The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu

by Dan Jurafsky

  What about the use of entrée now? One of the advantages of the narrow houses and dense neighborhoods of San Francisco is that the restaurants are all very close by, so a short walk down to Mission Street quickly answers that question. I checked all the menus of the 50 restaurants within a few blocks of us (Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Peruvian, Japanese, Indian, Salvadoran, Cambodian, Sardinian, Nepalese, Italian, Jordanian, Lebanese, barbecue, southern, plus the pairwise combinations like Chinese Peruvian roast chicken, Japanese French bakeries, and Indian pizza). The word entrée was used only at five restaurants. Not surprisingly these serve mainly European American rather than Asian or Latin American food.

  The vast increase in the number of ethnic restaurants and the fading of French words like entrée as a marker of social prestige in the United States are part of a general trend in food, music, and art that sociologists call cultural omnivorousness. Previously high culture was defined solely by a limited number of “legitimate” genres: classical music or opera, or French haute cuisine or wine. The modern high-culture omnivore, however, can be a fan of 1920s blues, or 1950s Cuban mambo, or the ethnic or regional foods championed by writers like Calvin Trillin. High status is signaled now not just by knowing fancy French terms, but also by being able to name all the different kinds of Italian pasta, or appreciating the most authentic ethnic cuisine, or knowing just where to find the best kind of fish sauce. Even potato chips are advertised by appealing to this desire to be authentic.

  Omnivorousness explains the decline, detailed in the previous chapter, of the use of pseudo-French as a modern marker of status on menus. And omnivorousness is perhaps one reason we are seeing the decline of the word entrée in menus and in books and magazines as well. The Google Ngram corpus, a very useful online resource that counts the frequency of words over time in books, magazines, and newspapers, demonstrates entrée’s rise in the 1970s and 1980s and then the fall since 1996:

  If entrée is declining in use, what is it being replaced by? Some menus use “main course,” Italian restaurants often use “secondi,” and French restaurants might use “plat.” But the most frequent answer in new restaurants is, Nothing; appetizers and entrées are listed without a label at all, and diners have to figure it out, like the less-is-more implicitness we saw in menus. In the highest-status restaurants, whether the food is an appetizer or entrée portion, how crispy or fluffy it is, or even exactly what you are going to be served can literally go without saying.

  Entrée has more to tell us than Alan Davidson guessed: it concisely encapsulates an entire history of culinary status, from the structure of fabulous Renaissance meals, to the early role of French as a signal of high status, to the more recent decline of French as the sole language of culinary prestige, replaced by omnivorousness and by more tacit signals of status.

  The high status of French isn’t completely gone, however; Paul and I automatically assumed the French meaning was the “correct” one even though it’s actually the American borrowing that retained entrée’s Renaissance sense of a hearty meat course.

  In the next chapter we’ll turn to a word whose change in meaning reflects an even larger social transformation, while still retaining aspects of its meaning that are thousands of years old.

  Three

  From Sikbj to Fish and Chips

  SINCE THE DAYS WHEN the native Ohlone people, who caught and ate the bounty of oysters and abalone and crab that thrived throughout the bay, San Francisco has been a good place for seafood. The first restaurants here were mainly Chinese, serving fish caught by the redwood fishing sampans that set out from the Chinese fishing villages on the beach south of Rincon Hill. Tadich Grill (founded by Croatian immigrants in 1848) has been using Croatian methods of mesquite-grilling fish since the early twentieth century, the Old Clam House has served clam chowder at the foot of Bernal Hill since 1861 when it was still waterfront property with a plank road to downtown, and Dungeness crab has been in demand for San Francisco Italian Thanksgivings and Christmas Eve cioppinos since the nineteenth century.

  And then there’s ceviche (or seviche or cebiche), the tangy fish or seafood marinated in lime and onion that’s the official national dish of Peru, a gift to San Francisco from the Peruvians who also brought the Pisco that made Pisco punch. Peruvians have been in San Francisco since the 1850s, when what’s now called Jackson Square at the southern foot of Telegraph Hill was called Little Chile and was filled with the Chileans, Peruvians, and Sonorans drawn by the gold rush. This was before the transcontinental railway was built, so ships from Valparaiso and Lima brought the earliest men to the gold fields. Chilean and Peruvian miners introduced techniques like dry digging and the “chili mill” that they had learned in the great silver mines of the Andes, the mines that produced the Spanish silver dollar or “piece of eight” that was the first world currency. Now San Francisco has so many cevicherias that I have found myself in many a pleasant debate about which is best, from cozy gems in the neighborhoods to bright whitewashed dining rooms overlooking the water.

  What is ceviche? The Royal Spanish Academy’s Diccionario de la lengua española defines cebiche as:

  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 chile.]

  In Peru, ceviche is often made with aji amarillo (Peruvian yellow chile), and served with corn and potatoes or sweet potatoes.

  Ceviche turns out to have a historical link to the seafood dishes of many nations, from fish and chips in Britain to tempura in Japan to escabeche in Spain. All of them, as well as some others that we’ll get to, turn out to be immigrants themselves, and descend directly from the favorite dish of the Shahs of Persia more than 1500 years ago.

  The story starts in the mid-sixth century in Persia. Khosrau I Anushirvan (501–579 CE) was the Shahanshah (“king of kings”) of the Sassanid Persian empire, which stretched from present-day Armenia, Turkey, and Syria in the west, through Iran and Iraq to parts of Pakistan in the east. This was an extraordinary period of Persian civilization. The capital, Ctesiphon, on the banks of the Tigris in Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq; ancient Babylonia), was perhaps the largest city in the world at the time, famous for its murals and a center of music, poetry, and art. Although the state religion was strictly Zoroastrian, Jewish scholars wrote the Talmud here, Plato and Aristotle were translated into Persian, and the rules for backgammon were first written down.

  King Khosrau and Borzya the scholar, from the 1483 German rendering Das buch der weißhait of John of Caput’s Latin translation of the Panchatantra

  This part of the Fertile Crescent was irrigated by an extensive canal system that was significantly extended by Khosrau. Persia was at the center of the global economy, exporting its own pearls and textiles, and helping bring Chinese paper and silk and Indian spices and the Indian game of chess to Europe.

  Another borrowing from India in Khosrau’s time was the Panchatantra, a collection of c. 200 BCE Sanskrit animal fables that the Persian physician Borzya brought back and translated into Persian, and which was the source of stories in One Thousand and One Nights and Western nursery tales like the French fables of Jean de La Fontaine. There is a beautiful fable about Borzya’s trip itself, told in the Persian national epic “The Shahnameh,” in which Borzya asks King Khosrau for permission to travel to India to acquire an herb from a magic mountain that when sprinkled over a corpse could raise the dead. But when he arrives in India a sage reveals to him that the corpse is “ignorance,” the herb is “words,” and the mountain was “knowledge.” Ignorance can only be cured by words in books, so Borzya brings back the Panchatantra.

  Ctesiphon is long gone now, but as we’ll see, Khosrau’s favorite food lives on. He loved a dish of sweet-and-sour stewed beef called sikbj, from sik, Middle Persian for “vinegar.” Sikbj must have been amazingly delicious, because
it was a favorite of kings and concubines for at least 300 years, and celebrated in story after story. In one story, Khosrau sent a great number of cooks into separate kitchens, saying, “Let each one of you prepare his best dish.” I am sure the cynical among you will not be surprised to hear that it turned out that all the chefs made the shah’s favorite, sikbj.

  The Sassanid empire fell as Islam spread, and by 750, the Islamic Abbasid caliphate was established in formerly Persian areas of Mesopotamia. The Abbasids built a new city 20 miles from Ctesiphon, Madinat al-Salam, “the city of peace,” in a former market town called Baghdad. The Abbasids were heavily influenced by Sassanid culture, hiring local Persian-trained chefs who knew how to cook sikbj. The dish became the favorite of the new rulers, like Harun al-Rashid (786–809). I love the stories of Caliph Harun in One Thousand and One Nights, and how he would go in disguise at night through the city of Baghdad with his vizier Jafar, listening to the complaints of the people, and I imagine some of these adventures must have happened after a big dinner of sikbj. In fact Harun’s recipe for sikbj and others are given in the oldest surviving cookbook in Arabic, Kitb al-Tabkh (The Book of Cookery) compiled by Ibn Sayyr al-Warrq, c. 950–1000 CE. Here’s the recipe that al-Warrq claims is the original sixth-century Persian version eaten by Khosrau, slightly shortened from Nawal Nasrallah’s translation:

  Meat Stew with Vinegar (sikbj)

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

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

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

  Add 4 cleaned plump chicks and bring to a boil again. Add 3 ounces of ground coriander, thyme-mint, 1 ounce of whole garlic cloves (threaded onto toothpicks) and cook until everything is done.

  Finally 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. Take the pot off the fire and ladle it, God willing.

  The details of sikbj vary from recipe to recipe, but in all of them it is a rich beef stew, often with chicken or lamb too, flavored by many herbs and often by smoked woods, and always preserved with lots of vinegar. Besides its perky flavor, vinegar has been known since Babylonian times to be an excellent preservative (acetic acid is a potent antimicrobial, killing salmonella and E. coli). In fact, it seems likely that sikbj is a variant of even older local vinegary meat stews. In the 1980s Assyriologist Jean Bottéro translated the world’s oldest cookbook: a set of clay tablets, written in Akkadian in 1700 BCE, probably in Babylon, only 55 miles south of Baghdad. Recipes for meat stews on these clay slabs, the Yale Culinary Tablets, make such similar uses of vinegar, smoked woods, and herbs like rue that it seems likely that sikbj is a variant of local stews that had been cooked in southern Mesopotamia for thousands of years.

  Very quickly, sikbj moved around the Islamic world, perhaps because it seems to have been a favorite dish of sailors, who are often more dependent on preserved foods. The story is told that the ninth-century Caliph al-Mutawakkil was once sitting with his courtiers and singers on a terrace overlooking one of the canals of Baghdad when he smelled a delicious sikbj stew cooking on a nearby ship. The caliph ordered the pot to be brought to him, and enjoyed the sikbj so much that he returned the pot to the sailor filled with money.

  It’s possible that it was these sailors that first started making sikbj with fish instead of meat. The first mention of a fish sikbj is in The Book of the Wonders of India, a set of stories collected by a Persian sea captain, Buzurg Ibn Shahriyar, fantastical tales about the Muslim and Jewish sea merchants that were trading among the (Abbasid) Muslim 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 porcelain vase. “I have brought you a dish of sikbj from China,” said Isaac. The ruler is skeptical that even a preserved sikbj could last that long, so Isaac opened the vase to show it was full of fish made out of gold, with ruby eyes, “surrounded by musk of the first quality.”

  This story reveals that already by the tenth century sikbj could be made of fish. The first recipe we have for these fish sikbj comes somewhat later, in the thirteenth-century medieval Egyptian cookbook Kanz Al-Fawa’id Fi Tanwi’ Al-Mawa’id, or The Treasury of Useful Advice for the Composition of a Varied Table. Sikbj now is a fried fish dredged in flour and then sauced with vinegar and honey and spices. Here’s the recipe as translated by Lilia Zouali in her excellent Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World:

  Fish sikbj, Egypt, 13th century

  Provide yourself with some fresh fish, vinegar, honey, atrf 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 the flour. When [they] are ready, take them out.

  Slice the onion and brown it in the sesame oil.

  In the mortar, crush the pepper and atrf tib. Dissolve the saffron in vinegar and honey and add it. When [the sauce] is ready, pour it over the fish.

  The recipe continued to move westward along the ports of the Mediterranean, the name and the recipe metamorphosing as it did so. By the early fourteenth century there were recipes for escabetx in Catalan, the Romance language spoken in what is now northeastern Spain and by the late fourteenth century in southwestern France for scabeg, written in Occitan, the medieval language spoken in Provence, the southern part of France. Later in Italy we see the word in the dialects from Sicilian (schibbeci), to Neapolitan (scapece), to Genoese (scabeccio).

  The journeys of sikbj

  In all these areas the word refers to a fried fish dish. For example, a Catalan cookbook from the first half of the 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. In Muslim regions like Baghdad or Spain, by contrast, cookbooks like the Book of Dishes (Kitab al-tabikh) still mostly describe sikbj as a meat stew with vinegar.

  Why did the fish rather than meat sikbj become so prevalent in these Romance languages? One clue is geographical: these scapeces and scabegs all appear in ports along the Mediterranean (in southern but not northern France, in coastal but not inland Italy), consistent with the idea that it was sailors who continued to spread sikbj.

  But the key difference between Italy and France, on the one hand, and Spain and Baghdad on the other, is that the sikbj eaters of Italy and France were Christians. Medieval Christians had very strict dietary restrictions, abstaining from meat, dairy, and eggs during Lent, on Fridays and sometimes Saturdays and Wednesdays, and on numerous other fast days like Ember days. Medieval food scholar Melitta Adamson estimates that medieval fast days amounted to more than a third of the year for most Christians. Cookbooks were full of fish recipes for these extensive fast periods. Even as late as 1651, the famous French cookbook of La Varenne, The French Cook, is divided into three sections: meat recipes, Lent recipes, and “lean” recipes for non-Lenten fast days like Fridays.

  While the fish descendent of sikbj was traveling from port to port, another Christian borrowing of the sikbj stew took a different form. In the fourteenth century Arabic cookbooks and medical texts were translated into Latin and, as Italian scholar Anna Martellotti shows us, the full name al-sikbj began to be transcribed as assicpicium and askipicium. Medieval medical texts often focused on broths and their medicinal qualities, and Latin medical texts emphasized the broth of the cold sikbj. When sikbj was eaten cold, the vinegary broth results in a jelly, and assicpicium became aspic in French, still our modern word for a cold jellied broth.

  By 1492, the Reconquista had e
xtended Christian influence over Spain and Portugal as well, and cookbooks from neighboring Catalonia, like Master Robert’s 1520 Llibre del Coch, began to be translated into Spanish, bringing words for many seafood and other gastronomic terms into Spanish, and the new Spanish word escabeche seems to have been one of them. Meanwhile, other descendants of sikbj had appeared in Arabic cookbooks in Spain under different names, including another fried fish recipe very similar to the twelfth-century Egyptian sikbj, called “dusted fish,” in which fish is dipped into a spicy egg batter, fried in oil, and then eaten with vinegar and oil.

  By the early 1500s, Spain and Portugal thus had a number of closely related dishes involving fried fish with vinegar, usually eaten cold, which derived from various versions of sikbj. In escabeche the fish was first fried, with or without crumbs or batter, and then soaked in vinegar and onions. In pescado frito, there were no onions, and the fish was invariably battered before being fried and then eaten cold with vinegar.