Searching around the web assured me that it wasn’t just my granny who used the term “The Popes Nose” for the triangular tail you notice on a roast chicken or other poultry.
What I didn’t manage to unearth is where exactly the phrase came from. I saw that protestants call it “The Parsons Nose”, but I suppose that is just an adaptation as there would generally be only one pope at a time, but many parsons.
So, which pope, and why?
I don’t think it’s for a particular pope, but a slur against Catholics in general: it’s the ass of the chicken, so bust on the pope when referring to it.
I don’t think that it’s a slur on Catholics, so much. Joyce mentions it in his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The family is gathered together for Christmas dinner and one uncle, begins describing it as a rather tasty cut of the bird, before calling it “the Pope’s nose” and asking if anyone minds if he has it. While Joyce had no fondness for the Catholic Church, I doubt he would have included such a scene (since there were young children present) if the uncle had intended it as a slur. (There’s another scene in the book where an uncle calls the Irish “priest-ridden,” meaning that the priests were to blame for Ireland being under England’s thumb, and is quickly hushed up because of the presence of a young child.)
Yeppers, the Popes Nose is what it is called by catholics, I have seen elsewhere on the web that protestants tend to call it the Parsons Nose.
Curious, the only term I’ve heard “pope’s nose” in reference to is the license plate light cover on the bonnet on early vintage Volkswagen beetles. I always presumed it to be the holy schnozz of John XXIII. Take a look and you’ll see the resemblance.
I find it amazing that anyone would think a particular pope inspired this. According to the OED, “Pope’s Nose” dates back to 1796. Back then, no one outside of Rome knew what the Pope even looked like.
Something that I’ve wondered about for a long time is starting to make sense now. I had never heard the term pope’s nose until Scott Thompson (as Buddy Cole) used it in Kid’s in the Hall. From the episode where Buddy talks about being Canadian: