When you’re exploring a vegetable garden, you might note that most of the produce is edible. You’d be in good Latin company if you did; “edible” comes directly from the Latin “edibilis,” and in both Latin and English it means something you can eat. But you might, of course, have accidentally stumbled into an 18th-century garden, and if that happened you’d probably find yourself noting that most of the produce is “esculent.” You’d be in good Latin company if you did; “esculent” comes directly from the Latin “esculentus”, and in both Latin and English it means something you can eat.
The similarities between “edible” and “esculent” don’t stop there: both words entered English in the 1600s, and both are adjectives that can also be used as nouns. In 1921 the English seed company Sutton and Sons printed this: “Although the Cardoon is not widely cultivated in this country, it is found in some of our best gardens, and is undoubtedly a wholesome esculent from which a skilful cook will present an excellent dish”. And the impressively named George Augustus Henry Fairfield Sala, in 1861, wrote the impressively titled “Twice round the Clock; or the Hours of the day and night in London. … Illustrated with a portrait of the author and numerous engravings … from drawings by W. McConnell”, which included this: “The delightful hampers of edibles and drinkables.”
The only real difference between “edible” and “esculent” is fashion. “Esculent” was at one time more widely used than “edible,” for no particular reason. Then somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century “edible” became more popular and “esculent” began to fall into disuse. Again, for no particular reason. That pattern continues, to the point that today “edible” is very widely used and “esculent,” while not quite yet obsolete, is much rarer. Luckily for “edible,” I guess there aren’t any other English words that mean something comestible. That is, consumable. What I really mean to say is “cibarious”. Or…sorry, meant to say “palatable.” Well, heck, even “eatable” is a word.
Speaking of “eatable,” it’s older than any of the others by at least eight centuries, and offers proof that the Romans, even though they introduced lots of innovations (and cibarious dishes), didn’t invent dining. “Eat,” in all its various forms, isn’t from Latin at all; it’s Germanic, and appears in Old English as far back as nearly anything appears in Old English: “Ah ic eotu flesc ferra” is from the Vespasian Psalter, sometime in the 8th Century CE. Manuscripts from those days are pretty rare; the Psalter is the oldest surviving manuscript from southern England (Southumbria) and contains the oldest English (not “Old English,” which isn’t quite the same thing) translation of the Bible.
The Vespasian Psalter may have been produced in Canterbury, which is most famous now, of course, for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Those contain references to any number of comestibles, from wafers “And wafres, pipyng hoot out of the gleede” (The Miller’s Tale) to salad (“wort” in those days meant both herbs and green leafy vegetables like cabbage): “”Wortes or other herbes tymes ofte” (The Clerk’s Tale). It might say something about that era, though, that the esculent most often mentioned in The Canterbury Tales is probably wine (“wyn”): “Wel loved he by the morwe a sop in wyn;” (Prologue), “The spices and the wyn is come anoon” (The Squire’s Tale); “No wyn ne drank she, neither whit ne reed;” (The Nun’s Priest’s Tale).
Even “ape-wyn” makes an appearance: “”I trowe that ye dronken han wyn ape” (The Manciple’s Tale). Ape-wyn, of course, was wine that got someone drunk enough to start acting like a chimp. After all, wine made from real apes would never be edible.
