| Summary: | In recent decades, the development of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, put forward by Lakoff and other scholars. In this light, metaphor and metonymy have been found to provide a semantic motivation for a considerable number of idiomatic expressions. Within this framework, the present contribution explores the cognitive motivation of food idioms in English (e.g., ‘be a cup of tea,’ ‘bread and butter,’ ‘walking on eggshells’) and Spanish (e.g., <i>darse pisto, tener mala uva, cortar el bacalao</i>). The analysis reveals that idiomatic meaning often relies on metaphoric amalgams and metonymic chains, or on the interaction between metaphor and metonymy.
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