French culinary expression: LE TORCHON BRÛLE
This phrase dates from the end of the 18th century?
It is usually interpreted as a household scene: the kitchen towel is on fire, nothing is going well in the domestic harmony.
A evidence which turns out to be misleading, the expression would depict a completely different cloth, derived from the verb "to torch", which had as its original meaning "to wipe by rubbing with a straw stopper", an operation which could be practiced a little vigorously, since one of the old meanings of the word was "to beat".
From the 15th century, therefore, a "rag" was a blow, and the expression "bloat" which became widespread during the 19th century, in the sense of "dispute", "battle", that which we also perceive today as a blow given with a cloth, is in fact redundant since it means “a blow with a blow”!
But we have not yet finished with our "burning cloth" an additional degree of meaning being to be attributed to the phrase, since the "cloth" is also used to designate a small torch, hence the image, which flows perfectly on two levels, of the lit torch and the fight which ignites.
