Well, bel, thanks for your well-intended correction. But I've been involved with the restaurant business for more years than I care to admit, and I've always seen and used the double-e form, sautéed, for the transitive verb (with the accent on the first "e", that was just a typo or late-night mind-flip
). I searched a variety of hits on OneLook and it's listed as the preferred usage to sautéd, or even as the only form of the two.
Perhaps, as the etymology suggests, the one-e is the French form and the double-e is the common English variable. The menu might read, for instance, shrimp sauté, but sautéed shrimp in the v.t., not sautéd shrimp. Here's a couple supporting citations:
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.
SYLLABICATION: sau·té
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: sau·téed, sau·té·ing, sau·tés
To fry lightly in fat in a shallow open pan.
NOUN: A dish of food so prepared.
ETYMOLOGY:
French, sautéd, from past participle of sauter, to leap, from Old French, from
Latin saltre. See saltation. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate
Main Entry: 1sau·té
Variant(s): also sau·te /so-'tA, sO-/
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from past participle of sauter to jump, from Latin
saltare -- more at SALTATION
Date: 1813
: a sautéed dish
- sauté adjective And this fascinating site,
www.foodlexicon.net http://www.xs4all.nl/~margjos/index.html, which translates culinary words and phrases into five different languages offers
sautéed as the English form:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~margjos/satxtgb.htm
