Surnames traditionally arose from the type of work people did. The cooper or barrelmaker became Mr. Cooper, the rope maker became Mr. Roper. However, some words– known as eponyms– are derived from someone’s name.

Next time you eat a sandwich, give a thought to the man it was named for, John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, a man more notorious in his day as a member of the Hellfire Club. During the late hours one night in 1762 he was too busy gambling to go to dinner. The legend goes that he ordered a valet to ‘just bring me roast beef between two slices of bread!’ to keep his fingers from getting greasy while he played cards. Of course, he wasn’t the first to eat meat between bread. But somehow, his was the name that stuck.

How many times have you bitten into a crisp, tart green Granny Smith apple, shown right, without giving a thought to Maria Ann ‘Granny’ Smith, the Australian apple breeder who developed the variety from a seedling in 1868? She died two years later, but her apple was one day to become a commercial success, being introduced to the UK in 1935 and to the US in 1972.

There are other examples of apples which were named for people who did not originate them. The Bramley is a cooking apple named for Matthew Bramley. But the first tree grew from pips planted by a young girl, Mary Ann Brailsford, in her garden in Southwell, Nottinghamshire, around 1809.

Many years later a local butcher, Matthew Bramley, bought the cottage and the garden. When a local nurseryman took graftings from the tree and began to sell the fruit, he named it after the new owner.

The Blenheim orange apple, superb with cheese, was once known as Kempster’s pippin. Kempster discovered it in 1740 growing against the wall of the park of Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire, the seat of the Duke of Marlborough.

Kempster grew a cutting in his own garden and people stopped their coaches to marvel at the tree with its load of striking orange-red fruit. But alas for his posthumous fame, when the apple came to be sold commercially, Blenheim, the name of the Big House, was thought a classier label.

The Cox apple was named after Richard Cox, a wealthy brewer from Bermondsey who in the 1820s retired to the country to pursue his hobby of horticulture. To make his name a household word for apple, he took the Blenheim orange and pollinated it with the Ribston pippin.

Leaving apples behind, how about the nacho, that tortilla chip covered in cheese which is everywhere these days? According to ‘The Dallas Morning News’ of October 22, 1995, it was named for restaurant cook Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Anaya, who invented the dish in the Mexican border town of Piedras Negras in 1943.

The semi-soft sweet made from butter and sugar and flavourings, called fudge, also has an interesting origin. The sweet or candy (by the way, the American word ‘candy’ derives from the Arabic ‘qandi,’ meaning something made with sugar’) was first made in New England women’s colleges. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it may be a variant of an older word, ‘fadge’, meaning ‘to fit pieces together’ or to ‘contrive without the necessary materials’.

‘Fudge’ had been used to mean a hoax or cheat since about 1833, and by 1850 ‘Oh, fudge!’ was a fairly innocuous expletive. It has long been speculated that American college women of that day used candymaking as an excuse to stay up late at night, hence candymaking was a bit of a fudge, or a hoax. The word fudge as a candy first showed up in print in 1896, and by 1908 was commonly associated with women’s colleges, as in ‘Wellesley Fudge’.

A Pavlova is a meringue dessert with cream and fruit named after the Russian ballerina, Anna Pavlova. It was a delicacy created to be served during her ballet tours.

A Garibaldi is a biscuit with currants named after the Italian soldier, Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-1882), while Battenberg cake, pictured left, is probably named after one of the Battenberg family living in England, who gave up their German titles during World War I and changed their name to Mountbatten.

Béchamel sauce was named to flatter the maítre d’Hotel to Louis XIV, Louis de Béchamel, Marquis de Nointel (1630–1703), also a financier and ambassador.

A recent example of this trend is Cherry Garcia ice cream with bing cherries and chocolate chips, which was makers Ben & Jerry’s homage to the Grateful Dead leader Jerry Garcia (1942–1995). For a month following the musician’s death in 1995, the ice cream was made with black cherries instead of bings as a show of mourning.

Finally, nicotine, the poisonous alkaloid found in tobacco leaves, dates from 1819, from the French for modern Latin Nicotiana, the formal botanical name for the tobacco plant. This plant was named for Jean Nicot (c.1530–1600), then French ambassador to Portugal, who sent tobacco seeds and powdered leaves back to France in 1561.