poach1
/pəʊtʃ
/- Salt in the water when poaching eggs will set the white quickly.
- To poach the eggs, pour 3.5cm of boiling water into a clean frying pan or saucepan and place it over a low heat - the water should show a few bubbles on the base of the pan, but no more.
- In the breakfast room, over poached eggs, she talks wittily and uninhibitedly.
- The food to be poached must be fully immersed in the liquid and not allowed to boil otherwise it can toughen the most delicate protein.
- The menu covers all eventualities, from salads and burgers to open sandwiches, steaks and chicken, as well as grilled and poached salmon.
- Which brings me rather neatly to my main course - advertised as poached fillet of salmon with dill and Muscadet, it sounded like a perfect light evening meal.
Origin
Late Middle English: from Old French pochier, earlier in the sense 'enclose in a bag', from poche 'bag, pocket'.
pocket from Middle English:
The first sense recorded for pocket was a ‘bag, sack’. It comes from Anglo-Norman French poket(e), a little poke or pouch (see pig). This also lies behind poach. Poaching eggs and poaching game may seem vastly different activities, but they are both probably connected with the Old French word pochier or French pocher, ‘to enclose in a bag’. When you poach an egg you can think of the white of the egg as forming a pocket or bag for the yolk to cook in. The second poach first meant ‘to push together in a heap’, and acquired the ‘steal game’ sense in the early 17th century. The connection with the source word comes from the pocket or bag into which a poacher would stuff his ill-gotten gains. Pucker (late 16th century) is probably from the same source, with the little gatherings being seen as small pockets.
Rhymes
poach2
/pəʊtʃ/- She sets traps to try and poach fish from the local pond and checks them daily.
- Baited explosives are used to hunt pigs while dynamiting is the most popular method employed to poach fish.
- I think we have to differentiate here between those deer that have been legally shot at and those that have been illegally poached and there is a distinct difference.
Synonyms
- Businesses will even more ruthlessly poach skilled workers off each other.
- ‘It is a fact that we have people in other firms trying to poach my staff telling them not to trust the big employer,’ he said.
- Last year, the company was forced to award a 17 percent pay increase to its drivers, in an effort to stop them being poached by other train operators.
Synonyms
- His idea of defense is to try to block shots or poach the passing lanes.
- A doubles tennis player may win by poaching all of the time, but will his partner enjoy the game?
- However, his pace and the occasional flash of poaching ability should be good for 10 goals or so this season.
- There has been a temptation on some farms to roll fields that have been badly poached.
- We have had our cows out since March but we have had to take them in again because they were poaching the land.
- Livestock poaching during the incessant wet weather and machinery operations on soft ground has done enormous damage to grass swards.
- Open swards are more liable to poaching so greater care is needed.
- The objective is to minimise poaching, overgrazing and soil erosion as this can lead to siltation and nutrient enrichment of surface waters.
- Was it overgrazed, undergrazed, poached or closed too late?
Phrases
poach on someone's territory
Origin
Early 16th century (in the sense 'push roughly together'): apparently related to poke1; sense 1 is perhaps partly from French pocher 'enclose in a bag' (see poach1).