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| “Poolish” comes from an English word which means “Polish” and refers to a French breadmaking bread-making method imported by the Austrians. Four countries to define one method!

We know by now that while Prof. Calvel was a great authority on baking bread, he was not infallible, especially in matters of history. Besides, it seems he must have repeated the story about "Baron" Zang "from Poland" after someone else, as the sme same information had alrady appersed already appeared in ''The Atlantic Monthly'' in 1972.<ref>{{Cyt

Some of the oldest French-language mentions of this supposedly Polish starter use the spellings "''poolisch''" or "''polisch''" (with "sch"), which suggests an alternative version of the above etymology. Namely, that the word comes not from English, but from German. But isn't the German word for "Polish" written as "''polnisch''", with an "N"? Yes, it is in modern Standard German; but in 19th-century southern dialects (used in Austria), the same adjective could be written without the "N", as "''polisch''", "''pohlisch''" or "''pollisch''". And some of these spellings can be found in the context of bread starters. For example, an 1865 advertisement for St. Marxer, a Viennese brand of pressed yeast, mentions a "''Polisch''" method. The word, in this sense, seems to have been largely forgotten in German with time, but even a century later a German breadmaking bread-making handbook still talked about a "''polische''" bread dough:

The trouble is that in French the word "''pouliche''" has a meaning which is completely unrelated to baking; it means "a filly". What could a young female horse have to do with a yeast starter? Perhaps someone associated a pre-ferment, whose purpose is to rejuvenate a yeast population, with a young equine? Or maybe fermenting and bubbling dough reminded someone of a prancing filly? We can only guess. In any case, this the etymology that Jim Chevalier is leaning to. In his opinion, the pseudo-English phonetic spelling "poolish" appeared after the original "''pouliche''", and it was only then that its similarity to the English word "Polish" gave rise to the story about the method's Polish origin. And to make this story more believable, someone decided to explain the Polish-French connection by adding the famous August Zang as a missing link.

I've found an even more suprising surprising hypothesis, which proposes that the work "poolish" comes from "''polish''" (פאליש), which is a Yiddish word for a synagogue antechamber. The idea here is that a pre-ferment is the first step towards a finished bread, just like the antechamber is the first step towards the synagogue. In the central (Polish-Galician) dialect of Yiddish, the vowel "o" is closer to the "oo" sound, which would explain the "poolish" spelling in English transcription, as well as indicate a Polish origin of the method. Except that, in this case, the authorship of this method would belong not to Poles in general, but specifically to Polish Jews.