The Language of Food

Potato Chips

2011-11-30T08:00:00.000-08:00

The political season is well upon us and that means a lot of politicians talking about strugglin' and rollin' up our sleeves, especially when speaking to working class audiences. Since the pioneering work of sociolinguists like Bill Labov, linguists have studied the ways we chose variants, like "-in" to project a working class authenticity but "-ing" to project an educated or professional persona (see some lovely posts on political aspects of -in/-ing by my friends Mark Liberman, Geoff Nunberg, and Julie Sedivy).

Photograph by Stephanie Shih.
Used by permission

This use of linguistic variables to mark identity and authenticity occurs in the language of food as well. Josh Freedman, a young political researcher, was an even younger freshman in my Language of Food seminar at Stanford four years ago when he became interested in how the language of food advertising reflects socio-economic class. Josh's idea led to a collaboration that you can read about in detail in the latest issue of the journal Gastronomica. Stephanie Shih's lovely photo above gives you the intuition; below is a quick sketch of our results.

Josh and I looked at 12 bags of potato chips, 6 more expensive (Boulder, Dirty, Kettle Brand, Popchips, Terra, Season's, averaging 68 cents per ounce) and 6 less expensive (Hawaiian, Herr's, Lays, Tim's, Utz, and Wise, averaging 40 cents per ounce). We coded up all the advertising text from the back of the chips and then examined how the words differed between the two classes of chips.

What factors characterized expensive chips? You may be surprised to learn that potato chips are a health food; almost all chips (expensive or not) emphasized the healthiness of their products by using phrases like "low fat", "healthier", "no cholesterol", or "lowest sodium level". But these health-related claims occur on expensive chips 6 times as often as on inexpensive chips (6 times per bag versus once per bag). This difference in health language is not, as far as we can tell, due to actual differences in the chips. No chips in our sample contain trans fats, but only 2 out of the 6 inexpensive chips talk about it. By contrast, every one of the 6 expensive chips mentions the lack of trans fats.

Expensive chips also turn out to be much more natural. Phrases such as "natural", "real", or "nothing artificial" are 2.5 times more likely to be mentioned on expensive bags (7 times on each expensive bag but under 3 times on each inexpensive bag).

Finally, expensive chips are 5 times more likely to distinguish themselves from other chips, using comparative phrases like "less fat than other leading brands", "best in America", "in a class of their own". or "a crunchy bite you won't find in any other chip". Where text on the inexpensive chips focuses on the chips themselves, ads for expensive chips emphasize their differences from "lesser" chips.

Another way to differentiate is to use negative markers, words like "never", "not", or "no" ("never fried", "we don't wash out the natural potato flavor", "no wiping your greasy chip hand on your jeans"). Negation emphasizes bad qualities that a chip does not have, subtly suggesting that other brands have this bad quality. To get a more fine-grained analysis, we also regressed the number of negative words against the price. We found that a bag of potato chips costs 4 cents more per ounce for every additional negative word on the bag.

In his famous book "Distinction", sociologist Pierre Bourdieu showed that our position in society heavily influences our tastes, whether in food, music, film, or art. He argues that "hip" or "fashionable" tastes are just a away for the upper class to display their high status, to distinguish themselves from other classes. Taste, says Bourdieu, is "first and foremost... negation... of the tastes of others". The fact that expensive chip advertising is full of comparison (less fat, finest potatoes) and negation (not, no, never, don't) suggests that Bourdieu is right, that the notion of upper class taste in food advertising is defined by contrast with tastes of other classes; what it is to be upper class is to be not working class.

What characterizes inexpensive chip advertising? Text on these chips tend to use simpler sentences and simpler words, with writing and vocabulary on average at the 8th grade level (as computed by the standard Flesch-Kincaid test that measures the length of sentences and words). The advertising on expensive chips is written at the 10th-11th grade level; here's a sample sentence from an expensive chip:

"We use totally natural ingredients, hand-rake every batch, and test chips at every stage of preparation to ensure quality and taste."

Notice the simpler grammar and vocabulary in this sample from an inexpensive chip:

"What gives our chips their exceptional great taste? It's no secret. It's the way they're made!"

This difference in language between the two classes of chips is a reflection of what one of the original Mad Men, David Ogilvy, said back in 1963 in Confessions of an Advertising Man:

Don't use high-falutin words for the non-high-falutin audience.

Finally, Josh and I looked at words related to authenticity. Authenticity has become an obsession in our society, a fact that is not lost on marketers for whom, the New York Times recently noted, "the exultation of the 'authentic' reaches near-hilarious heights". Authenticity comes in many flavors. We talked above about products being "natural" or "real"; a product is also more authentic if it is grounded in family or American traditions. We looked at this kind of traditional authenticity, measuring mentions of tradition ("family recipe"), the founding or founder of a company ("our founder..."), or mentions of America or American locations ("the great Pacific Northwest").

Mentions of tradition occurred more than twice as often on inexpensive chips. Our linear regression showed that every time a family or an American locale is mentioned, the price per ounce of the chips drops 10 cents. The inexpensive chips thus represent a model of authenticity rooted in family traditions and family-run companies, and set in regional locations throughout America.

For the upper class, by contrast, being authentic means being natural, using quality natural ingredients and avoiding artificial ingredients, preservatives, and so on. Words like artificial or fake are used solely in the expensive chip advertising. Even though most of the inexpensive chips also contain no preservatives, this fact is only mentioned in expensive chip advertising. This emphasis on authentic food as natural and non-artificial is prevalent in the popular press as well in books like Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, which contains rules for avoiding what Pollan calls "imitation foods" :

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS CONTAINING INGREDIENTS THAT ARE
A) UNFAMILIAR,
B) UNPRONOUNCEABLE,
C) MORE THAN FIVE IN NUMBER,
OR THAT INCLUDE
D) HIGH-FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP.

Of course we all want to be special, and live an authentic life, whether we draw our metaphors from nature or from tradition. These models of natural versus traditional authenticity are part of our national dialogue, two of the many ways of framing that make up our ongoing conversation about who we are. The red state and blue state models of our nation are deeply inscribed in our collective discussion-- written on the back of every bag of potato chips.

Ice Cream

2011-07-11T12:59:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco midsummer fog was late in coming this year,which means Janet and I got a fantastic view of the July 4th fireworks (legal and not-strictly-legal)from the top of Bernal Hill. Hot days are rare in San Francisco, so random strangers have been smiling at each otheron Mission Street and the lines are extra-longon the sidewalks in front of the ice creameries.

You may not be aware of the close relationships amongthese summer phenomena. Ice cream was inventedby modifying a technology originally discovered for fireworks.And the way ice creams flavors are namedturns out to have a surprising relationshipwith the evolutionary origin of the human smile.

Ice cream has always been popular in San Francisco; Swensons, Double Rainbow, and It's It were all founded here, andRocky Road ice cream was invented across the bay in Oaklandduring the Great Depression.Prices are not Depression-era at the latest upscale creameries, though,where you'd be lucky to walk away with a pint of ice creamfor less than seven dollars. At Smitten, in HayesValley, for example, they'll make your ice cream fresh when you order it, freezingit with liquid nitrogen.At other places the selling point is thethe unusual flavors (or their interesting names).At Humphry Slocombe you can get foie gras, pink grapfefruit tarragon, or strawberry black olive.Bi-Rite Creamery will happily sell you honey lavender, balsamic strawberry, and salted caramel.Mitchell's specializes in Filipino and other tropical flavors, includinghalo halo, lucuma, ube (purple yam), and avocado.And Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous seems to keep running out of their latest hip flavor, orange blossom.

Well, actually, it turns out that orange blossom is not a newfangled flavor.Orange blossom is, in fact, the original ice cream flavor, appearing in the earliest recipes by the mid 1600's,the period when ice cream was invented.Ice cream was served in the Restoration court of Charles II as early as 1671, and food scholar Elizabeth David gives uswhat may be the English royal recipe, handwritten in Grace Countess Granville's Receipt Book by the 1680's:

The Ice Creame
Take a fine pan Like a pudding pan ½ a ¼ of a yard deep,and the bredth of a Trencher; take your Creame & sweeton it w^th Sugar and 3 spoonfulls of Orrange flower water, & fill yo^r pan ¾ full...

By about 1696, a later edition of La Varenne's cookbook suggests using fresh orange flowers:

You must take sweet cream, and put thererto handfuls of powdered sugar,and take petals of Orange Flowers and mince them small,and put them in your Cream,and if you have no fresh Orange Flowers you must takecandied, with a drop of good Orange Flower water...

And by 1700 other ice cream flavors were developed as well, including pumpkin, chocolate, and lemon,as well as a plethora of early sorbets: sour cherry, cardamom, coriander-lemon, and strawberry.

Where did these flavors come from? The use of orange flower should give you a clue:the historical roots of ice cream and sorbet, like many of our modern foods, lie in the Muslim world.

Fruit syrups, and the refereshing drinks made from mixing them with water,are called sherbet inTurkish and sharbat in Persian, from Arabic sharba^h, from shariba `to drink'. These chilled (but not frozen) drinkshave been popular throughoutt the Ottoman, Arab, and Persian worlds continuously since the Middle Ages.On the left is a Gül Şerbeti (rose sherbet) from a modern Turkish cookbook;and Claudia Roden talks nostalgically of the sharbat of Egypt,flavored with lemon, rose, violet, tamarind, mulberry, raisin, or liquorice.

By the 16th centuryItalian and French travelers had brought back words of these Turkish sherbets.In one of the earliest mentions of the word in Europe,the French naturalist Pierre Belon in 1553 described sherbets in Istanbulmade of figs, plums, apricots, and raisins.Thirsty passers-by would buy a glass of syrup from wandering sellers or stands,mixed with water and chilled with ice.But by 1615 sherbets were still unavailable in Europe;here's an excerpt from a letter an Italian traveler sent home in 1615 from Constantinople,from Elizabeth David's lovely book "Harvest of the Cold Months":

scerbet, a certain composition which they make...of sugar, lemon juice, seasonings of fruit and flowers and other ingredients, something like the conservesand marmalades of Naples; when they wantto drink, they put some of this composition in a jug of water...

These sherbets were the source of the fruit icesthat we now call sorbets. But the Ottoman drinks (and the modern Middle Eastern ones as well) were not frozen; they were cooled with ice or snowjust like modern lemonade. People had been putting ice and snow into drinks to cool them for over 4000 years,but freezing sweetened fruit juice or cream requires a much lower temperature than just ice can achieve.

So where did the idea and the technology forfreezing arise? Obviously liquid nitrogen,the darling freezing technology of modernist cuisine,was not available in the 16th century.

The insight came from fireworks. In the 9th century, during the Tang dynasty,the Chinese first realized thatsaltpeter (potassium nitrate) could be mixed with sulpher and coalto create the explosive mixture we now call gunpowder.Gunpowder was quickly adopted by the Muslim world,where potassium nitrate was called Chinese snowin Arabic and Chinese salt in Persian.

But it was in the Arab world rather than China thatthe processing of purifying and refining potassium nitrate was perfected, and it was here in Damascus that it was discovered, probably by the Damascus physician Ibn Abī Uṣaybi'a, in his 1242 History of Medicine ("Uyūn al-ānbā"))(although he credits a lost work from an earlier Muslim physician, Ibn Bakhtawayh, from 1029),that saltpeter had refrigerating properties:when potassium nitrate (saltpeter) is added to water, it chills the water.Dissolving salts like potassium nitrate (KNO₃) in waterbreaks the bonds between the ions, drawing heat from the surrounding water.This endothermic reaction, the basis of the modern cold pack shown to the right,can drop the temperature of the water enough to freeze pure water, although not low enough to freeze fruit ices or ice cream.

By the early 16th century this discovery was widely used in Muslim Indiato chill water for drinking. At this time most of what is today northern and central India, Pakistan,and Bangladesh, as well as parts of Afghanistan, was ruled by the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. The Mughals were originally Turkic speakers from central Asia,and the royal line that conquered Delhi traced their descent from Genghis Khan (Mughal was thePersian word for Mongol), but had adopted the Persian language and culture.By the time of Akbar, the Persian-speaking court at Agra was a center for the arts,architecture and literature.The Ramayana and the Mahabharata were translated from Sanskrit to Persianduring this period,and Akbar's keen interest in painting and architecture led to the development of stylesof art that mixed Persian, Hindu, and European forms.Like many places where scientific and culinary innovation and mixingflourished (Moorish Spain, early Norman Sicily),Akbar's reign was a beacon of relative religious tolerance,in which the tax on non-Muslims was eliminated and other religions were allowed self-government.Agra (and his later court in Lahore) were steamy hot, and drinkswere cooled by spinning a long-necked flask in saltpeter-water.Here's a 1596 description from the Ain I Akbari:

One sér of water is then put into a goglet of pewter,or silver, or any other such metal, and the mouth closed. Then twoand a half sérs of saltpetre are thrown into a vessel, togetherwith five sérs of water, and in this mixture the goglet is stirredabout for a quarter of an hour, when the water in the goglet willbecome cold.

Very quickly this idea of using saltpeter to cool water was adopted in Italy.Blas Villafranca, a Spanish physician working in Rome published the idea in 1550,saying that this saltpeter bath had become the common method of cooling wine in Rome.On the left is his picture of the method, showing a bulbous flask clearly adapted from the Indian flasks above; the shape makes it easy to speed up the cooling by turning the bottle in the cold bath.

In 1589 the next step in ice cream technology was taken bythe Neapolitan Giambattista Della Porta. In the 2nd edition of his "Magia Naturalis" he experimented with adding saltpeterto snow rather than to water. The result successfully froze watered wine.Della Porta's combination was a happy accident; it was not saltpeter'sendothermic reaction with water that caused cooling when mixed with ice,but a completely different chemical property. Adding a solute (anything will do)lowers the freezing point of water, by interfering with the crystal structure of the ice.Adding salt or potassium chloride slowly draws water out from its chrysal mixture,and since the freezing point is lowered, turns into a salty slush. The phaseshift from solid to liquid takes energy (another endothermic reaction),resulting in an even colder freezing brine that reaches -20 degrees C,easily cold enough to freeze ice cream or fruit ices.

Sometime between 1615 and 1650, the Neapolitans combined the liquid Ottoman sherbets with the newly inventedsaltpeter-and-ice freezing method,resulting in a new food: frozen sherbets or frozen sorbets.The idea of freezing other liquids like milks and custards soon followed.We don't have any of these early Italian recipes, the way we haveearly English and French recipes, but evidence for the Italian innovation comes from contemporary French ice cream makers who discussed learning their recipes from Italy.Soon afterwards the Italians also figured out that common salt worked better than saltpeterfor freezing (salt is a smaller molecule than saltpeter; the smaller the molecule, themore ions from each gram of solute interferes with freezing); by 1665 the English chemistRobert Boyle said that ice and common salt was the method "much employ'd" in Italy to chill drinks and fruit.

By the 1700s European languages had settled on names for the new invention,with the Ottoman sherbet now redefined as a frozen fruitice rather than just a fruit syrup,and the words for ice creammostly based on words meaning "ice" or "frozen" (Eis, glace, gelato, etc.).

As for the names of the flavors, mostlythey are just the names of the ingredients ("chocolate", "strawberry", "orange blossom", and so on).We commonly assume that such flavor namesare purely descriptive, and that factors likethe sounds of the names should have no bearing on how the ice cream tastes.To paraphrase Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet:

What's in a name? that which we call a rose sherbet
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Juliet was roughly correct;the sounds (or "phones") that make up a word don't generally tell you what the word means.By 500 BC Plato (in the Cratylus) and the Chinese linguist Xunzi of the Chinese Warring States period had figured out that the relationship between sound and meaning is usuallyarbitrary. A moment's thought makes it clear why this must be true:different languages have totally different sounds for the same concept, and languages only have around fifty or so phones, and obviously have a lotmore ideas to express than fifty.

But it turns out that research over the last century has shown that Shakespeare was wrong; sometimes the sounds of a name do influence how people perceive ice cream.The phenomenon of sounds carrying meaning is called "sound symbolism".Sound symbolism has been most deeply studied with vowels,and in particular the difference between two classesof vowels, front vowels and back vowels,which are named depending on the position of the tongue.The vowels i (the vowel in the words cheese or bean) and ɪ (the phonetics symbol is a small capital I, pronounced as in mint or slim) are front vowels. because they are made by holding the tongue high upin the front part of the mouth. The picture to the left showsa very schematic cutaway of the head, showing the lips and teeth on the left,and the tongue high up toward the front of the mouth.

By contrast,the vowel ɑ (as in large, pod, or on)is a low back vowel; this sound is made by holding thetongue lower in the back part of the mouth;other back vowels are o (as in cold) and ɔ (as in the word pour or my mother's New York pronunciation of ought). The picture to the right shows a very schematic tongue positionfor these vowels; lower in general, and more toward the back of the throat.

A number of studies over the last 100 years or so have shownthat front vowels in many languages tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light things,and back vowels in words that refer to big, fat, heavy things.It's not always true, but it's a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little, teeny or itsy-bitsy (all front vowels)versus humongous or gargantuan (back vowels). Or the i vowel in Spanish chico(front vowel meaning small) versus gordo (back vowel meaning fat). Or French petit (front vowel)versus grand (back vowel).

In one marketing study, for example, Richard Klink created pairs of made-up product brand namesthat were identical except for having front vowels or back vowels:nidax (front vowel) verus nodax (back vowel),or detal (front vowel) versus dutal (back vowel).For a number of hypothetical products, he asked people which seemed bigger or smaller,or heavier or lighter, with questions like:

Which brand of laptop seems bigger; Detal or Dutal?
Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?
Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen?
Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab?

In each case, the participants in the study tended to choose the product namedby back vowels (dutal, nodax) as the larger, heavier, thicker, darker product.Similar studies have been conducted in various other languages.

The fact that consumers think of brand names with back vowelsas heavy, thick, richer products suggests that they might preferto name ice cream with back vowels, sinceice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be heavy and rich.

Indeed, it turns out that people seem to (at least mildly) prefer ice creamsthat are named with back vowels.In a study in the Journal of Consumer ResearchEric Yorkston and Geeta Menon had participants read a press release describing a new ice creamabout to be released.Half the participants read a version where the ice cream was called "Frish" (front vowel) andthe other half read a version where it was called "Frosh" (back vowel),but the press release was otherwise identical. Asked their opinionsof this (still hypothetical) ice cream, the "Frosh" people ratedit as smoother, creamier, and richer than the "Frish" people,and were more likely to say they would buy it. The participants were evenmore influenced by the vowels if they were simultanously distracted by performing some other task,suggesting that their response to the vowels was automatic, at a non-conscious level.

If people subconsciously think of ice cream names with back vowels as richer and creamier,it suggests that actual ice cream brands or flavors might also use back vowels.So I ran what Mark Liberman calls a Breakfast Experiment™; a quickexperiment using some easy-to-access language data. My hypothesis was that we would see more back vowels in names of actual ice cream brands or flavors.Furthermore, if front vowels indeed indicate thin, small, light ,we should expect more front vowels in foods that supposed to be thin and light,like crackers.

To test the hypothesis I downloaded two lists of food names from the web. One was a list of 81 ice cream flavorsthat I constructed by including every flavor sold by either Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry's.The second was a list of 592 cracker brands from a dieting website.For each list, I counted the total number offront vowels (i, ɪ, ɛ,e,æ)and the total number of back vowels (details of the study are here).The result, shown in the table to the right,is that ice creams names indeed have more back vowels and cracker names have more front vowels.

Here are some examples of stressed back vowels in ice cream names:

Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, Chocolate, Caramel, Cookie Dough, Coconut

And here are samples of the many cracker names with front vowels; note the extraordinary number ofɪ vowels:

Cheese Nips, Cheez It, Wheat Thins, Pretzel thins, Ritz, Krispy, Triscuit, Thin Crisps, Cheese Crisps, Chicken in a Biskit, Snack sticks, Toasted chips, Ritz bits

Of course there are exceptions: vanilla, the orange blossom of our day, has an ɪ.But most of the front vowels in ice cream flavorstend to be the names of small thin ingredients in the ice cream:(thin mint, chip, peanut brittle).

So what's going on? Why are front vowels associatedwith small, thin, light things, and back vowelswith big, solid, heavy things?

The most widely accepted theory, called the Frequency Code, suggests thatlow frequencies (low pitch) and high frequencies (high pitch)are associated with particular meanings.The frequency code wasdeveloped by linguist John Ohala (my old phonetics professor!), extending work by Eugene Morton of the Smithsonian.

Morton noticed that mammals and birds tend to uselow-frequency (deeper) sounds when they are aggressive or hostile,but use higher-freqeuncy (higher-pitched) sounds when frightened, appeasing, or friendly.Since larger animals naturally make deeper sounds (the roar of lions) and smaller animals naturallymake high-pitched sounds (the tweet of birds), Morton's idea is that animals try to appear larger when they are competing or aggressive,but try to appear smaller and less threatening when they are tryingto be friendly or appeasing.

Morton and Ohala thus suggest that humans instinctively associate the pitch of soundswith size.It turns out that front vowels like ɪ and iare higher-pitched in a particular way than back vowelsɑ and o.All vowels are composed of different frequency resonances.When the tongue is high and in the front of the mouth,it creates a small cavity in front of the tongue.Small cavities cause higher-pitched resonances (the smallerthe space for vibration, the shorter the wavelength, hencethe higher the frequency). One particular resonance (called the second formant)is much higher for front vowels and lower for back vowels.

Thus the frequency code suggests that front vowels are associated with small, thin, things,and back vowels with big heavy things because front vowelshave higher pitched resonances, and we instinctively associatehigher pitch with smaller things.

This link of high pitch with deference or friendliness may also explainthe origin of the smile, which is similarly associated with appeasing or friendly behavior.The way we make a smile is by retracting the corners of the mouth.Animals like monkeys also retract the corners of theirmouths to express submission (Ohala's figure (a) on the right), and use the opposite facialexpression, which Ohala calls the "o-face"in which the corners of the mouth are drawn forwardwith the lips possibly protruding (figure (b) on the right), to indicate aggression.Retracting the corners of the mouth shrinks the size of the frontcavity in the mouth, just like the vowels ɪ or i.In fact, the similarity in mouth position between smiling and the vowel iexplains why we say "cheese" when we take pictures; i is the smiling vowel.

Ohala's theory is thus that smiling evolved when mammals were in competitive situations, as a way to makethe voice sound more high-pitched, so as it make the smilerappear smaller and less aggressive, and hence friendlier.

Of course even if Ohala is right about the ancient evolutionary origin of the smile, smiling in humans has evolved into a meansof expressing many shades of enjoyment and other emotional meanings,just as back vowels have become part of a rich and beautiful system for expressing complex meanings by combining sounds into words.

Something similarly beautiful was created as saltpeter and snow, sherbet and salt,were passed along and extended from theChinese to the Arabs to the Mughals to the Neapolitans,to create the sweet lusciousness of ice cream.And it's a nice thought that saltpeter, applied originally to war, became the key hundreds of years laterto inventing something that makes us all smile on a hot summer day.

Ice cream, anyone?

Macaroons, Macarons, and Macaroni

2011-04-16T11:55:00.000-07:00

It's a beautiful spring day here in San Francisco.The wild garlic is blooming, the top of Bernal Hill is covered in fennel,and everyone is celebrating spring.The stores are full of marshmallow peeps for Easter,Janet's family just swept her grandparents' grave forthe Qingming Festival,the Persian New Year Festival, Nowruz, just passed,and my family is getting ready for Passover, which means it's time for coconut macaroons,shown above.

Photograph by Stephanie Shih.
Used by permission

The city is also full of another, trendier, macaroon right now: the Parisian macaron.Shown at right are Stephanie Shih's Grapefruit-White Chocolate macarons.As even the Wall Street Journal is pointing out,Parisian macaroons are everywhere, from fancy patisseries to Trader Joes,and San Francisco, never a place to miss out on a trend, even hasmacaron delivery.

Of course, fads, whether modern or historical, are not confined just to desserts.In fashion, there was a trend amoung rich young hipsters in 18th century Englandto wear outlandish hair styles (very tall powdered wigs with tiny caps on top) and affected clothing (shown below).They were called Macaronis, likely because on their travels in Italy they acquired a taste for pasta(maccheroni is a generic word for pasta in Italian).The song Yankee Doodle, written around this time to poke fun atthe tattered colonial troops, mocks a disheveled "Yankee" soldier whose attempt to look sharp was to"stick a feather in his hat and call it macaroni".

"Yankee Doodle" was appropriated by the revolutionary troops, and the song quickly became popular,no different than modern trends like the 1995 dance song"La Macarena" by the Spanish band Los Del Río,which almost instantly had millions of drunk people in discos around the world awkwardly waving their armsaround their body.

But I digress. What are the antecedents of the macaron trend?Were coconut macaroons the original? Or did they derive instead from the Parisian macaron?

It turns out that both are new fads, invented around 1900 by modifying the original almond cookie calledmacaroon in English or macaron in French.From the Larousse Gastronomique:

Macaroon: A small, round biscuit (cookie), crunchy outside and softinside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites.Macaroons are sometimes flavoured with coffee, chocolate, nuts, or fruit andthen joined together in pairs.

The original macaroons (or macarons), then, are almond meringue cookies; exactly what are calledamaretti or ricciarelli in Italian or amarguillos in Spanish,and shown on the right. The Parisian macaron is a sandwich cookie that joinstwo macarons with a filling, while the coconut macaroon replaces the ground almonds with shredded coconut.

But it turns out that all of these:macarons, macaroni, coconut macaroons, and perhaps even the Macarena,have the same origin, rooted in the great meetings of theIslamic and Christian culinary traditions in the Middle Ages.

One tradition is the rich repertoire of sweets that originated in Zoroastrian Persia.One of these was calledfālūdhaj, a honey and starch candy eaten by the Sassanid kings of Persiato celebrate the Persian new year, Nowrūz.

Likesikbāj and otherother pre-Islamic Persian foods, fālūdhaj was adaptedby the chefs of the Muslim Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad,and a number of nut and sugar confections developed:fālūdhaj and lausinaj, made ofalmonds and sugar, and fustuqiyya (or muqarrada, meaning `cut-up' or `clipped')made of pistachios and sugar.The recipes appear throughout the 13th century Muslim world, from the AndalusianManuscrito Anonimoin the west to the Kitāb al-Tabīkh, (The Book of Dishes) in the east.Here's a recipe from the latter, fromCharles Perry's English translation:

Fālūdhaj: Take a pound of sugar and a third of a pound of almonds and pound them fine together... Take a third of a pound of sugar, dissolve it with half an ounce of rose-water on a quiet fire, then take it up. When it has cooled off, throw the pounded sugar and almonds on it and knead them with it.... .... [The paste is then wrapped in dough and soaked in sesame oil and rose-water syrup]

Another important food of the Islamic world was pasta,called itriyya in 10th century Arabic.Dough products were also eaten in the Greek and Roman worlds.A kind of fritter dish made from sheets of fried dough called lagana dated back to the 1st century BC,and there were many gruels such as a Byzantine Greek gruel called makaria (μακαρία),from the Greek makarios (μακάριος) 'blessed', eaten as a funeral food.

These two food traditions came together on the island of Sicily.The Romans had planted durum wheat, and made Sicily a breadbasked of their Empire.The Byzantine period brought the Greek language andOrthodoxy. The Arabs landed in 827 and made Palermo the second largest city in the world,introducing paper to Europe, and bringing sugar cane, pistachios, lemons, rice, andoranges. By 1072 the Normans had conquered Sicily (and England),and for a brief period the rule of Roger I and Roger II of Sicily was an experimentin mutual tolerance, at least compared to the restof Europe;Greek, Arabic, and Latin were all official languages,government officials were drawn from all three cultures andMuslims and Jews were governed by their own laws.Above and right is the Cathedral of Monreale, showing its beautiful combination of Norman,Byzantine and Arab styles.

Sicily is also where modern durum wheat pasta was developed.By 1154, Muhammad al-Idrisi, the Moroccan-born geographer of king Roger II,describes Sicily as an important center of pasta (itriyya), exported throughout the Mediterranean world,to both Muslim and Christian countries.(The myth that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy from China was inventedin the 1920's in the Minnesota Macaroni Journal;By the time Polo returned from China in 1296, pasta had been a major export commodityfor well over a century.)By 1200 pasta had branched out of Sicily. Even in France,Jewish documents, like theThe Siddur Rashi, attributed to the 11th French scholar Rashi,use the word vermiseles, derived via old French vermeseil from Italianvermicelli, to describe dough boiled as pasta or fried in fritters.

Within a hundred years or so the Yiddish word vermiseles has morphed to germizelli orvremzel, and finally to the modern form of the word, chremsel,which still describes a dough fritter, by now a sweet matso-meal pancake (shown above from Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisted)that is eaten at Passover.

The modern word "macaroni/macaroon"(maccarruni in its original Sicilian form, maccherone in standard Italian)first appears in writing in 1279, and is quickly used for both meanings.Alas, we just don't know where it comes from. Arabic is likely; Italian food scholar Anna Martellottisuggests that it comes from thepistachio marzipan muqarrada mentioned above and Clifford Wright suggestsa different Arabic etymology from a Tunisian word.Others (including the OED) suggest it may come fromthe Greek makaria funeral gruel,or perhaps from the Italian dialect word maccare, meaning 'to crush'.But none of these etymologies are universally accepted, and we may never know.

What most scholars seem to agree on is thatthe ancestor of macaroon or macaroni was a word used in various languages (French, Catalan,and to some extent English and Italian)for two distinct foods, both made of a paste with rose water and egg whites and sweet spices:one a kind of marzipan (almond paste with rose water, egg whites, and sugar) andthe other a kind of gnocchi (flour paste with rose water, egg whites, no sugar).

Photo © the John Rylands library

The earliest mentions of the word refer to pasta.Boccaccio in his Decameron (around 1350) talks about macaronias a kind of hand-cut dumpling or gnocchi eaten with butter and cheese.Pasta came very quickly with the Normans from Sicily to England,and the first extant recipe for macaroni turns out to appear in the first cookbook in English, Forme of Cury, shown above and below:

Makerouns. Take and make a thynne foyle of dowh, and kerue it on peces, and cast hym on boillyng water & seeþ it wele. Take chese and grate it and butter imelte, cast bynethen and aboven as losyns.
[Make a thin sheet of dough, and cut it in pieces and place them in boiling water; boil well.Take cheese and grate it, and melted butter, and arrange below and above like lasagne.]

By 1465 the word maccherone in Italy had many regional meanings, but one of themwas the tubular pasta with cheese that a modern 8-year-old would recognize, althoughwith the addition of rose water and "sweet spices".Here's Maestro Martino of Como's Libro de Arte Coquinaria (The Art of Cooking) (ca. 1465).recipe for

Sicilian Macaroni

Take some very white flour and make a dough using egg whites and rose water... then shape it into long, thin sticks,the size of your palm and as thin as hay. Then take an iron rod as long as your palmor longer, and as thin as string, and place it on top of each stick,and then roll with both hands over a table; then remove the iron rodand the macaroni will be perforated in the middle.....cook them in water or meat broth; and place them on platters with generous quantities of gratedcheese, fresh butter, and sweet spices.

These recipes are quickly translated, and by 1505 this recipe appears in French, in Lyons,under the name macarons en potaige.But pasta never caught on in England and France, and by a fewhundred years later seems to have disappeared.Only in the 18th century did eating macaroni became first an exotic habit of British dandys,and then eventually a more widely popular food in both England and America.

Simultaneously with the expansion of pasta out of Sicily and around Europein the late Middle Ages, various dishes based on almond paste also started to appear.The most popular almond paste dish in Europewas marzipan, made of almond paste, sugar, rose water, and sometimes egg whites.The word marzipan first appeared in Italian, in 1343, as marzapane,and in English in 1516 as marchpane.Food historians generally believe that the name comes from the Arabic (and Persian)word mauthaban, which described the boxes or jarsthat this kind of candy was imported in, and indeed the earliest uses of the word marzipan seems to referto a pastry casing with a marzipan filling. Here's a recipe (without egg whites) for the filling from Martino'ss Art of Cooking:

Marzipan. Peel the almonds well and crush... When you crush them, wet them with a bit of rose water so that they do not purge their oil. ...take an equal weight of sugar as of almonds... and add also an ounce or two of good rose water; and incorporate all these things together well...

Marzipan very early became a food eaten for celebrations at Christmasand Easter, and was often produced by convents, includingthe convent of San Clemente in Toledo, Spain,and the convent of the Martorana in Palermo, Sicily, shown at right.

Then somewhere perhaps between 1450 and 1650 a version of baked marzipan that is much lighter, with more eggwhites,began to appear in France, Italy and possibly Spain.This new baked marzipan generally had only 3 or 4 ingredients:almonds, sugar, egg whites, and sometimes rose water or orange blossom water.

In France,the word macaron is used for this food (as well as for the pasta).In Italy, where the word maccherone by now only means pasta,these new lighter marzipan cookies had various names.In Sienna they were called marzapanetti, 'little marzipans',in Lombardy they were called amaretti, `little bitters',because they were made with bitter almonds.A name referring to bitter almonds was also used in Spain, or at least it was by the followingcentury, wherethe 1780 edition of the Real Academia Española's "Diccionario de la lengua castellana"tells us that this cookie was called amargo `bitter', or lateramarguillo `little bitter', a name that is still used.The same cookie is also popular in modern Turkey, where it is calledAcıbadem kurabiyesi, 'bitter almond cookie',and Alan Davidson tells us that many macaroon-like almond cookies are eatenthroughout the Maghreb.

We can't be absolutely certain whether this new lighter, baked version of marzipan hadbeen created in Sicily (or elsewhere in Italy) and then spread to France, Spain and Turkey,or whether it was France or Spain was the original source.Alternatively, the idea of making a puffy baked marzipan might have developed in different regions independently,a possibility that is consistent with the widely different macaroon traditions that exist in different regionsof both Italy and France.In Italy, there are different traditions for dry amaretti (like amaretti di Saronno, above),soft amaretti (amaretti morbidi) which have a higher quantity of water and may contain honey,and others like the dry bruti ma buoni (ugly but good),which are rough lumps with pieces of hazelnuts or almonds, orthe soft ricciarelli (above) which are traditionally oval-shaped and have orange peel or zest and sometimes honey.In France,the Larousse Gastronomique mentionsboth crisp (macarons croquants)and soft macaroons (macarons moelleux, anddiverse recipes from many regions, includingAmiens, Melun, Montmorillion, Nancy, and Niorts.In Cormery, for example,batter is piped into a circle (right) resulting in a donut shapeafter baking (below).

Convents and monasteries like Cormery Abbey were instrumental in the preservation and transmission of recipesfor sweets like macaroons. The Larousse Gastronomique tells us that by the eighteenthcentury macaroons were a specialty of a number of convents and their recipes were quickly commercialized;in Nancy two sisters left the convent of the Holy Sacrament and startedMaison des Soeurs Macarons,while in Saint-Emilion,Cindy Meyers' lovely article in Gastronomica tells us ,the Fabrique de Macarons Blanchez bakery sells macarons according to the"Authentic Macaron Recipe of the Old Nuns of Saint-Emilion".

The macaron doesn't appear in print, however, until 1552, in Rabelais,in passing. Shortly thereafter, thefirst English language recipe in 1611 defines the English word "macaroon"as derived from the French "macaron" which are

"compounded of Sugar, Almonds, Rosewater, and Muske, pounded together and baked with a gentle fire".

The earliest complete recipe is in English, in Martha Washington's BOOKE of COOKERY, a manuscript handwritten in England sometime in the 17th century (Karen Hess suggests that it is a fair copy of an original written well before the 1650s)that Martha Washington's family brought with them to the new world:

TO MAKE MACKROONS

Take a pound & halfe of almonds, blanch & beat them very smallin a stone morter with rosewater. put to them a pound of sugar,& y^e whites of 4 eggs, & beat y^m together. &put in 2 grayns of muske ground with a spoonfull or 2 of rose water.beat y^m together till y^r oven is as hot as formanchet, then put them on wafers & set them in on A plat. after a while,take them out. [yⁿ when] y^r oven is cool, set [y^m in]againe & dry y^m ...

The Washington macaroon, with its rose water and muske, is a medievalrecipe redolent of its Arab sources.Even as this recipe was being written, however, modern French cuisine began to evolveout of its medieval antecedents, replacing imported medieval spices withlocal herbs. The chef who was most important in guiding this transitionwas La Varenne, and the first completely modern recipe for macaroons comes from his famous 1651 cookbook, The French Cook, in which heeliminates the orange water and rose water from the earlier recipes:

Macaroon

Get a pound of shelled almonds, set them to soak in some cool water and wash them until the water is clear;drain them. Grind them in a mortar moistening them with three egg whitesinstead of orange blossom water, and adding in four ounces of powdered sugar.Make your paste which on paper you cut in the shape of a macaroon,then cook it, but be careful not to give it too hot a fire.When cooked, take it out of the oven and put it away in a warm, dry place.

For the next few centuries,from 1650 to 1900, the word macaroon meant this recipeof La Varenne's, defined above by the modern Larousse Gastronomique asa "small, round cookie, crunchy outside and soft inside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites."

Then two things happened around the turn of the last century, one in France and one in America.The French innnovation was related to the fact that macaroons and amaretti were often sold in pairs with the flatsides together. A new recipe added a filling in between the two, an innovation that is often creditedto the famous Parisian pastry shop and tea salonLadurée. From their web site:

Pierre Desfontaines, second cousin of Louis Ernest Ladurée, who at the beginning of the 20th century first thought of taking two macaroon shells and joining them with a delicious ganache filling.

The second innovation happened in Americaonly a few years before Desfontaines added ganache to his macarons,and was linked to the new fad for coconut.Coconut palms had been introduced to Florida in the 1880s, andefficient methods had just been developed for processing shredded coconutfor baking. Everyone was making the hip new desserts from this period: coconut cream pie,coconut custard, and ambrosia (in its original form: oranges, powdered sugar, and shredded coconut).Recipes for another of these trendy new coconut innovations, coconut macaroons, appear at about this time, especially in Jewish cookbooks.Here's the recipe from the first Jewish cookbook in America, Esther Levy's 1871 Jewish Cookery Book,in which the almond paste is simply replaced by grated coconut (cocoanut):

COCOANUT MACAROONS - To one grated cocoanut add its weight in sugar, and the white of oneegg, beaten to a snow; stir it well, and cook a little;then wet your hands and mould it into small oval cakes;grease a paper and lay them on; bake in a gentle oven.

In these Jewish cookbooks macaroons often appear in the Passover section.Since flour (except in the form of matzah) cannot be eatenduring Passover, macaroons are kosher for Passover.By the late 1930's or early 1940's,Alan Adler of Aron Streit Inc. tells me,Streit's began to sell coconut macaroons for the Jewish Passover market,and coconut became the best-selling macaroons for both Streit's and Manischewitz.

Streits sells coconut macaroons only at Passover time,making them (and chremsel) only the most recent in a long chain of springtime treats,preceded by the Easter marzipan lambs and simnel cakes of Europeand all the way back to the honey pastries eaten for the Persian New Year by the Zoroastrian Persians. And it's nice to know that the link with spring continues;this spring Miette's, our local confiserie in Hayes Valley, is offeringmacaron happy hour.A dollar each, from 5-7pm.Maybe I'll see you there?

Oh, I almost forgot to mention The Macarena. The song got its name fromthe eponymous region of Seville, which itself is named from the old Arabic wordfor the gate to that region of the city, Bab–al-Makrin. The gate was named fora village called Makrin or Makrina outside the gate, which was probably namedfor some landowner named Macarius, from the same Greek word makarios, μακάριος, 'blessed',that gave us the funeral gruel that is one possible source of the word macaroon.

Or possibly not. Whichever it is, I wish you all a lovely spring full of delicious treats.

Turkey

2010-11-23T12:50:00.001-08:00

I love Thanksgiving, when the rains finally begin to come to San Franciscoand it feels almost like we have seasons, and the streets are bustling with people buying ingredients for their mother's fabulous stuffing or dessert recipes,and, most important, my choirs have their winter concerts.This year I missed seeing various friends' choir concerts,making me feel almost as much a musical Scrooge as Edgar Allan Poe, who famously said:

"I never can hear a crowdof people singing and gesticulating altogether at an Italian opera without fancying myself at Athens,listening to that particular tragedy by Sophocles in which he introduces a full chorusof turkeys who set about bewailing the death of Meleager."

Poe is referring to Meleager, the lost tragedy of Sophocles,which, as you've probably assumed, didn't actually have a chorus of turkeys.This is certainly not to disparage their vocal stylings, but turkeys simply didn't make it to Europe until 1511.

What's up, then, with the name turkey? Why is a Mexican bird named for a large Eurasian democracy of the eastern Mediterranean?Why are turkeys called turkeys?English is not alone in naming this bird after random countries. The word in French is dinde, a contraction of the original d'Inde 'of India'.In Dutch it's called kalkoen, a contraction of the originalKalecutisher Han, 'hen of Calicut' (the city in India now called Kozhikode)'. India appears also in the name in Turkish (hindi) and Polish (indik) and a number of other languages.In Portuguese, it's called peru , andin Levantine Arabic it's dik habash, 'the Ethiopian bird',after two more countries.Were turkeys just named after any random country?It turns out the story of all these names is one of massive multilingal mistaken identitybetween the turkey and another bird, the guinea fowl.

Let's start with the turkey, Meleagris Gallopavo; on the right is a female.Six subspecies of wild turkeys are native to North America, as shown in the map below:Easter, Florida, Rio Grande, Merriam's, Gould's, and South Mexican.

Historic range of the wild turkey subspecies in North America, from C. F. Speller et al. PNAS 2010;107:2807-2812

The native Americans of south-central Mexico (possibly in Michoacan, or Puebla)domesticated the South Mexican turkey Meleagris gallopavo gallopavoby 180 AD (or maybe earlier; there are sporadic signs of turkey use as early as 800 BC).We don't know who the domesticators were, but they passed it on tothe Aztecs when the Aztecs moved down into this region from the north.

At roughly the same time, or perhaps a bit later, the turkey was domesticated by the Anasazi,the ancestral Pueblo people who built the cliff dwellings in the southern United States.A lovely paper this year showed thatthis domestication was independent, and likely came from a different subspecies of wild turkey.

By the 15th century, therewere vast numbers of domestic (South Mexican) turkeythroughout the Aztec world.Cortes described the streets set aside for poultry markets inTenotichtlan (Mexico City), and theFranciscan Motolinia noted that over 8,000 turkeys were sold every five days, all year round,in Tepeyac, just one of several suburban markets of the city.

The turkey plays a role in Aztec mythology, andTezcatlipoca the trickster god had amanifestation as Chalchiuhtotolin ("the jeweled turkey") shown on the right.Turkeys were similarly important to the classic Maya culture, andturkey stew was a popular dish for both Aztec and Maya cooks;below is an Aztec turkey stew being eaten with tamales from the Florentine Codex.Aztecs made turkey with several different chili sauces, andone Aztec version, totolmolli, from totolin 'turkey, turkey hen', and molli 'sauce',was a dish that probably was incorporated into the 17th or 18th centuryinvention of mole poblano de guajolote (but was of course quite different,since mole poblano is full of Old World ingredients like onion, garlic, pepper, cumin, cloves, anise, and sesame,and since the original molli did not have chocolate).The word for male turkey, huexolotl, gaverise to the modern Mexican Spanish word for turkey, guajolote.

The turkey's trip to Europe came very quickly afterthe Spanish arrived in the Americas.Columbus was given tasty gallinas de la tierra ('local chickens'), possibly turkeys,on the coast of Honduras in August of 1502. Two turkeys definitelyarrived in Spain from Hispaniola on September 30, 1512.From this point, the spread of turkeys throughout Europe wasastonishingly rapid. They were in Italy in Germany in 1530, France in 1538,England certainly by 1541 (and possibly by 1524)Denmark and Norway by 1550, and Sweden by 1556.

What did they Europeans call the turkey around 1550?They didn't call them totolín or huexolotl,or even use the Spanish galinas de la tierra or gallopavo,another early Spanish word for turkey that literally meant "chicken-peacock".Instead, the OED and early European dictionaries likethe Nomenclator of Junius tell us that turkeys were called:

English: turkey cock, cock of Inde
French: poulle d'inde, poulle d'afrique
Dutch: Calkoensche henne, Turcsche henne
German: Indianisch hun, Kalekuttisch hun, Welschhun
Italian: Gallina D'India
Portuguese: Galinha do Peru

The many references to India and Turkey actuallycome from the name of a bird that arrived earlier in Europe,the guinea fowl. A guinea fowl is a bird roughly the size of a large chicken,most commonly black covered with white pearly spots,native to many areas of sub-Saharan Africa and domesticated there.Many of the earliest uses of the word turkey that the OED lists for the sixteenthcentury are actually describing the guinea fowl,suggesting that the name "turkey hen" preceded the name "guinea hen".

(1552): Meleagrides, byrdes, whiche we doo call hennes of Genny, or Turkie hennes.
(1578): With white and blacke spots, lyke to the feathers of the Turkie or Ginny hen.

The same situation is true of theFrench "poule d'inde" ("chicken of India"):the word is used first to describe the guinea hen, and then is transfered to the turkey.

How did the guinea fowl come to be calledfirst "turkey cock" and then later "guinea fowl"?The guinea fowl first appears in 2400BC in Egyptian pyramid murals,imported by the Egyptians from Ethiopia and Sudan.In West Africa there are long oral traditions of breeding guinea fowlamong the Mandinka and the Hausa.By 400 BC the Ethiopian guinea fowl were common in Greece and called meleagrisafter the hero Meleager.Meleager was the son of Althea andOeneus, king of Calydon; perhaps you remember his story. When Althea was pregnant with Meleager, she overheard the three Fates say he would live only as long as a brand burning on her fireplace.Althea snatched the brand out of the flames, doused it, and hid it in achest. Later, after Meleager had grown up to be a great hero, he helped raise a large company of warriors,among them one woman, Atalanta, to fight a fierce boar that was ravaging the countryside. After a long chase, Meleager killed the boar and gave the spoils (the hide and the head with its tusks) to Atalanta.Meleager's two uncles, envious, and angry about the inclusion of a woman in a hunt,took them from her in a fury. In a fit of rage Meleager killed them both.His mother Althea, hearing that her son had killed her brothers,took the brand from the chest and threw it on her fire, killing her son,and then killed herself in sorrow. Meleager'sdistraught sisters, dressed in black, cried so many tears over Meleager's tomb that, in pity, Artemis turned them into birds, Meleagrides. The tears that dottedtheir black mourning clothes she turned into white spots all over their bodies.

This story is beautiful but it's more likely the name meleagrisis a corruption of melenargis 'black-silver', after its spots.Whichever it is, by the first century Italy and Greece were stocked with guinea fowl,and the Romans distributed the birds across their empire,but with the fall of the Roman Empire the guinea fowl was lost in Europe.The bird was still domesticated in west Africa and certainly in Ethiopia and Sudan,where Marco Polo saw them in the fourteenth century, andparts of Greece and Italy also seem to have preserved knowledge of the birds during the dark ages;indeed, in Italy they are still known by the old names of faraone ("Pharaoh's birds").

In the 15th century the guinea fowl began to be reintroduced to Europe.Collecting exotic animals was a hobby of Renaissance princes and the wealthy, andguinea fowl appeared in their royal parks and private menageries.In Provence in the 1460s Good King René fed his "poulles d'Inde" (India chickens) at his table,and in 1491, guinea fowl were received at Marseille for Anne de Beaujeu,the sister and regent for King Charles VIII of France.Evidence for the source of these birds come fromJacques Coeur, the fabulously wealthy French financier and trader with the Levant,whose nephew Jean de Village was sent to Alexandria in 1447 foran audience with the Mamluk sultan, and returned with galinias turcicas ('Turkish chickens').The Mamluks, an originally Turkish but by now Circassian dynasty of soldiers of originally slave origin,were still referred to in Europe as "Turkish".The Mamluk Sultanate at this point controlled Egypt, the Levant,and the Red Sea spice trade, and presumably importedguinea fowl from Ethiopia along the traditionally spice-trading routes.

So roughly by 1500, guinea fowl are an occasional exotic pet,called poule d'Inde, gelline d'Inde or galine de Turquie at least in Franceand we can hypothesize probably also in England, and so named because they came from Ethiopia('India' in the 15th century could mean Ethiopia as well as India)and were imported to Europe from Alexandria run by the Mamluk Turks.

By 1500 or shortly later, however, the trade in spices and exoticanimals through the Mamluks and the Levant was vastly disrupted by the Portuguese.The world emporium for spices at this time was the city of Calicut in Kerala, India,where black pepper from the hills of south India, andspices from the Spice Islands were sold to Muslim traders who shippedthem to the Levant via Yemen or Hormuz.In an attempt to break the Ottoman and Venetian monopolies on this trade,Portugese mariners, starting with Vasco da Gama in 1497,sailed around Africa to reach Calicut directly by sea.On the way, they establishedcolonies in the Cape Verde Islands and down the coast of west Africa, a region they called Guinea,slave-raiding and trading for ivory, gold, and, in the process, guinea fowl.Reaching Calicut in 1502, they quickly began to import spices as well.

Image of Calicut, India from Georg Braun and Frans Hogenberg's atlas Civitates orbis terrarum, 1572

From the Spanish, the Portugese also acquired turkey at this time, along with other New World products like corn and chili pepper. The Spanish origin is clear in the namethey used for turkeys, `galinha do Peru', 'Peruvian chicken'.At that time the Virreinato del Perú (the Viceroyalty of Peru) was the name for the entire Spanish Empire in South America,including modern-day Peru, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina.The Portugese most likely got turkey and corn fromthe mid-Atlantic trade islands (the Canary or Cape Verde islands)where ships stopped to provision between the Americas, Africa, and Europe;other New World products, for example pototoes, were known to have first reached Europe in this wayfrom the Canaries rather than directly from the Americas.

The trading capital of northern Europe at this time was Antwerp,a bustling commerical metropolis where Germans were bringing their copper and silver products, the English were bringing cloth. The Portuguese built factories (warehouses)and filled them with products from their three colonial territories:spices and textiles from Calicut,ivory, gold, feathers, and Guinea fowl from West Africa (Guinea), andturkey and corn from the Americas (still called "the Indies" at this point).Thus by 1550 both turkeys and guinea fowl were being brought intocentral and northern Europe by Portuguese traders.Here's one of the earliest European drawings of turkeys, fromFrench naturalist Pierre Belon in 1555:

The two birds were immediately confused, in Antwerp and throughout Europe.The English word "turkey cock" or "cocks of Inde", and the French word"poules d'Inde" were used sometimes for turkeys, sometimes for guinea fowl,for the next hundred years. Even Shakespeare sometimes got it wrong,at least once using "turkey" (1 Henry IV II.1) when he meant guinea hen.Flemish texts from 1555 cited by the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (WNT),show that the Dutch had the same confusions, as did the Portuguesethemselves; the word for turkey, galinhas do Peru ("Peru chickens")was used to describe the guinea fowl that the Portugese Jesuits saw in Ethiopia. Conrad Gesner, the Swiss naturalist whose Historiae animaliumwas the most encyclopedia zoological description of animals of its time,confused the turkey and the guinea fowl in his bird descriptions in 1555.

The confusion is understandable.Even modern guinea-fowl handbooks point out that guinea fowl are confusable "at first glance"with small modern hen turkeys, sharing "the bald head and dark plumage with white bars and dots".Turkeys were much smaller in the sixteenth century than they are now,and the different subspecies of guinea fowl coming from differentparts of Africa likely added to the confusion. And the two birds may very well have arrived on the same Portugese ships.

Another reason for the confusion was the secretive nature of the Portugese governmentat the time. Unlike the Spanish, who allowed Columbus to publicize his discoveries,the Portuguese government would allow nothing to be published about itsdiscoveries; producing a map of exploration was illegal. Perhaps related to this,or perhaps as an early attempt at branding, the word "Calicut" with its imagesof exotic India was used to describe many of the objects the Portuguese brought.In his diary of his trip to Antwerp, the German artist Albrecht Dürer describes"Calicut feathers", "weapons from Calicut", and "two ivory salt-cellars from Calicut", although some of these are clearly fromWest Africa rather than India.

In summary, the turkey acquired its name through a confusionwith the guinea fowl. Guinea fowl were re-introduced into Europe from Ethiopia through Mamluk Egypt, and one of their names was "turkey cock"or "poule d'Inde" in various languages as a result. Turkeys arrived slightly later, and were confused with guinea fowlbecause of their physical similarity, because they were brought to Europe onthe same Portuguese ships, because of the Portuguese tradersbranding everything as an Indian or "Calicut" product, and perhapsbecause of Portuguese paranoia about keeping secret the details of their overseas discoveries.The confusion is at the root of the names for the turkeyin English, French, Dutch, Levantine Arabic,while other names involving India (e.g., in Russian, Polish, Turkish) datefrom later reference to the Americas as the West Indies.

Another lesson from turkey names is the massive variation we see in each language.In German alone, Weitzenböck's 1936 survey of turkey namesincluded Truthahn, Puter, Indianisch, Janisch, Bubelhahn, Kollerhahn, Kurrhahn, Welscher Guli, Pokal, Grutte and Schruthahn, among many others.There's a folk-theory that foods (or any object) have one 'real' name,but the more common situation is vast variationin naming, particularly in the early stages of borrowing.We can see this now in English with my favorite vegetable, the recent immigrant ipomoea aquatica, which is called in local supermarketswater spinach, chinese spinach, water convolvulus, swamp cabbage, ong choi, kangkong, rau muông, and morning glory vegetable.I. aquatica is so new that we don't yet know what the final English name will be,but even the names of completely nativized foods,like pop, soda, and coke, vary by region in the United States:

Andrew Smith's The Turkey, and A. W. Schorger's The Wild Turkey are both excellent books on the turkey if you want to read more.

But first I want to conclude by considering travel in a different direction;the journey of the turkey and the guinea fowl west to the United States at the start of the 17th century.The guinea fowl's trip was a by-product of the horrific slave trade,which began in the 1440s as the Portuguese created slave-trading posts along the coast of West Africato staff their sugar plantations in Madeira and then in the New World.As slavery expanded to the Americas, slaving ships included flocks of guinea fowl as provisions.They brought guinea fowl to the Cape Verde islands and then to Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola very early, certainly by 1549. In what became the United States, slaves raised guinea fowlon small plots of land, and guinea fowl is still an important species raised by African Americans in the southern UnitedStates (and in Brazil, guinea fowl play a liturgical role in African-origin religionslike candomblé). The shipping of guinea fowls continued at least into the 1700s, when the presence of guinea fowl on Bristol slave ships is commented on in England.

The late African-American chef and food writer Edna Lewis, the granddaughter of freed slaves,talks about guinea fowl as one of the important foods she grew up with in Freetown, Virginia.In her essayWhat is Southern?in Gourmet she said:

Southern is a guinea hen, a bird of African origin. They live intrees around the house and make a big noise if strangers come around.Like any game bird, they have to be aged before cooking. They havea delicious flavor and are best when cooked in a clay pot withbutter, herbs, onions, and mushrooms.

Archaeologist Anne E. Yentsch found early archeological evidence for thisAfrican-American tradition of using clay pots, and argues that it comes fromMandinka traditions of stewing guinea fowl in earthenware pots.It's even quite possible that the fried chicken traditions of our Southderive from West African fried guinea fowl cooking methods.

Turkey also made the journey back to the United States,The turkey in England was very popular by the 1560s and was a standard roasting bird for Christmas and other feasts by 1573,when a poem celebrated:

Christmas husbandlie fare... pies of the best, ... and turkey well drest

The English colonists brought domestic turkeys to Jamestown in 1607.In 1612, Captain John Smith talks of Virginia having "wilde Turkies as bigge as our tame". Domestic turkeys were also shipped from England to the Massachusetts Bay colony from England in 1629,where colony members compared the wild turkey to "our English Turky".Thus even if the mythical Pilgram Thanksgiving had actually happened,it would certainly have been following a fine English tradition of roast turkey celebrations.

In other words, both the Africans and the English managed, despite the horrors of slavery and the terrible hardship of exile, to bring the food of their homelands to help create the cuisine of our new country.That's another beautiful myth about America, one that I still cling to:that we've created something truly extraordinary in our stone-soup America by throwing into the pot, each of us, ingredients from the fiercely-preserved traditionsthat we each brought from wherever we came from to make this place home.

Well, back to the kitchen. This year, we're making my mom's apricot strudel and Janet's mom's sticky-rice stuffing.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Ceviche and Fish & Chips

2009-11-26T15:59:00.000-08:00

You can always get a good argument going in San Franciscoby asking people for their favorite taqueria. Personally, I lean towardthe carnitas tacos (accompanied by a strawberry agua fresca) at La Taqueriaon Mission and 25th, but I'm not completely immune to the charmsof the el pastor served by the famous El Tonayense taco trucks.

But tacos aren't alone in their ability to incite the kind of fierce foodie fanaticismin San Francisco that seems in other countries to be reserved for local soccer teams.Each tamale vendor, huarache stand, and pupuseria also has their fervent backers.And lately you can start a pretty brisk discussion among my friendsby asking where to find the best ceviche, the fish or seafood marinatedin lime that'sthe national dish of Peru.Of course Peruvians have been in San Francisco since the 1850s,when what's now called Jackson Square at the southern foot of Telegraph Hillwas called Little Chile and was filled with the Chileans, Peruvians, and Sonoransdrawn by the gold rush. But lately there's been a gush of new Peruvian restaurants,making for numerous opportunities for competing ceviches (or seviches or cebiches).

What is ceviche? The Royal Spanish Academy's Diccionario de la Lengua Española tells us that cebiche is:

Plato de pescado o marisco crudo cortado en trozos pequeños y preparado en un adobo de jugo de limón o naranja agria, cebolla picada, sal y ají.
[A dish of raw fish or seafood diced and prepared in a marinade of lime or sour orange juice, diced onion, salt and chili.]

In Peru, ceviche is often made with aji amarillo (Peruvian yellow chili), andserved with corn and potatoes or sweet potatoes:

It's nice that Peru has a national dish. It's not clear that we have one herein America since, after all, what's great about Americais that everyone who came here showed up with their foodand started right in on cooking it for everyone else.So if we do have a national food, it's probably something borrowed,like ketchup, whichas I pointed out earlier comes fromChina or Vietnam. Or perhaps it's hamburgers, frankfurters, or french fries,but of course linguistically speaking the immigrant status of those three is right there intheir names (Germany, Germany, and, well, Belgium, but that's pretty close).

Now, as it happens, this Thanksgiving week I'm in London, whereinstead of fighting over tacos and ceviche,people argue about the best place for fish and chips.Here's my supper last night, from a placemy friends Matt and Anna took me to in Dalston:

Fish and chips are as authentically British as ceviche is Peruvian. But it turnsout that these "national dishes" of Britain and Peru are immigrants too, or more accurately fusion dishes.French fries, the "chips" of "fish and chips", are Belgian, and came to England only in the mid-19th century.And the "fish", deep-fried battered fish, turns out to be a cousin to ceviche;both of them, as well as some other well-known foods that'll we'll get to,are the direct descendents of the favorite dish of the Shahs of Persiamore than 1500 years ago.

The story starts in the mid-6th century in Persia.Khosrau I Anushirvan (501-579 CE) was the Shahanshah ("king of kings") of the Sassanid PersianEmpire, which stretched from present-day Armenia, Turkey, and Syria in the west, throughIran and Iraq to parts of Pakistan in the east:

This was a wonderful period of Persian civilization.The capital, Ctesiphon, on the banks of the Tigris in Mesopotamia,was perhaps the largest city in the world at the time,famous for its murals and a center of music, poetry and art.Plato and Aristotle were translated into Persian here,and chess was introduced from India. Persia was at the centerof the global economy, exporting its own pearls and textiles,and transmitting Chinese paper and silk and Indian spices to Europe.The murals are all gone now, but some of the ruins of Ctesiphon remain:

Ctesiphon is gone, but as we'll see, Khosrau's favorite food lives on.He loved a dish of sweet and sour stewed beef calledsikbāj, from sik, Persian for "vinegar", and bā "broth".Sikbāj must have been amazingly delicious, because it was a favorite ofkings and concubines for at least 300 years, and celebrated in story after story.In one story, Khosrau sponsored an early version of Iron Chef, sendingeach of his many cooks into a different kitchen toprepare their favorite dish. When it came time tocompare the dishes and choose the best one, it turned out all the chefs had made sikbāj!

A few hundred years later, the new Muslim Abbasid dynastyestablished its capital very near Ctesiphon (in a former market town called Baghdad),hiring chefs who knew how to cook sikbāj .The dish became the favorite of the new rulers, likeHarun al-Rashid (the Caliph of One Thousand and One Nights), and Harun al-Rashid's recipe and othersare given in the oldest surviving Arab cookbook,Kitāb al-Tabīkh, (The Book of Cookery),compiled by Ibn Sayyār al-Warrāq c. 950-1000 CE.Here's the recipe that al-Warrāq gives as the original Persian version eaten by Khosrau:

Meat Stew with Vinegar (sikbāj)

[Khosrau's 6th century Persian recipe as given by Al-Warruq, slightly shortened by me fromNawal Nasrallah's new translation]

Wash 4 pounds of beef, put in a pot, cover with sweet vinegar, and boil until almost done.

Then pour out the vinegar, add 4 pounds of lamb, cover again with fresh vinegar, and boil again.

Now clean and disjoint a chicken and add it to the pot,along with fresh watercress, parsley, and cilantro in equal amounts,as well as a few snips of rue and 20 citron leaves.Boil until the meat is almost cooked. Discard the greens.

Clean 4 plump chicks and add them whole to the meats in the pot. Bring to a boil.Add 3 ounces of ground coriander, 1 ounce of whole garlic cloves (threaded onto toothpicks)and cook until everything is done.

Add honey or sugar syrup (use a quarter the amount of vinegar you used),6 grams ground saffron, and 2 grams ground lovage.Stop feeding the fire and let the pot simmer until it stops bubbling.Serve.

Very quickly, sikbāj moved around the Islamic world, perhapsbecause it seems to have been a favorite dish of sailors.The story is told that Caliph al-Mutawakkil (9th century CE) wasonce sitting with his courtiers and singers on a terrace overlooking one of the canals of Baghdadwhen he smelled a delicious sikbāj stew cookingon a nearby ship. The Caliph ordered the pot to be brought to him,and enjoyed the sikbāj so much that he returned the pot to the sailor filled with money.

It's possible that it was these sailors that first started makingsikbāj with fish instead of meat.The first mention of a fish sikbāj is in The Book of the Wonders of India, a set ofstories collected by a Persian sea captain, Burzug Ibn Shahriyah,fantastical tales about the Muslim and Jewish sea-merchants that were tradingbetween the Muslim (Abbasid) Empire, India, and China.In one story set in 912 CE, a Jewish merchant, Isaac bin Yehuda,returns to Oman with a gift for the ruler: a beautiful black porcelainvase. "I have brought you a dish of sikbāj from China", said Isaac,and opened the vase to show it was full of fish made out of gold,with ruby eyes, surrounded by musk of the first quality.Perhaps these golden fish looked something like this:

This tells us that already by the 10th century sikbāj could be madeof fish. An actual recipe for these fish sikbāj come somewhat later.The first one seems to be ina medieval Egyptian cookbook in the 13th century.sikbāj now is fried fish dredged in flourand then sauced with vinegar with honey and spices:

Fish sikbāj, Egypt, 13th century

Provide yourself with some fresh fish, vinegar, honey, atraf tib [spice mix], pepper, onion, saffron, sesame oil, and flour.

Wash the fish and cut it into pieces then fry in the sesame oil after dredging in flour. When ready, take out of the pan.

Slice onion and brown it in the sesame oil.

Crush pepper and atraf tib in mortar. Dissolve the saffron in vinegar and honey and add. When sauce is ready, pour over the fish.

[Translation from Lilia Zaouali's wonderful book Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World]

The recipe continued to move westward along the Mediterranean,the name and the recipe metamorphosing as it did so.Over the next century, the word seems to cling to the cliffsand beaches along the Mediterranean as, from Sicily, it climbs north up theTyrrenian coast of Italy and then westthrough Provence in the south of French and finally to the coast of Catalunya.In Italy we see the word in the dialects from Sicilian (schibbeci),to Neapolitan (scapece), to Genoese (scabeccio).By the fourteenth century there are recipesfor scabeg, written in Occitan, the medieval language spoken in Provence,and for escabetxin Catalan, the Romance language spoken in what is now northeastern Spain and southwestern France.

In all these areas the word refers to a fried fish dish.For example, a Catalan cookbook of the early 1300s,the Book of Sent Soví (Saint Sofia),has a recipe called Si fols fer escabetx, "If you want to make escabeche",that describes fried fish made into minced fishballs and served cold with a sauce made of onions in vinegar and spices.

By contrast, aside from that one exceptional Egyptian fish recipe,Arabic cookbooks from both ends of the Muslim world in the 13th century,the Kitab al-tabikh of al-Baghdadi, from Baghdad in the eastand the Manuscrito anónimo from Andalusia (Muslim Spain) in the west,(both translated by Charles Perry),give only meat recipes for the dish.In the Muslim regions, sikbāj is still a meat stew with vinegar.

Why did sikbāj change to become a fish dish, but only (or mainly) in the Romance languages along the Mediterranean?The key difference of course is that the speakers of these languageswere Christians. Christians at the time didn't eat meat during Lent,nor on Wednesdays or Fridays,and cookbooks had separate sections full of fish recipesfor these 'fast' periods. Even as late as 1651, thefamous French cookbook of La Varenne,The French Cook,is divided into three sections: Meat recipes, Lent recipes, and `lean' recipesfor non-Lenten fast days like Fridays.

Another Christian borrowing of the sikbāj stew took a different form.In the 14th centuryArabic cookbooks and medical texts were translated into Latinand, as Italian scholar Anna Martellotti shows us,the full name al-sikbāj began to be transcribed as assicpicium.At this period medical texts often focused on the medicinalqualities of broths, andthese Latin medical texts focus on the broth of the sikbāj,which at this point was generally eaten cold. The vinegarybroth of such a cold stew broth when chilled results inwhat Charles Perry calls a "tart jelly".Assicpicium, of course, became the word aspic, still our modernword for a cold jellied broth.

If sikbāj was still a meat dish in Muslim Andalusia in the 13th century,when did Spanish adopt the dish of fried fish in vinegar and onions,and the word escabeche to describe it?They borrowed it after the Reconquista from Catalan. The word seems to have first occurred in Spanishin 1525, when another Catalan cookbook, Master Robert's Llibre del coc,was translated into Spanish. This cookbook was the source of many new Spanish terms borrowed fromCatalan, as Marta Sabater's dissertation shows, particularly seafood and other gastronomic terms,and I think the new Spanish word escabeche was probably one of them.Thus escabeche came to Spanish from Catalan, which acquired it from its neighbor,Occitan, who got it from the Genoese, who stole it from the Neapolitans, and so on, back eventually east to the Arabic of Baghdadand the Persian of Ctesiphon.

Modern escabeche is a popular food throughout Spanish, Latin America,and the Phillipines. Fish (or chicken or or vegetables like carrots) is fried and thensoaked in vinegar with onions, bay leaves, salt, and so on.

Once it arrived in Spain, sikbāj moved rapidly to the new world.In 1532-3, Francisco Pizarro González,the Spanish conquistador from Estramedura in Spain, led the army that conquered Peru.Peru and its neighboring regions are the home of many foods (like potatoes)but the indigenous coastal groups like the Moche lived off fish and molluscs such as snails.The Mexican Gutíerrez de Santa Clara (1522-1603), one of Pizzaro's soldiers, reportedthat:

"los indios desta costa pescan (...) y todo el pescado que toman en el río,o en la mar, se lo comen crudo..."
[the coastal Indians fish... and all the fishthey take from the river or the sea, they eat them raw.]

Local lore in Peru suggests that the Moche flavored this raw fish with chile.Modern ceviche (fish, lime juice, onions, chile, salt) is thus probablya mestizo dish that incorporates chile and raw fish from the Moche's tradition,and onions and limes from the Spanish escabeche.Most scholars (such as Peruvian historian Juan José Vegaand the Royal Spanish Academy's Diccionario de la Lengua Española )believe that the word ceviche thus derives from a shorteningof escabeche, although we may never know for sure -- the worddoesn't appear in writing until almost 300 years later in an 1820 song,spelled sebiche.

Where did the citrus come from? Citrus fruits (limes, lemons, sour oranges)were brought to the New World by the Spanish, as well.While modern escabeche uses vinegar rather than citrus, earlier recipes usedeither or both, as we can see from the definition in an early Spanish dictionary, the1732 edition of the Real Academia Española's "Diccionario de la lengua castellana":

Escabeche. A kind of sauce and marinade, made with white wine or vinegar, bay leaves, cut lemons, and other ingredients, for preserving fish and other delicacies.

Something else happened at the same time as the Spanish conquistadors departure for the New World:Spain and Portugal expelled its Jews. These Sephardic Jewsleft Portugal and Spain, many of them settling in Holland.Within the next century, England had rescinded its own ban on Jews,and many of these Sephardim emigrated there in the 17th and 18th century.There they brought escabeche and its close relative,pescado frito, a similar dish of fried fish eaten coldwith vinegar, but in which the fish was battered before being fried.

Culinary history and Arabic scholar Charles Perry points out that the origins of thispescado frito variant was calledmu'affar in Muslim Spain.By 1796, a cold battered fried fish with vinegar that seems to have combined the two dishesappeared in Britain in Hannah Glasse'sThe art of cookery, made plain and easy.She called this dish, battered and fried fish soaked in vinegar and served cold,"The Jews Way of preserving Salmon, and all Sorts of Fish":

Take either salmon, cod, or any large fish, cut off the head, wash it clean,and cut it in slices as crimped cod is,dry it very well in a cloth, then flour it, and dip it in yolks of eggs,and fry it in a great deal of oil till it is of a fine brown and well done;take it out, and lay it to drain till it is very dry and cold.... have your pickle ready, made of the best white wine vinegar;when it is quite cold pour it on your fish, and a little oil on the top; the will keep good a twelvemonth, and are to be eat cold with oil and vinegar:they will go good to the East Indies.

This final note in Glasse's recipe helps explain why this dish originated as a favorite of sailorsand why it spread so quickly up the coasts of the Mediterraean: it was made of an ingredient readily available at sea (fish) andkept well for long periods.

By the early 19th century, the Jewsbegin selling this cold fried fish in the streets of London.In Oliver Twist, first serialized in 1838, Dickenstalks of the fried-fish warehouses of London's East End:

Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its barber,its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse.It is a commercial colony of itself: the emporium of petty larceny.

In 1852, a Times of London reporter covering a story on London's Great Synagoguecomplained of being forced to pass through strange Jewish alleys" impregnated with the scents of fried fish".

The 1846 A Jewish Manual, the first Jewish cookbook in English,written by Lady Judith Cohen Montifiore,gives a similar recipe to Glasse's, anddistinguishes between Jewish fried fish and "English fried fish";the difference was that English recipes don't encase the fish in batter (it's just topped with bread crumbs)and they fry it in butter rather than oil.

Roughly the same fried fish recipe, eaten cold with vinegar, is still considered "Jewish" as late as 1855 inAlexis Soyer's Shilling cookery for the people:

By the middle 19th century, potatoes fried in drippings came to London, probably fromthe north of England. Modern fish and chips arose at the latest by 1860, as Ashkenazi Jewsbegan to move into London and integrate Sephardic foods and customs, andone of the earliest known fish and chips shopswas opened by Ashkenazi Jewish proprietor Joseph Malin, combiningthe new fried potatoes with Jewish fried fish, and serving everything warm rather than cold.

I'll leave you with a finalpiece of visual evidence; at the old-fashioned chippie that Matt and Anna took me to,you can also choose to have your fish battered in matso meal batter, from the pulverized matzos that Jewish mothers like mine stilluses as a breading. (It wasn't until my twenties that I realized that matso was not a main ingredient inother people's mothers' recipes for veal parmesan.)Here's our fried haddock from last nite, made with the slightly crumbier matso batter:

Well, I suppose I'd better sum up, sinceit's now Thanksgiving and time to turn from sikbāj to turkey (the linguistic origins of whichI'll save for another day).

It seems that it's not just melting-pot America whose favorite foods come fromsomewhere else.This family of dishes that are claimed by many nations ascultural treasures (ceviche in Peru and other countries in South America, fish and chips in Britain,escabeche in Spain, aspic in France)were invented by the (Zoroastrian) Persians, borrowed by the Muslims,adapted to fish by the Christians, brought to the New World by the Spanishand to England by the Jews.

I'd like to think that the lesson here is that we are all immigrants, that no culture is an island,that beauty is created at the confusing and painful boundaries between cultures and peoples and religions.That's the wonder and joy and innocence ofthe Thanksgiving myth that people from different and antagonistic cultures and nationsonce brought the foods of their nations and sat down to dinner together.

I guess we can only look forward to the day when the battles we fight are aboutnothing more significant than where to go for tacos.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Dessert

2009-10-06T01:16:00.000-07:00

We're all very trendy here in San Francisco, riding around on our fixed-gear bikesand raising our urban chickens and having universal health care and all.And I suppose it's good about the health care, because that might offsetanother recent SF trend: eating a whole lotta pork products.My neighborhood butcher shop Avedanos, for example, teaches a courseon Sundays called "Butchery for Adults" where you learn to break down a pig carcass.And everyone and their sister is making salumi, includingmy local Italian restaurant,where you can also get a very respectable roast suckling pig.

And speaking of bad for you, let's not forget pork desserts, like the pistachio-baconice cream served by my neighborhood ice creamery Humphry Slocombe.Which is right around the corner fromthe nearby hipster donut shop, Dynamo, whose most popular item isthe Maple Glazed Bacon Apple donut, shown on the right.

Now I'm sympathetic to the argument that it's pretty hard to make anything non-delicious outof a pork belly. Nonetheless, after trying both, I'm afraid I canrecommend neither bacon ice cream nor bacon donuts.What's delightful about donuts is how their illusion of lightness and fluffiness(when properly achieved) totally masks their true oily nature.(Who, me? Fried?). The bacon, for me, just removes the illusion, and the donutcomes crashing greasily back to earth.

To each his own dessert, I suppose. And yet I can't help but think thatthe vogue for bacon-flavored dessert is strongly related to their role asthe bad boys of the cuisine world; they violate some implicit cultural normthat says that desserts can't be meaty and savory.

What are these implicit norms? What makes something a dessert, anyhow?Clearly, dessert doesn't just mean "sweet food".If I have a donut from Dynamo on the way to the gym, that's not dessert.That's just lack of willpower. To be a dessert you have to appear after something else, something savory,i.e., be in a certain order in a structured meal.In common American English usage, the dessert is a final sweet course.The online thesaurus and dictionary WordNet gives this definition:

dessert: a dish served as the last course of a meal

The word comes from French, wheredessert is the participle of desservir, to de-serve,that is, to "remove what has been served".According to Le Grand Robert de la Langue Francaiseit was first used in France in 1539.In its original usage, dessert meant what you ate after the meal had been cleared away;fresh fruit or the kind of dried fruits and candied nuts that used to be called 'sweetmeats'.

In 1633 dessertwas still considered a foreign word in English, as we seein the following passage :

Such eating, which the French call desert, is unnaturall.

But by a hundred years later, in the 18th century, it was borrowed into bothBritish and American English.Given the American attitude toward food(something on the order of "Why eat an apple when you can eat an entire plate of ice cream and cake with chocolate syrup instead?"),you will not be shocked to know thatthe word shifted here by the end of the 18th centuryto include more substantial sweet fare like cakes, pies and ice cream.In British English, on the other hand, the wordretained this meaning of a light after-course longer than American.We can see this from the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary:

a. A course of fruit, sweetmeats, etc. served after a dinner or supper; 'the last course at an entertainment'
b. 'In the United States often used to include pies, puddings, and other sweet dishes'. Now also in British usage.

This idea of reserving sweet dishes for the end of a meal is thus a recent development.In the Middle Ages, a main course in England or France might include a dish likerabbits or beef tongue in gravy covered in sugar,or sweet meat puddings like blancmange (sweetened boiled rice and almond milk with capon or fish),and it was quite common to have custards or sweet cheesecakes in the middle of the meal.Meats and vegetables were often seasoned with ginger, rose water, and dried fruits.

Even as late as the 16th century, savory and sweet were intermingled,and a leg of mutton might be simmered with lemons, currants, and sugar, orchicken might be cooked served with sorrel, cinnamon, and sugar,as in the following recipe for "Chekyns upon soppes" (Chicken on bread with sauce)from the 1545 early Tudor cookbook, A Propre new booke of Cokery:

Chekyns upon soppes. [Chickens upon sops.]
Take sorel sauce a good quantitie / and put in Sinamon and suger / and lette it boyle / and poure it upon the soppes / then laie on the chekyns.
[Take sorrel sauce a good quantity / and put in Cinnamon and sugar / and let it boil / and pour it upon the sops / then lay on the chickens.]

Cinnamon toast with chicken and sorrel!It may be time to revive this recipe, which is reminiscent ofMorrocan bastilla,the flaky pastry dish of squab or chicken with saffron, almonds, cinnamon, and sugar.In general this use of sugar and fruits with meats, while it died out in Western Europeafter medieval and Renaissance times, still existsin Moroccan cuisine as well as in Persian, Central Asian, and even parts of Eastern European cuisine.

Not only could medieval or Renaissance meat and dish dishes be sweet, but dessertor last-course dishes could also be savory. A medieval final dessert courseoften included dishes like venison, turtledove and lark pie, or crayfish. As late as the 16th century in France,capon pies or venison could be served with the flans, fruits, and pastries of the dessert course.

How, then, did dessert develop its modern sense of purely sweet dishes?An answer comes fromculinary historian Jean-Louis Flandrin's analysis of French cookbooks over time,Arranging the Meal: A history of Table Service in France.Flandrin carefully annotated the presence of sugar in each recipe, and found thatas French cuisine develops from the 14th and to the 18th century,main courses become more and more savory rather than sweet,and sweet dishes slowly shift toward the end of the meal.

The graph below, from Flandrin's data, shows the percentage of French meat recipes, fishrecipes, and dessert recipes containing sugar.After a preliminary rise in the 15th century as sugar became morewidely available, we see a sharp drop in the use of sugar in meatand fish dishes, and a corresponding rise in sweet desserts.

Jean-Louis Flandrin's data showing the falling proportion of sugary meat dishesas desserts become sweeter.

In modern France, this segregation of sugar has become absolute.The rules of French cuisine incorporate a strict constraint on the structure of a meal:sweet foods can only be served for dessert.By contrast, in American cuisine,maple syrup can be served with bacon for breakfast,and sweet foods like cranberry sauce, apple sauce, and even candied yamsare eaten for dinner, particularly for old-fashioned meals like Thanksgiving.In other words, candied yams could not be a dish in French cuisine, not becausethey aren't delicious but because sweet foods are only served as dessert.

Yet while American meals are a bit more flexible in the placement of sugar,we clearly have constraints on the ordering of dishes.We still mainly save sweet things for dessert.And other constraints are implicit in the typical ordering of an American dinnerwhich might be represented as a sequence of dishes as follows (with parentheses indicating optional dishes):

(salad or appetizer)
main/entree
(dessert)

That is, an American dinner might consists of a main course, preceded byan optional salad or appetizer (or both), and possibly followed by dessert.

By contrast, French cuisine makes use of a cheese course before dessert,and a light green salad is often eaten after the main rather than before:

(entrée)
plat
(salade)
(fromage)
(dessert)

while Italian cuisine has a distinct course ('primo') that often consists of pasta or risotto:

(antipasto)
primo
secondo
...

Just as the structure of the French meal changed over time,the ordering of the American meal has also shifted.Americans used to eat salad later in the meal, much as the French still do.The late writer M.F.K. Fishersuggests that the modern custom of eating salad before the main course arose in California in the early 20th century.Fisher grew up in Whittier around the first World War, eating fresh lettuce salad before the meal,and writes that her "Western" custom of starting a meal with saladshocked her friends from the East Coast who all ate salad after.

Anyhow, these differences between American, French, and Italian meals,and between each cuisine at different times,illustrate that part of what defines a particular cuisine is a set of constraints on how,and in what order, a meal is made of dishes.From a structural perspective, a cuisine defines a kind of grammar or scriptof what makes up a meal.

This grammar can vary enormously from cuisine to cuisine.In Chinese cuisine, for example, a dessert course is not part of a meal,and it's not even clear to me that there is an exact translationfor the word "dessert". The common modern translation, tihm ban甜品 in Cantonese,or tian dian 甜点 in Mandarin, is most likely a kind of borrowing from the West, originally justreferring to sweet foods. The end of the meal is instead often marked by a serving of soup,or occasionally, after the table is cleared, by fresh fruit.

Of course Chinese cuisine does have sweet food, such as thelovely genre of Cantonese sweet soups known astong sui 糖水(literally "sugar waters"), which in modern times can be served as desserts,but more often act like snacks or small meals. Tong sui are sweet soups, tradionally hot but now available iced as well,which, like European medieval desserts, include savory ingredients along with the sweet.On the right is warm sweet peanut soup (花生糊) with rice dumplings (汤丸)from my local sweet soup place.Other traditional favorites include tofu curds with honey, red bean soup,tortoise jelly, and, shown below, Chinese dates with "snow frog", 雪蛤.Snow frog is the poetic name given to frog fallopian tubes,an ingredient which,you'll be happy to know, is not nearly as disgusting as it sound,mainly serving to provide a little texture.

While Chinese meals don't have the concept of a final sweet course, theydo have structure of a different sort: constraints on the constituent ingredients and their combination.A Cantonese meal, for example, consists of starch (rice, noodles, porridge)and non-starch portions (the vegetables, meat, tofu, and so on).These can be mixed together in one dish (to form chow mein, chow fen, fried rice, and so on) ora meal can use plain white rice with the non-starch served as separate dishes that each eaterserves over their own portion of rice. Describing this in English requires the awkward word "non-starch";Cantonese has a word for this, sung, 餸.The word for "grocery shopping" in Cantonese is mai song: "buying sung",(since the starch is a staple that would already be in the house).

Thus a typical Cantonese meal consists of a starch, plus a sung 餸,or, in a kind of grammatical form:

MEAL = STARCH + SUNG

To summarize, these implicit constraints on meals form a "grammar of cuisine",telling us how individual dishes are allowed to combine in agrammatical meal in Chinese or French or American cuisine.This grammar imposes structure on individual dishes as well.To stretch the linguistic metaphor a bit,we can think of dishes as 'words', and particular ingredientsor flavor elements as the 'sounds' (the "phonemes") that make up a word or dish.Just as for sounds, where every language has its own version of the universally common sound "p" or "t",some flavor elements are variants of universal flavors.

Each cuisine, for example, seems to have its own flavor element for sweet.I especially love Malaysian "gula melaka", a coconut palm sugar witha smoky, carmelized taste; here is some that was generouslysent to me by Robyn Eckhardt of the EatingAsia blog:

By contrast,the sweet taste of American food comes from refined white cane sugar or corn syrup,or, in special cases, maple syrup.Mexican cuisine uses raw piloncillo sugar, and Thai cuisine palmyra palm sugar.Chinese dishes like the snow frog with red date tong sui are sweetened withwhat's called "rock sugar" but is really a mix of honey with various raw and refined sugars.

The flavor elements for sour tend to be rice vinegars in China,tamarind in south-east Asia,lemon juice or grain vinegar in the United States, sour orange or key lime in Central America,and wine vinegars in France (hence the name vin-aigre, 'sour wine').The Yiddish souring element is crystals of citric acid called "sour salt".This is what gives the sweet and sour flavor to the cabbage stuffed with rice, beef, and tomatoesthat my father refers to as "beef in shrouds".Other universal flavor elements include salt (by now you can fillin the list yourself: sea salt, soy sauce, fish sauce, fermented shrimp paste, salted olives, and so on).

Of course not all flavor elements are universal. Sometimes a particular combination of flavorsis definitive of a cuisine, an idea that food scholar Elisabeth Rozin calls its "flavor principle".A dish made with soy sauce, rice wine, and ginger will taste Chinese; the sameingredients flavored with sour orange, garlic, and achiote will taste Yucatecan.Add instead onion, chicken fat, and white pepper, (or for baking, butter, cream cheese, and sour cream)and you've got my mother and grandmother'sYiddish recipes.

Some grammatical constraints have to do with cooking techniques rather than flavors.For example, ingredients in Chinese dishes are required to be cooked; a raw dish like a green salad violatesthe structures of the cuisine. We might say that salad is "ungrammatical" in Chinese.Although of course salad is now available in foreign restaurants(called "sa leut" in Cantonese), traditionally it would have been as bizarre in Chinato see someone munch on raw carrots or celery or bell peppersas it seems to most Americans to eat duck brains.This constraint is very strict: water cannot be consumed raw either, andis always boiled before drinking.Of course this practice arose for health reasons, and togetherwith the related and also ancient practice of drinking tea, with its antiseptic properties,presumably helped at least in part to protect China from the severityof some of the water-transmitted epidemics suffered by the West.By contrast, Americans and Europeans traditionallydrank water raw, and as a consequence until the twentieth century suffered constant epidemics of diseases like choleraspread by microbes in water.

Only in the mid-nineteenth century was itdiscovered that cholera was spread by the water-dwelling bacterium Vibrio cholerae,and municipal water supplies began to be treated.The turning point was the work ofJonathan Snow, the father of modern epidemiology, whotraced the London cholera epidemic of 1854 to water from the Broad Street pump that hadbeen infected by cholera from a nearby leaking cesspool.

Jonathan Snow's map, with black bars for each cholera death, showing the cluster of infections around the Broad Street pump at the upper left.

This cultural constraint against raw water runs very deep.Despite the fact that the municipal water inmodern Hong Kong or Taipei is treated and perfectly safe and drinkable,my friends that grew up in those very sophisticated cities still boil all their water,even keeping pitchers of pre-boiled water in the fridge.

The 'implicit cultural norms' that make us think that desserts should besweet, or that knishes should taste like chicken fat instead of butter,run just as deep. The shudder of my Hong Kong friends at the thoughtof drinking raw water, the shock of M.F.K Fisher's friends at salad occurring at the wrong place ina meal, the disgust at frog fallopian tubes or raw carrots,come from the fact that a cuisine is a richly structured cultural object, with its component flavor elements and its set of combinatory grammatical principles, a cultural object that we learn early and deeply.

I strongly suspect thatthis is what's going on with the fad for pork in dessert.Unlike the medieval combinations of sweet and savory, or the Chinese tong suiwith its tofu and honey, people delight in bacon ice cream or bacon donutsnot because this is the most delicious way to serve bacon, butbecause of the frisson it supplies, because it's non-normative, because it breaks the rules."See how wild and crazy I am", bacon donuts allow us to say, "I put meat in my dessert!".

Or perhaps I'm just an old fogey.

Anyhow, I think I'll go see if there's some salted caramel ice cream left in the freezer.

Ketchup

2009-09-02T12:48:00.000-07:00

Ketchup

Fujianese immigrants rescued from
thegrounded freighter Golden Venture.
AP Photo: used by permission

Immigration has been a hot topic on this continent for well over 300 years,although the details of our journeys vary. A century ago when my grandparents made their way to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, they came by ship; modern immigrants instead arrive by land or air.

In the 21st century, however, a new wave of immigrants to the Lower East Side hasbeen coming by ship again, from the Chinese province of Fujian.The human smuggling ship the Golden Venture, which ran aground in Queens in 1993carrying 286 Fujianese after 120 days at sea, is in the news again because ofThe Snakehead,Patrick Radden Keefe's new book on Fujianese human smuggling.Jennifer 8 Lee's The Fortune Cookie Chronicles documents how Fujianese immigrants have opened Fujianese restaurants in the Lower East Side and Chinatown,and how they spread out by Greyhound to work Chinese restaurants in small towns throughout the United States.The story of Fujianese immigrant Ming Kuang Chen, trapped for three days in a Bronx high-rise elevatorwhile delivering Chinese food, isbeing workshopped this month in New Yorkas an opera called Stuck Elevator.

But I want to talk about another immigrant from Fujianthat has received a lot less attention from the press: ketchup.

I know what you're thinking; ketchup is a sauce made from tomatoes, so how can it come from China,whose cuisine makes pretty sparse use of tomatoes?

A clue to the answer comes from a question from a precocious 7-year-old named Katie.Take a look at the following ketchup pictures:

Here's Katie's question: why is ketchup called "tomato ketchup" (or "tomato catsup"; I'll deal with thespelling issue later). Doesn't the mention of "tomatoes" seem redundant?After all, if I walk down the hill to El Amigo, my local corner bar, and order a margarita,I don't order a "tequila margarita". A margarita is made of tequila. Otherwiseit would be a daiquiri. Or a gimlet, or, God forbid, a mojito.

The answer is, of course, that the name "tomato ketchup" didn't used to be redundant.Ketchup used to be made with something other than tomatoes. The recipe for ketchuphas changed quite dramatically over time; tomatoes were only added to the recipe around 1800,and sugar even later, well after the Civil War.

Where modern ketchup is a very thick sweet and sour chutney of tomatoes,ketchup from about 1750-1850 mainly meant a thin dark sauce madeof fermented walnuts or sometimes fermented mushrooms.Mushroom ketchup is still produced by old-fashioned grocers; here's a bottle:

In the 18th century, of course, ketchup was made at home,and we still have many of the home recipes, such as a walnutketchup recipe used by Jane Austen's family. Here's the recipe,from the household bookkept by Jane's best friend Martha Lloyd while she lived with Jane and Cassandra and their motherin the brick cottage in Chawton:

Walnut Ketchup

Take green walnuts and pound them to a paste. Then put to everyhundred two quarts of vinegar with a handful of salt. Put italtogether in an earthen pan keeping it stirring for eight days. Thensqueeze through a coarse cloth and put it into a well lined saucepan,when it begins to boil skim it as long as any scum, rinse, and add toit some cloves, mace, sliced ginger, sliced nutmeg, Jamaicapeppercorns, little horse radish with a few shallots. Let this haveone boil up, then pour it into an earthen pan, and after it is coldbottle it up dividing the ingredients equal into each bottle.

But walnut or mushroom aren't the original ingredients of ketchup either.As Samuel Johnson tells us in his greatDictionary in 1755,English mushroom ketchups were just an attempt to imitate the taste of an earlier original sauce that came from Asia.

What was this Asian sauce? It's clear from the earliest English recipes that the original ketchup was fish sauce, the stinky cooking sauce callednuoc mam in Vietnam, nam pla in Thailand, patis in the Philippines,and made from salting and fermenting anchovies.An English recipe in 1736 calls for boiling down "2 quarts of strong stale beerand half a pound of anchovies", and then letting it ferment.And here's a full early recipe for ketchup from Eliza Smith's cookbook,the book mentioned in my essay on 'entrée'. Smith's cookbook,The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion,was a very popular English cookbook, first published in 1727, and in the 1742 edition the first cookbook to be published in the American colonies.

The modern story of how tomatoes became popular in the 19th century, how they were added to ketchup, how even later the recipe changed to replace fermentation by lots of vinegar and sugar to resultin a kind of sweet and sour chutney has been nicely toldin Andrew Smith's Pure Ketchup. Jeffery Steingarten's Vogue essayPlaying Ketchup, collected inThe Man Who Ate Everything,describes how he discovered and cooked some of the earliestrecipes for tomato ketchup and showed in a careful scientific test that they werequite delicious.

But we'll leave Smith and Steingarten to tell the modern part of the story.We were talking about Fujian. How did fish sauce get a Fujianesename and how did it get to England so as to make its way here to acquiretomatoes and turn into the American national condiment?

Fermented food products have a long tradition in Asia.The first fermented condiments werethick pastes made of fermented meat or fish used as a flavoring for dishes like roast suckling pig.We know this because the Chinese have a longstandinghabit of celebrating their food products in theirpoetry, and fermented sauces appear in theElegies of the Chu State (楚辞), dating from before 300 BC.The following legend about the origins of fish paste comefrom the "Important Arts for the People's Welfare" (齐民要术Qimin Yaoshu),written 544 CE.

When the Han emperor Wu-ti (-140 to -88) chased the I barbariansto the sea shore, he smelled a potent, delicious aroma, but could notsee where it came from. He sent an emissary to investigate. Afisherman revealed that the source was a ditch in which was piledlayer upon layer of fish entrails. The covering of earth could notprevent the aroma from escaping. The emperor tasted a sample ofthe product and was pleased with the flavour. This sauce then becameknown as Chu I to commemorate the fact that it was obtained whilechasing the I barbarian. It is simply a fermented paste made fromfish entrails. To make chu i: take the intestine, stomach, andbladder of the yellow fish, shark and mullet, and wash them well.Mix them with a moderate amount of salt and place them in a jar.Seal tightly and incubate in the sun. It will be ready in twentydays in summer, fifty days in spring or fall and a hundred days in winter.
from H. T. Huang. Fermentations and Food Science, the superb Volume 5 of Needham's Science and Civilization in China, page 382-3.

The methods used to ferment fish pastes were soon appliedto ferment vegetable products like beans, and indeedfermented soy beans and soy bean pastes (from which soy sauce developed)were a major trade commodity throughout the Chinese empire by the lateHan Dynasty (i.e. by 50 BCE or 100 BCE).As Chinese culinary historians Naomichi Ishige and H. T. Huang show,over the next millenium the popularity of fermented fish and meat productsdrastically declined in China while fermented soy bean products became more and more popular,presumably because soy products were cheaper to make, easier to transport, and allowed for a wider variety of possible tastes.Certainly by the Qing Dynasty (the 17th century)soy sauce and bean pastes were the standard seasonings in China, leaving fish pastes as a marginalproduct only used in some regions.

In southeast Asia, on the other hand, especially along the Mekong river,the development of fermented fish products was much more central to the cuisineand fermented bean products never took off. Fish sauces like nuoc mam wereprobably developed indigenously here and remain today the most popularcondiments. Food scholar Naomichi Ishige shows thateast Asia is roughly divided into two large condiment regions, separated by a bean/fish isogloss,with southeast Asia mainly using fermented fish and northeast Asia mainly usingfermented beans:

Thus in general, fish sauce either never really developed in China,or more likely died out, and is no longer mentioned in food histories and dictionariesby the Ming dynasty. Nonetheless, in modern timesfish sauce is manufactured and eaten in China.The regions where it is eaten can be seen in the next figure fromNaomichi Ishige, showing regions of east Asia where fish sauce is endemic:

As Ishige's figure shows, fish sauce is eaten inside China alongthe southeast coast, in Guangdong (Canton) and Fujian provinces,and seems to have been there for hundreds of years. Indeed, anthropologistE. N. Anderson notes that in Fuzhou, fish sauce is more common than soy sauce.On the right is a bottle of modern Chinese fish sauce from Chaozhou, the Southern Min speakingregion in Guangdong (Canton) province:

Since indigenous Chinese use of fish sauce had died out by this time,Huang and Ishige argue thatduring the 17th and 18th centuries fish sauce enteredChina by migration, carried byChinese sea traders from Vietnam or Cambodia up the southeastern coast of China, into Canton and Fujianprovinces and the cities of Guanggong (Canton), Chaozhou (Teochew), Xiamen (Amoy)and Fuzhou.

What was this fish sauce called? In modern Chinese, in Mandarin, it's often calledyu lu 鱼露('fish dew'), as in the bottle of Chaozhou fishsauce above. But yu lu is a modern name,and these Chinese sailors, traders, and settlers weren't speaking modern Mandarin.Many of them were speakers of Southern Min, a Chinese language (or dialect, dependingon your definition) of 46 million speakers, spoken in both Fujian and Guangdong provincesas well as in Taiwan and throughout Southeast Asia(and whose variants and subdialects are called Hokkien, Taiwanese, Teochiu,and Amoy dialect, among other names).

So what was this fish sauce called in the Southern Min dialect in the 18th century? It turns out it was called something like "ke-tchup", "ge-tchup",or "kue-chiap", depending on the dialect.Here's the entry for kôe-chiap 鲑汁from a Southern Min to English dictionarycompiled by missionaries in 1873, that givespronunciations in various Southern Min subdialects.

The word is pronounced kôe-chiap in Quanzhou (listed above as Cn.) andkê-chiap in Zhangzhou (listed above as C.), two large Hokkien-speaking cities near Xiamen (Amoy) in Fujianprovince. Those of you who speak Southern Min or Cantonese dialects will recognize the last syllableof the word, chiap or tchup, as the word for 'sauce', written 汁 and pronounced zhi in Mandarin.

A modern (1982) dictionary, Mandarin to Southern-Min, confirms our evidencefrom the missionary dictionary, telling us that the first syllable 鲑is an archaic word, pronounced "gué" in spoken Southern Min,and meaning a preserved fish.Over the years this character has changed its meaning and in modern times often means 'salmon' .

So ketchup, written 鲑汁,is an archaic word for "fish sauce" in the Zhangzhou region of the Hokkien dialect of Southern Min Chinese.

It was James Murray, the famous editor of the Oxford English Dictionary,who first figured out this etymology when he wrote theOED entry for this word in the Scriptorium in his back gardenin 1889 (thanks to OED editor Penny Silva for this fact!).Some dictionaries, alas, give an obviously incorrectetymology, claiming that ketchup derives from a hypothetical Cantonese word ke jiap, 'eggplant sauce'.Since tomatoes in Cantonese are called "foreign eggplants", the intuition is thatke jiap was somehow short for "faan ke jiap" tomato sauce. I used to hear this folk etymology from friends all the time in Hong Kong but it can't be correctsince, as we've seen, the original condiment was borrowed, togetherwith its name, hundreds of years before the tomatoes were added.

In addition to bringing fish sauce from Vietnam to southeastern China,the Hokkien traders also brought it to Indonesia. Indeed, themodern word in Indonesia for sauce is: kecap.The word is used for soy sauce, sweetened soy sauce,fish sauce, and so on. On the right is a modern bottle of Indonesian kecap manis, sweet soy sauce.

Anita van Velzen's ethnographic research shows thatuntil the 1950's, all these kinds of kecap were made only by ethnic Chinesefamilies. So kecap in Indonesian presumably started out meaning "fish sauce"and slowly generalized its meaning to "sauce in general".

How did the British acquire the word and the sauce?One possibility is that theBritish acquired kecap from the Indonesians or from the Chinesein Indonesia.Evidence for this Indonesian origin possibility is thatthe British had a trading post in Sumatra in the 1690s,and that there existsan early English recipe (from 1732), for"Ketchup, in Paste. From Bencoulin in the East Indies"i.e. from Bengkulu, on Sumatra in Indonesia.

Another possibility is that they acquired the word from the Hokkien Chinese traders and settlers that they encountered throughout southeast Asia,since in the earliest discussion of ketchup being acquired in Asia,(British merchant Charles Lockyer's 1711An account of the trade in India), Lockyertells us that the best ketchup can be gotten from Tonkin (northern Vietnam) or China:

Whether the British originally got the word from Indonesians or from Chinese,the role of the Hokkien traders is clearly significant.Lockyer reports seeing a huge number of Chinese trading ships in the 1700s in all the ports in southeast Asia, in what is now Vietnam,Cambodia, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Fujian and Canton have been the source of China's seafarers for a thousand years.It was Fujianese shipwrights who built the great treasure fleet of Chinese Admiral Zheng He in the 15th century, which is thought to be depicted in the early 17th century Chinese woodblock printshown above.It was from the Hokkien-speaking city of Quanzhou in southern Fujian that Marco Polotraveled from China to Persia.Since the Chinese communities throughout southeast Asia aredescended from settlers that arrived from these seafaring regions,and hence speak either Southern Min or Cantonese, the British may have acquiredthe word and a taste for fish sauce from them.

In summary,between about 1300 and 1800 vast numbers of Southern Minspeakers (Hokkien and Teochiu) sailed between China andSoutheast Asia, trading and settling in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Burma, and the Philippines, exactly the regions that todayuse fish sauce. The Chinese traders presumably picked up fish saucefrom mainland south-east Asia along the Mekong river where it was developed by the Vietnamese andKhmer, and spread it to China, the Philippines, and Indonesia.The British encountered these Chinese in Indonesia or elsewhere in Southeast Asia, borrowed the word ketchup,brought it home, and started right in on messing with the recipe.

But the history of ketchup has some deeper implications.Much popular history (especially in the west) talks about Chinaturning inward in 1450 during the Ming dynasty andstopping sailing. A standard economic argument is that this ban on shippingand this inward-turning of Chinese cultureled to the stagnation of China and the economic rise of the West,and only pressure from the West finallydragged Asia into the world economy in the 19th century.

Some parts of this story are true: China's inward turn did reflect repeated government bans on shippingin the Ming dynasty.But the vast amount of Chinese trade around Southeast Asiaas late as the 18th century suggests that thisaccount may be simplified.

This thesis was taken up by the lateeconomist and sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in his bookReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Frankshows that although the Chinese government banned sea trade inthe 16th and 17th centuries, Hokkien and Cantonese traders continuedto sail and trade illegally with Asia on a massive scale.In 1700 alone, 20,000 tons of goods were carried to South China by Chinese ships,while only 500 tons of goods were carried away by European ships.

Frank shows that in 1750, Asians, while less than 66% of the world population, produced80% of the world GNP, and that as late as 1800 the per capita GNP was higher in China than in Europe. In other words,the Chinese dominated the entire intra-Asia trade, in spices, raw materials,and manufactured goods, and because of this trade and Asia's superior manufacturingtechnology (manufacturing til the 19th century basicallymeant textiles and ceramics, both of which were dominated by China and India), China dominated the world economy.

Frank's facts explain why theBritish, Portuguese and Dutch were so eager to get to Asia:most of the world's trade took place only here.But Europe had no manufacturing base that was comparable to Asia'suntil 1800, and so had nothing to trade except money.What Europe did have is colonies in America that were producinggold and silver from mines, usually run by slaves.So Europe used the gold and silver from these American colonial minesto buy into the Asian economy for industrial goods like textiles and housewares, and fooditems like spices, tea, rice, soy, and, yes, ketchup.

In other words, if Frank is right, the story of ketchup is a story of globalizationand centuries of economic domination by a world superpower. But thesuperpower isn't America, and the century isn't ours. Ketchup'sorigins in the fermented sauces of China and Southeast Asiamean that those little plastic packets under the seat of your carare a direct result of Chinese and Asian domination of a single global worldeconomy for most of the last millenium.

Of course the modern global economy isn't your grandmother's or even yourmother's global economy. But it's nice to know ketchup still plays a role. Right next to all those new Fujianese restaurants in the Lower East Side, and just beneaththe tenement apartment where my mother was born, there's now a McDonalds. French fry, anyone?

Entrée

2009-08-25T13:21:00.000-07:00

Entrée

entrée, entremet: A couple of French terms which no doubt retain interest for persons attending hotel and restaurant courses conducted under the shadow of French classical traditions, but have ceased to have any real use, partly because most people cannot remember what they mean and partly because their meanings have changed over time and vary from one part of the world to another. Forget them.
Alan Davidson, Oxford Companion to Food, 1999

We might ... follow fashion in food through the revealing history of certain words which are still in use but which have changed in meaning several times: entrées, entremet, ragoûts, etc.
Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, Volume 1, 1989 page 189

Living in San Francisco means visitors, and visitors mean an excuse to wander down Bernal Hill and explore various delicious dinner options along Mission Street. Of course my friends are invariably excellent house-guests and, crucially, open-minded eaters, but they do sometimes find odd things to complain about. My British friend Paul, for example, is annoyed by the interminable questions at cafes in the US ("Single or double? Small, medium, large? For here or to go? Milk or soy? Whole milk or nonfat?"). "Just give me a bloody coffee," says Paul, who claims these coffee dialogs reflect our national obsession with personal control and choice.

Other visitors are confused by our parochial word usage. For example, the word entrée in the United States means a main course. Contrarily, as (numerous) guests have informed me, in France as well as in other English-speaking countries, the entrée means what we would call the appetizer course. Thus a French meal might consist of an entrée, the main course (the plat), and dessert, while a corresponding American meal would have appetizer, entrée, and dessert. Since the word entrée comes originally from French (and literally means 'entrance'), my guests are (ever so politely) implying that we Americans must have botched up the meaning of this word at some point.

Well, let's go find out! Anyhow, it seems appropriate to begin these notes on language and food by snooping into the history of entrées.

Just to be completely formal, here's the modern French definition in the Le Grand Robert de la Langue Francaise:

Mets qui se sert au début du repas, après le potage ou après les hors-d'œuvre.
[A dish served at the beginning of the meal, after the soup or after the hors d'oeuvres]

The two menus below, from Alain Ducasse's bistro Aux Lyonnais in Paris, and Range in San Francisco, show the French and American usages.

How did this difference in meaning develop? The word entrée first appears in France in 1555. In the 16th century, a banquet began with a course called entrée de table ("entering to/of the table") and ends with one called issue de table ("exiting the table"). Here are two menus in Middle French (explaining the archaic forms and variable spelling) from the 1555 book Livre fort excellent de cuysine tres-utile et profitable exerpted from culinary historian Jean-Louis Flandrin's excellent book Arranging the Meal: A history of Table Service in France:

Cest que fault pour faire ung banquet ou nopces après pasques
[What you need for a banquet or wedding after Easter:]

Bon pain. Bon vin. Entrée de table. Potages. Rost. Second rost. Tiers service de rost. Issue de table.
[Bread. Wine. Table Entree. Soups. Roast. Second Roast. Third roast service. Table Exit.]

Bon pain. Bon vin. Entrée de table. Aultre entrée de table pour yver. Potaiges. Rost. Issue de tables.
[Bread. Wine. Table Entree. Another table entree for winter. Soups. Roast. Table Exit.]

As these menus show, the entrée is the first course of the meal, there can be multiple entrées, and after the entrée comes the soup, one or more roasts, and then a final course.

Over the next hundred years, this sequence began to shift slightly, with the most significant change being that by 1650 the soup was the first course, followed by the entrée.

Let's look at Le cuisinier françois, the famous 1651 cookbook that helped introduce modern French cuisine, to see what the word entrée meant at this time. An entrée was a hot meat dish, distinguished from the roast course. The roast course was a spit roast, usually of fowl or rabbit, while the entree was a more complicated 'made dish' of meat, often with a sauce, and something requiring some effort in the kitchen. The cookbook, recently translated as The French Cook, gives such lovely entrees as Ducks in Ragout, Sausages of Partridge White-Meat, a Daube of a Leg of Mutton, and Fricaseed Chicken. An entrée was not cold, nor was it composed of vegetables or eggs. (Dishes that were cold, or composed of vegetable, or eggs were called entremets, but that's a story for another day). So the entrée in 1651 is a hot meat course eaten after the soup and before the roast.

By a hundred years later, in the 18th century, the French, English (and colonial American) banquet meal had standardized in a tradition called à la Française or sometimes à l'Anglaise. Meals were often in two courses, each course consisting of an entire table-full of food. All the dishes were laid out on the table, with the most important dishes in the middle and the soup or fish perhaps at the head of the table, entrees scattered about, and the smallest courses (the hors d'oeuvres) placed around the edges (i.e., "outside" of the main stuff).

After the soup was eaten, it was taken away, and it was replaced on the table by another dish, called the relevé in French or the remove in English. A remove might be a fish, a joint, or a dish of veal. The other dishes (the entrees and entremets) stayed on the table. Sometimes a fish course was itself removed, just like the soup. Then the joint might be carved while the entrees and hors d'oeuvres were passed around. After this first course was completed, the dishes would all be cleared away and a second course of dishes would be brought in, based around the roast, usually hare or various fowl such as turkey, partridge, or chicken, together with other dishes.

Here's a map of how the dishes were laid on the table in the two courses à la Française from the first cookbook published in the American colonies, Eliza Smith's very popular English cookbook, The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplished Gentlewoman's Companion, first published in 1727 in England, and published in the American colonies in the 1742 edition.

Note the "soop", with the Breast of Veal Ragout remove, and the entrées like Leg of Lamb, 2 Carp Stew'd, and A Pig Roasted. Recall that the classic French roast course consisted of roast fowl; that would be the 4 Partridges and 2 Quails in the second course; roast beef and pork were served in the first course as entrées or removes. Also note that at this point, the word entrée was not yet used in English; at least it's not mentioned in Eliza Smith, and the first usage listed in the Oxford English Dictionary seems to be 10 or 20 years later, in William Verral's 1759 A complete system of cookery, where it is marked in italics as a newly-borrowed foreign word.

The next change in the ordering of meals was another hundred years later, in the 19th century, to a method known as service à la Russe, significantly closer to modern coursed dinners. Instead of the food being all piled on the table to get cold, dishes are brought in one course at a time on plates served directly to the guests. Thus, for example, meat is carved at the sideboard or the kitchen by servants rather than by the host at the table. Since the table was no longer covered in food, it was decorated with flowers and so on. And since the guests couldn't know what food they were going to eat just by looking at the table, a small list of dishes (the "menu") was placed by each setting. This service à la Russe took over in France in the 19th century; in England and the US the custom shifted roughly between 1850 and 1890. (Note that although modern meals are served in serial courses à la Russe, the old-fashioned method of putting all the food on the table at once and having the host carve at the table is still commonly practiced even in the US for very traditional meals like Thanksgving dinner.)

At this point (meaning the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th), the order of a traditional meal was something like the following:

soup
fish (possibly followed by a remove)
entree
break (sherbet or rum or absinthe)
roast
possible other courses (salads, etc)
dessert

The word entrée maintained this meaning of a substantial meat course served after the soup/fish and before the roast in Britain, France, and America until well after the first World War. Here are some menus from 1883 (Delmonicos in New York) and 1909 (the Hotel Washington in Seattle) showing this formal meaning; note that these still show a separate relevé (remove) course.

By the 1930s, the word seems to be in transition. In a number of US menus from this period, the word is still used in its classic sense as a substantial 'made' meat dish distinguished from roasts, but by now sometimes the term includes fish, and has lost the sense of a course in a particular order. Here is a typical such menu from the Home of the Green Apple Pie restaurant in Seattle in 1937. Note that there are still distinct sections for Entrees and Roasts but some of the entrees are seafood.

By the 1950s, as separate roast and fish courses dropped out of common usage, the word entrée seems to no longer be distinguished from roasts or fish, leaving it to mean the main course, as in this menu from the Chrystal Tea Room in the Seattle Bon Marche:

The result is thus a three-course meal consisting of appetizer, entrée, and dessert. What about the French usage? The French use of the word entrée in Escoffier's 1921 Le Guide Culinaire was still the traditional one ('made' hot meat dishes served in the classic sequence before a roast). Escoffier classifies as entrées almost any dish that we would now consider a main course: steaks (entrecotes or filet de boeuf, tournedos), cassoulet, lamb or veal cutlets, ham, sausage, braised leg of lamb (gigot), stews or sautes of chicken, pigeon or turkey, braised goose, foie gras. Escoffier has over 500 pages of entrée recipes. Only roast fowl, and small game animals are classified as roasts, in a small 14 page roast section.

Thus for French, the change from the classic usage of a central heavy meat dish to the modern French usage of a light first course must have come after 1921. But the meaning of entrée must have changed by 1962, by which point the recipes Julia Child gives for entrées are light dishes, mainly quiches, soufflees, and quennelles, and we see similar light dishes listed as typical entrées in the modern Larousse Gastronomique, the French culinary encyclopedia.

A clue comes from an older edition of the Larousse Gastronomique. The 1938 edition defines entrée as follows:

Ce mot ne signifie pas du tout, comme bien des personnes semblent le croire, le premier plat d'un menu. L'entrée est le mets qui suit, dan l'ordonnance d'un repas, le plat qui est désigneé sous le nom de relevé, plat qui, lui-même, est servi après le poisson (ou le mets en tenant lieu) et qui, par conséquent, vient en troisième ligne sur le menu. [This word does not mean, as many seem to believe, the first dish in a meal. In the ordering of a meal, the entree is the dish that follows the relevé, the dish served after the fish (or after the dish that takes the place of the fish) and, therefore, comes third in the meal.]

What we have here is a "language maven" complaining about a change in progress: Aux armes! The French masses are using the word entrée incorrectly! Language mavens have probably been around pretty much since there were two speakers to complain about the vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar of a third. They can be very useful for historical linguists, because grammar writers don't complain about a change in the language until it's basically already happened, at least by a sufficiently large number of speakers. So we can be pretty certain that in popular usage, entrée mostly meant "first course" in French by 1938.

In summary, the word entrée originally (in 1555) meant the opening course of a meal, one consisting of substantial hot 'made' meat dishes, usually with a sauce, then evolved to mean the same kind of dishes, but served as a third course after a soup and a fish, and before a roast fowl course. American usage kept this sense of a substantial meat course, and as distinct roast and fish courses dropped away from popular usage, the meaning of entree in American English was no longer opposed to fish or roast dishes, leaving the entree as the single main course.

In French, the word changed its meaning by the 1930s to mean a light course of eggs or seafood, essentially taking on much the meaning of earlier terms like hors d'oeuvres or entremets. The change was presumably helped along by the fact that the literal French meaning ("entering, entrance") was still transparent to French speakers, and perhaps as more speakers began to eat multi-course meals the word attached itself more readily to a first or entering course. So both French and American English retain some aspects of the original meaning of the word; French the "first course" aspect of the meaning (which had actually died out by 1651) and American the "main meat course" aspect.

Postscript:

With the rise in the popularity and status of ethnic food and the simultaneous decline of the social prestige of French cooking in the United States, I thought I had better check whether the word entrée is still used. I checked the 40 or so (mainly Asian or Central or South American) restaurants in my neighborhood: the word entree was hardly used (appearing on less than 10% of the menus). This suggests that the word is mainly only used for American food of European origin, or perhaps only upscale restaurants. To test this hypothesis, I selected 25 upscale restaurants serving European American cuisine returned from the Google query ("San Francisco restaurants"). The following table shows how the main course was referred to on their dinner menus. In summary, entree is indeed the most popular way to refer to the main course in upscale European American restaurants, but is generally not used on other ethnic menus.