Hors d'oeuvre
appetizer in French cuisine
An hors d'oeuvre ( or DURV(-rə); French: hors-d'œuvre [ɔʁ dœvʁ(ə)] ), entrée, appetiser, appetizer or starter is a small dish served before a meal in European cuisine. Some hors d'oeuvres are served cold, others hot. Hors d'oeuvres may be served at the dinner table as a part of the meal, or they may be served before seating, such as at a reception or cocktail party. Formerly, hors d'oeuvres were also served between courses.
Typically smaller than a main dish, an hors d'oeuvre is often designed to be eaten by hand. Hors d'oeuvre are typically served at parties as a small "snack" before a main course.
Etymology
Hors d'œuvre in French literally means 'outside the work', that is "not part of the ordinary set of courses in a meal". In practice, it is a dish which stands on its own as a snack or supports the main course. The French spelling is the same for singular and plural usage. In English, the typographic ligature ⟨œ⟩ is usually replaced by the digraph ⟨oe⟩ and two plural forms are acceptable: "hors d'oeuvre" (same as singular) or "hors d'oeuvres" (pronounced ).
“Hors d'oeuvre” enters the record as appetizer in French cuisine. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Hors, d'oeuvre and appetizer can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hors d'oeuvre” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.