Let's see who I can offend with this one...

Today's word:

zalabiya (n.) an ancient Persian dessert of fried and sweetened batter.

The earliest recipe for zalabiya appears in a tenth century cookbook from Baghdad. From there, it traveled across the middle east, Africa and Asia. In 1904, at the St Louis World's Fair, two brothers were running an ice cream stand, and ran out of serving bowls. A few stands away, a Syrian chef was selling zalabiya, and began rolling his wafers into cones for a single dollop of ice cream. Thus was born the ice cream cone.

My much-treasured Christmas present for 2017 is a book by Paul Anthony Jones: "The cabinet of linguistic curiosities". Each page contains a descriptive story about some obscure or archaic word. It occurred to me it would be a fun exercise to try and write, each day, a poem featuring the "word of the day" from the book.

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