by Dan Jurafsky
THE
LANGUAGE
OF FOOD
A Linguist Reads the Menu
Dan Jurafsky
W. W. NORTON & COMPANY
New York • London
For Janet
Contents
Introduction
1How to Read a Menu
2Entrée
3From Sikbj to Fish and Chips
4Ketchup, Cocktails, and Pirates
5A Toast to Toast
6Who Are You Calling a Turkey?
7Sex, Drugs, and Sushi Rolls
8Potato Chips and the Nature of the Self
9Salad, Salsa, and the Flour of Chivalry
10Macaroon, Macaron, Macaroni
11Sherbet, Fireworks, and Mint Juleps
12Does This Name Make Me Sound Fat? Why Ice Cream and Crackers Have Different Names
13Why the Chinese Don’t Have Dessert
Epilogue
Notes
References
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Index
THE LANGUAGE
OF FOOD
Introduction
THIS BOOK BEGAN WITH two questions. The first came from Katie, the very observant seven-year-old daughter of my old friends Jim and Linda. Katie asked why the label of a ketchup bottle read “tomato ketchup.” (Go look: most of them do.) Isn’t that redundant, she asked? It was a sensible question. After all, if I go into a bar and order a margarita, I don’t order a “tequila margarita.” A margarita is made of tequila. (Otherwise, it would be a daiquiri. Or a gimlet. Or even, God forbid, a cosmopolitan.) The tequila is understood.
So why do we mention the tomatoes in ketchup?
The second question came from Shirley, a friend from Hong Kong. Back when I was a young linguist studying Cantonese there, everyone assured me that the word ketchup came from Chinese—the second part of ketchup, tchup, is identical to the word for “sauce” in Cantonese, and the first part, ke, is part of the Cantonese word for “tomato.” Shirley was so convinced that ketchup was a Chinese word that when she went to a McDonald’s in the United States she confused her friends by asking what the English word for ke-tchup was. But how could ketchup be Chinese?
It turns out Katie’s question and Shirley’s question have the same answer. The ketchup we eat today is nothing like the original version created many centuries ago. Few people today would recognize the link with the original ke-tchup, a Chinese fermented fish sauce first made in Fujian province (an area that also gave us the word tea). From the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Chinese traders settled in ports throughout Southeast Asia and brought Chinese fermentation methods. They fermented local fish into ke-tchup—a fish sauce like the modern Vietnamese fish sauce nuoc mam—they fermented soybeans into soy sauce, and they fermented rice with a red ferment, molasses, and palm sugar and distilled it into an ancestor of rum called arrack. Arrack was the first widely produced liquor, long before rum or gin had been invented, so when English and Dutch sailors and merchants came to Asia around 1650 to trade for silk, porcelain, and tea, they bought vast quantities of arrack and used it to invent the world’s first cocktail (“punch”) for their navies. (And punch led eventually to modern cocktails like daiquiris and gimlets and margaritas.). Along the way, they also acquired a taste for the pungent fish sauce.
The traders brought ke-tchup back to Europe and over the next 400 years this dish evolved to fit Western tastes, losing its original ingredient, the fermented fish. Early recipes replaced the fish with English mushroom or, as in Jane Austen’s household, walnuts. By the nineteenth century in England, there were many recipes for ketchup; eventually the most popular one added tomatoes and then came to America where it acquired sugar. Then it acquired even more sugar. This version eventually became America’s national condiment, and was then exported to Hong Kong and the rest of the world.
The story of ketchup is a fascinating window onto the great meetings of East and West that created foods we eat every day, telling us how sailors and merchants spent a thousand years melding the food preferences of the West and the East to form our modern cuisines. But this great process produced more than just ketchup, as we can tell from linguistic evidence scattered through modern languages. Fish and chips, England’s national dish, began with Persian sikbj, a sweet-and-sour stew with vinegar and onions loved by the Shahs of sixth-century Persia. The dish leaves its marks in the names descended from sikbj in different languages—French dishes like aspic, Spanish dishes like escabeche, or Peruvian dishes like ceviche—and the story moves from the golden palaces of medieval Baghdad to the wooden ships of Mediterranean sailors, from the religious fasts of medieval Christians to the cold Sabbath fish of the Jews who left Spain in 1492.
Macaroons, macarons, and macaroni all descend from one sweet doughy predecessor, when a Persian food, the almond pastry called lauznaj, intermingled with the pastas of the Arab world and the durum wheat that the Romans had planted in Sicily, the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
We’ll look at the answers to questions of science, politics, and culture. Who came up with the idea of putting cream or juice into a bucket surrounded by salt and ice to make sorbet or ice cream, and how does it relate to the patent medicinal syrups that became our modern Cokes and Pepsis? The answers lie in the adventures of the words sherbet, sorbet, and syrup, and their descent from an Arabic word meaning drink or syrup.
Why is the turkey, a bird native to Mexico, named for a Muslim democracy of the eastern Mediterranean? It has to do with the fanatic secrecy of the Portuguese in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whose attempt to keep other countries from finding their overseas sources of gold and spices and exotic birds led to the confusion of the turkey with an entirely different bird that was imported by the Mamluks.
Why do we give toasts at weddings? It is not related to the custom of toaster ovens as wedding presents, but the two do share a surprising history involving toasted bread.
Why do we fancy something sweet at the end of a meal—so much so that we have influenced Chinese restaurants in the United States to offer one when their own culture didn’t even have a word for “dessert,” let alone a fortune cookie? We’ll see the history of dessert (rooted in Andalusia, Baghdad, and Persia), and we’ll introduce the grammar of cuisine, the idea that eating sweets at the end of a meal (rather than, say, the beginning) is rooted in the implicit structures that define each modern cuisine in the same way grammar rules help define a language.
The language of food helps us understand the interconnectedness of civilizations and the vast globalization that happened, not recently, as we might think, but centuries or millennia ago, all brought together by the most basic human pursuit: finding something good to eat. You might call this aspect of the book “EATymology.” But the language of food isn’t just an etymological clue to the past. The words we use to talk about food are also a code that we can decipher to better understand the present.
In our lab at Stanford, we use linguistic tools to study online or digital texts of all kinds, with the goal of better understanding the human condition. We’ve studied recordings of speed dates to uncover the subconscious linguistic signs of a date going well or badly, showing that the advice from dating manuals is completely backward. We’ve tested pages on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia to uncover the subtle linguistic cues to an author’s covert biases. We’ve used linguistic theories of politeness to automatically measure how polite different people are on the web, and show that, sadly, the more power and status people achieve, the less polite they become.
Throughout this book I’ll apply these computational linguis
tic tools to the study of food, drawing on rich datasets now available due to the rise of the Internet and examining millions of online restaurant reviews, thousands of online menus, the linguistics of food advertising and food brands.
I’ll use these tools and others from the intersection of linguistics and economics to uncover subtle linguistic cues hidden in the language of today’s food advertisers, showing surprising ways that you are being targeted every time you read a menu or even look at the text on the back of a package of potato chips. You will even see how linguistic cues can predict the price of individual dishes on a menu, based not only on the words that appear but also on those purposely omitted.
The language of food also tells us about human psychology, who we are, from the nature of our perception and emotions to the social psychology of our attitudes toward others. By using software to investigate millions of online reviews of restaurants or beers, we discover evidence for the Pollyanna effect: a claim from psychology that human nature strongly tends toward the positive and optimistic. Hence our comparisons of good food to, say, sexual pleasure. We’ll also look at how people talk about restaurants they really hate, the scathing 1-star reviews, discovering what people are most traumatized by, and we’ll see that it’s all about our connection to others.
Finally, we’ll talk about health. Why were flour and flower once the same word and what does that suggest about our unhealthy obsession with refined food? What does the fact that salad, salami, salsa, sauce, and soused all originally meant the same thing tell us about the difficulty of reducing the sodium in our diets?
Like the incriminating evidence in Poe’s Purloined Letter, the answers to each of these questions is hidden in plain sight in the words we use to talk about food.
The structure of the book follows the meal, starting with menus and then the fish course, replete with sailors and pirates, followed by a break for the punch course and toast that traditionally preceded the roast in formal dinners, then the roast itself, a brief interlude to talk about snacks and craving before finishing with dessert. (But the chapters can also be read independently in any order. My mom, whose love of consensus is legendary in our family, only read every other chapter of War and Peace, so we like to say she just read Tolstoy’s Peace.)
All innovation happens at interstices. Great food is no exception, created at the intersection of cultures as each one modifies and enhances what is borrowed from its neighbors. The language of food is a window onto these “between” places, the ancient clash of civilizations, the modern clash of culture, the covert clues to human cognition, society, and evolution. Every time you roast a turkey for Thanksgiving, toast the bride and groom at a wedding, or decide what potato chips or ice cream to buy, you are having a conversation in the language of food.
San Francisco, California
April 2014
One
How to Read a Menu
SAN FRANCISCO’S MOST EXPENSIVE restaurant won’t give you a menu. Well, that’s not strictly true. The attentive staff will happily offer you a beautifully printed list of dishes (“trout roe, sea urchin, cardoon, brassicas . . .”)—by email, after you get home, as a souvenir. Saison, this marvelous Michelin-starred restaurant, isn’t alone. Expensive restaurants everywhere increasingly offer “blind” tasting menus in which you don’t know what you’re going to eat in each course until the plate is set down on your table. When it comes to high-status restaurants, it seems that the more you pay, the less choice you have.
Status used to be expressed a different way. If you ate out in the 1970s I’m sure you dined at one of those establishments that writer Calvin Trillin called La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine. Trillin, an early supporter of local and ethnic eating, mocked pretentious restaurants whose menus were as macaronic a mishmash of French and English as their names (macaronic: from a sixteenth-century verse style mixing Latin with Italian dialect originally named, as we’ll see, after macaroni). Trillin complained of being led to a “purple palace that serves ‘Continental cuisine’ and has as its chief creative employee a menu-writer rather than a chef.”
Menu writing manuals of the day advised restaurants to “continentalize your menu,” and indeed they did, as we see from these examples, with French words mixed in randomly with English or Italian words; sometimes even just the French article “Le” with an otherwise English sentence:
Flaming Coffee Diablo, Prepared en Vue of Guest
Ravioli parmigiana, en casserole
Le Crabmeat Cocktail
Menus full of macaronic French weren’t just a fad. Through the wonder of the Internet, we can go back in time more than a century in the New York Public Library’s online menu collection (donated by Miss Frank E. Buttolph [1850–1924], a “tiny, unostentatious, literary-looking lady” with an obsession for menus). The 10,000 menus start with the Astor House’s breakfast menu for the Ladies Ordinary meeting of August 25, 1843 (clam soup, boiled cod, mutton cutlets “sauté, with champignons,” calf’s head, chicken pies, mashed potatoes, beets, squash, roast beef, lamb, snipe, squab, goose, and in case anyone was still hungry, blackberry pie, cream pie, peach ices, and macarons for dessert; we’ll come back to those macarons. Menus from the early 1900s are full of interwoven bits of French, especially those from expensive and upper-middle-priced restaurants, which use it five times more than cheap restaurants:
Flounder sur le plat
Eggs au beurre noir
Fried chicken a la Maryland half
Green turtle a l’anglaise
Sirloin steak aux champignons
We’re not in the 1970s any more (let alone the 1870s), and now this kind of fake French just seems amusing to us. But status and social class never really go away; modern expensive restaurants still have ways of signaling that they are high-status, fancy places, or aspire to be. In fact, every time you read a description of a dish on a menu you are looking at all sorts of latent linguistic clues, clues about how we think about wealth and social class, how our society views our food, even clues about all sorts of things that restaurant marketers might not want us to know.
What are the modern indicators of an expensive, high-class restaurant? Perhaps you’ll recognize the marketing techniques in the descriptions of these three dishes from pricey places:
HERB ROASTED ELYSIAN FIELDS FARMS LAMB
Eggplant Porridge, Cherry Peppers,
Greenmarket Cucumbers and Pine Nut Jus
GRASS FED ANGUS BEEF CARPACCIO
Pan Roasted King Trumpet Mushrooms
Dirty Girl Farm Romano Bean Tempura
Persillade, Extra Virgin Olive Oil
BISON BURGER
8 oz. blue star farms, grass fed & pasture raised,
melted gorgonzola, grilled vegetables
You probably noticed the extraordinary attention the menu writers paid to the origins of the food, mentioning the names of farms (“Elysian Fields,” “Dirty Girl,” “blue star”), giving us images of the ranch (“grass fed,” “pasture raised”), and alluding to the farmer’s market (“Greenmarket Cucumbers”).
And menu writers aren’t the only ones to get carried away. In the first episode of the show Portlandia Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, obsessive locavores, question the provenance of the chicken at a restaurant. The waitress tries to reassure them that the chicken is “a heritage breed, woodland raised chicken that has been fed a diet of sheep’s milk, soy, and hazelnuts.” Armisen and Brownstein, still unsatisfied (“The hazelnuts, these are local?”) head out to visit the farm where the chicken was raised just to make sure.
I suppose linguists can be annoying dinner companions as well. All that reading of words on menus does tend to slow down dinner ordering. And yet studying menus one by one, while good for inspiration, is generally not sufficient for uncovering the subtle differences. For that you need larger amounts of data.
Luckily, these days restaurants digitize their menus and put them online, making it possible to look at a huge number of menus, and hen
ce test hypotheses about restaurant language and price while controlling for the geographic location, the type of cuisine, and so on.
To find out how widespread this locavore trend really is, and to see what other subtle cues restaurant menus are hiding, I conducted a study with Victor Chahuneau, Noah Smith, and Bryan Routledge from Carnegie Mellon University. We used a very large dataset consisting of 6500 modern menus (describing a total of 650,000 dishes) culled from the web, covering restaurants in seven cities (New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, San Francisco, Los Angeles). This allowed us to control for the city, the neighborhood, the type of cuisine, and many other factors that economists control for when studying restaurant price (such as being on a main street versus a side street, a factor I learned from economist Tyler Cowen’s An Economist Gets Lunch).
We then wrote software to count the number of references to farms, ranches, pastures, woodlands, gardens, farmer’s markets, heritage pork, or heirloom tomatoes that occur on the menus of restaurants of different price classes—from cheap one-dollar-sign restaurants [$] to expensive four-dollar-sign restaurants [$$$$]. Across this very large dataset, very expensive ($$$$) restaurants mention the origins of the food more than 15 times as often as inexpensive restaurants! This obsession with provenance is a strong indicator that you are in an expensive, fancy restaurant. (Or that you are purchasing an expensive package of junk food, marketed with the exact same strategies, as we’ll see.)
