "the character of an imbecile had the face sprinkled with flour and the name of Jean-Farine".
So, to roll someone in flour , to be rolled in flour, is to abuse, to be abused, as easily as the one who came on stage with it, to use a close expression that is still current today, "the floury face" of the imbecile on duty.
