Today, currying favour, has come to mean ingratiating yourself with your boss or with members of a club you are eager to join. But where did the phrase come from? Surprisingly, perhaps, it has nothing to do with spicy cookery. It actually comes from a term to do with grooming a horse.
Favour in this context doesn’t mean favour as we understand it; it harks back to a medieval French story about a horse called Fauvel. The Roman de Fauvel is a 14th century French allegorical verse romance of satirical bent, generally attributed to Gervais du Bus, a clerk at the French royal chancery.
The romance features Fauvel, a horse who rises to prominence in the French royal court, and through him satirizes the self-serving hedonism and hypocrisy of men, and the excesses of the ruling estates, both secular and ecclesiastical. The antihero's name can be broken down to mean "false veil", and also forms an acrostic F-A-V-V-E-L with the letters standing for the human vices: Flattery, Avarice, Vileness, Variability (Fickleness), Envy, and Laxity.
Within this medieval context, currying refers to the sort of currying you do with a curry comb - basically grooming a horse. The horse, Fauvel, became so important that he lived in a palace rather than a stable and even the nobility went to grovel to him. They would do anything they could to earn his approval, including grooming or currying him, a lowly task normally left to a servant.
Currying Fauvel is one of those expressions that has changed over the years as people have lost sight of its origins, and thought, ‘That can’t be right’ and adapted it to something more familiar.
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