The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu

by Dan Jurafsky

  An alembic of the Middle Ages. The liquid to be distilled is placed in the cucurbit A and heated over a gentle fire. Alcohol has a lower boiling point than water, and rises as vapor into the still-head B, which is then externally cooled (for example, by cloth soaked in cold water), causing the condensed alcohol (or other distillate) to drip down the tube C into the collecting reservoir E.

  It was just at this time that the technology of distillation was perfected by Persian and Arab alchemists, extending the work of earlier Egyptian Greek and Byzantine alchemists. The alembic (from Arabic al-anbiq, from Greek ambyx; also the ancestor of the word lambic referring to the spontaneously fermented Belgian beer) is a flask whose lid has a tube coming off it; when a liquid is boiled in the flask, the vapor rises into the tube and drips out as it cools and condenses.

  By the early Renaissance alcohol distillation began to spread west to Europe and east to Central Asia. In Western Europe, apple ciders and grape wines were distilled into eau-de-vies and brandies. Peruvians and Chileans produced their brandy Pisco by distilling wine. In southeast Europe, plum cider was distilled into the rakia that we toasted with at Marta’s wedding.

  All this history, of course, is there in the words. The word rakia comes from ‘araq, meaning “sweat” in Arabic, a vivid metaphor for the condensing alcohol dripping from the spout of the still. Other descendants of the word ‘araq are used all over the world for the local distilled spirits. We already met arrack, the red rice liquor of Indonesia, in the previous chapter, and there are many others: the anise-flavored Levantine arak of Lebanon, Israel, Syria, and Jordan or raki of Turkey, Persian aragh, the gesho-leaf flavored araki of Ethiopia, the coconut liquor of Sri Lanka also called arrack, or Mongolian arkhi, distilled from fermented mare’s milk. What these areas have in common is their history of Muslim populations, contact, or influence, from Ottoman-controlled southeast Europe in the west through the Persian influence on the Mongols to Muslim Indonesia in the east. (Although intoxicants are banned in Islam, drinking of specific kinds of alcoholic beverages in various amounts was sometimes allowed and in any case seems to have persisted in different regions.) These words (and other Arabic words like alcohol) are thus a reminder of the important role of Arab and Muslim scientists in developing and propagating distillation and distilled spirits.

  As for cider and shikker, they both still carry the phonetic traces of shikaru, the Akkadian honeyed beer and the world’s oldest written recipe, and this ancient method of getting higher alcohol content by fortifying beer with honey or fruit. In fact, the very earliest manmade alcoholic beverage we know of is a similar beer/cider mixture of fermented honey, rice, and grape or hawthorn fruit whose traces have been found on pottery from 7000 to 6600 BCE in China’s Henan province.

  In other words, the chamomile, thyme, and fruits of our hip modern cocktails and summer micheladas are not a new innovation at all, but the modern reflex of an ancient tradition that began with the world’s very first mixed drinks 9000 years ago, and continued through history with the Levantine thyme-infused wines and Mesopotamian honeyed beers of 2000 BCE, the wassails of Henry VII, the toast-and-borage-spiced wine of eighteenth-century England, and our modern mulled ciders. And the strong hops flavors in modern IPAs bring to mind the barrels of India Pale Ale in the sweltering cargo holds of the East Indiamen crossing the equator to what were then called Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.

  Libations are still around too. Modern hiphop culture has a libationary tradition of “pouring one out”—tipping out malt liquor on the ground before drinking, to honor a friend or relative who has passed away—described in songs like Tupac Shakur’s “Pour Out a Little Liquor.” (It’s especially appropriate that malt liquor, a fortified beer made by adding sugar before fermenting, is itself another descendent of shikaru.)

  Modern cocktail names have gotten more interesting, though. The bar Trick Dog in the Mission names drinks after Pantone colors or old 45 rpm singles, Alembic by the park serves a Sichuan pepper-infused Nine Volt, and the Lower Haight’s Maven has drinks with names like Widow’s Kiss and Nauti’ Mermaid, whose straightforward appeal to women and sex recalls those eighteenth-century tipplers whose drinking to the health of the “Lady we mention in our Liquors” first gave rise to the word toast, although now it’s as likely to be the women doing the toasting.

  In any case, now that our Punch break is over, let’s talk turkey.

  Six

  Who Are You Calling a Turkey?

  I LOVE THANKSGIVING, when the rains finally begin to come to San Francisco and it feels almost like we have seasons. The streets are bustling with people buying ingredients for their mother’s fabulous stuffing or tamale or dessert recipes, and, most important, my choirs start to have their winter concerts. Last Thanksgiving 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 crowd of 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 chorus of 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—a good 2000 years after Sophocles wrote his tragedies in Athens. So how did they show up at the Greek amphitheater two millennia early? And why does this bird always seem to be named after countries? Besides Turkey the list includes India, the source of the name in dozens of languages including French dinde, from a contraction of the original d’Inde, “of India,” Turkish hindi, and Polish indik. And there’s Peru (the source of the word peru in both Hindi and Portuguese) and even Ethiopia (in Levantine Arabic the turkey is dik habash, “Ethiopian bird”).

  As we’ll see, the answer involves Aztec chefs, a confusion between two birds caused by Portuguese government secrecy and, indirectly, the origins of the modern stock exchange. And as with ketchup, it turns out that turkey and other favorite foods traveled around the world to get here, although in this case it’s a round-trip voyage that started with the Native Americans of this hemisphere.

  The journey begins thousands of years ago in south-central Mexico. Many different species of wild turkeys still range from the eastern and southern United States down to Mexico, but our domestic turkey comes from only one of these, Meleagris gallopavo gallopavo, the species that Native Americans domesticated in Michoacán or Puebla sometime between 800 BCE and 100 CE.

  We don’t know who the turkey domesticators were, but they passed the turkey on to the Aztecs when the Aztecs moved down into the Valley of Mexico from the north. The turkey became important enough to play a role in Aztec mythology, where the jeweled turkey is a manifestation of Tezcatlipoca, the trickster god.

  By the fifteenth century, there were vast numbers of domestic turkeys throughout the Aztec world. Cortés described the streets set aside for poultry markets in Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), and 8000 turkeys were sold every five days, all year round, in Tepeyac, just one of several suburban markets of the city.

  The words for turkey in Nahuatl, the Aztec language, are totolin for turkey hen and huexolotl for male turkey. Huexolotl gave rise to the modern Mexican Spanish word for turkey, guajolote. (English words from Nahuatl include avocado, tomato, chocolate, and chile.)

  Aztecs and the neighboring peoples made turkey with several different chile sauces. The Nahuatl word for sauce or stew is molli, the ancestor of the modern Mexican Spanish word mole, and many different moles were made, thick like ketchup or thin like soup, from various kinds of chiles, venison, rabbit, duck, iguana, armadillo, frogs, tomatillos or tomatoes, vegetables like amaranth leaves, and herbs like hoja santa or avocado leaves.

  Turkey in stews and tamales at the Aztec feast in honor of a newborn child, from the sixteenth-century illustrations in the
Florentine codex

  But one of the most common ingredients in mole was turkey. Bernardino de Sahagún’s sixteenth-century General History of the Things of New Spain tells us that Aztec rulers were served turkey moles made with chile, tomatoes, and ground squash seeds (totolin patzcalmolli), as well as turkey in yellow chile, turkey in green chile, and turkey tamales. In a 1650 description of a Oaxacan turkey mole called totolmole (from totolin [turkey hen], plus mole) turkey was stewed in a broth flavored with dried ground chilhuaucle (a black smoky chile still used for Oaxacan mole), pumpkin seeds, and hoja santa or avocado leaves.

  The arrival of the Spanish in the New World led to the famous Columbian exchange of foods between the Old and New worlds. Foods like rice, pork (and hence lard), cheese, onion, garlic, pepper, cinnamon, and sugar all crossed the Atlantic to Mexico, as did Spanish stews like chicken guisos with sauteed onion and garlic and Moorish spices like cinnamon, cumin, cloves, anise, and sesame. Soon recipes for guisos and moles in early Mexican manuscripts began to merge, mixing chile with European spices and the resulting moles and chil-moles and pipians became a foundation of modern Mexican cuisine.

  By the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, recipes appear for dishes like the most famous turkey dish of all, mole poblano de guajolote (Turkey with Puebla Mole), for which every chef in Puebla has a recipe. Its most famous ingredient, chocolate, was mainly treated as a drink by the Nahuatl, and doesn’t appear in moles until an 1817 cookbook, whose recipe for mole de guajolote (flavored with chile, garlic, onions, vinegar, sugar, cumin, cloves, pepper, and cinnamon) is followed immediately by a recipe for mole de monjas (Nuns’ Mole) that adds chocolate and toasted almonds. Modern recipes are even more spectacular, including cloves, anise, cinnamon, coriander, sesame, chile, garlic, raisins, almonds, tomatoes or tomatillos, and pumpkin seeds as well as chocolate.

  The profusion of ingredients and magical deliciousness of mole poblano de guajolote has led to many myths about the origin of the recipe, delightful folktales about winds blowing spices into mixing bowls, or boxes of chocolate accidentally falling into the pot, or a nun having to create a dish in a hurry for an important visitor from Spain, all quite dramatic but with no basis in truth. Almost all recipes develop not by spontaneous creation but by evolution, as each inventive chef adds a key ingredient or modifies a process here or there. Probably the only grain of truth in these stories is the role of nuns in convents, who in Mexico as in Europe probably played an important role in preserving and passing on recipes.

  In any case, modern turkey moles, from the simply delicious turkey mole tamale steamed in banana leaves at La Oaxaqueña down on Mission Street to the phenomenally complex mole poblano de guajolote, are a modern edible symbol of mestizo history, blending ingredients from Christian and Moorish Spain with the turkey, chocolate, and chile of the New World to create an ancient fusion food at the boundaries of the two cultures. Here’s a shortened list of ingredients from Rick Bayless’s recipe:

  Ingredients from Rick Bayless’s Recipe for Mole Poblano de Guajolote

  a 10- to 12-pound turkey, cut into pieces

  The chiles:

  16 medium dried chiles mulatos

  5 medium dried chiles anchos

  6 dried chiles pasillas

  1 canned chile chipotle, seeded

  Nuts and seeds:

  ¼ cup sesame seeds

  ½ teaspoon coriander seeds

  ½ cup lard or vegetable oil

  heaping cup unskinned almonds

  Flavorings & thickeners:

  cup raisins

  ½ medium onion, sliced

  2 cloves garlic, peeled

  1 corn tortilla, stale or dried out

  2 slices firm white bread, stale or dried out

  1 ripe, large tomato, roasted, cored, and peeled

  Spices:

  3.3-ounce tablet Mexican chocolate, roughly chopped

  10 black peppercorns

  4 cloves

  ½ teaspoon aniseed

  1 inch cinnamon stick

  Salt, about 2 teaspoons

  Sugar, about ¼ cup

  ¼ cup lard or vegetable oil

  2½ quarts poultry broth

  The recipe is long, and involves toasting the seeds; frying the chiles and then soaking them in boiling water; frying almonds, raisins, onion, and garlic; frying the tortilla and bread; pureeing the mixture; pureeing the chiles; frying the turkey; frying the sauce; and finally baking the turkey with the sauce.

  While mole poblano de guajolote resulted from the east-west direction of the Columbian exchange, the turkey itself (along with corn, squash, pumpkin, beans, potato, sweet potato, tomatoes, chile pepper, all domesticated in the New World thousands of years earlier) went to Europe simultaneously in the opposite direction.

  The turkey’s trip to Europe came very quickly after Columbus ate what were probably turkeys on the coast of Honduras in 1502. The Spanish explorers called them gallopavo (chicken-peacock), and sent them to Spain by 1512. The spread of turkeys through Europe was astonishingly rapid; by the mid-1500s turkeys were already in England, France, Germany, and Scandinavia.

  The first few turkeys were brought over by the Spanish, but it was the Portuguese rather than the Spanish who did the most to introduce the turkey to Europe. And it was the Portuguese government policy of secrecy that more than anything caused the misnaming of turkeys that persists to this day.

  It all began because of spices. 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 and spices from the Spice Islands were sold to Muslim traders who shipped them to the Levant (the eastern Mediterranean) via Yemen or Hormuz. Then the Ottomans and Venetians took over, controlling the reshipment of spices, and other goods like exotic animals from Africa, to the rest of Europe.

  In an attempt to break the Ottoman and Venetian monopolies on this trade, Portuguese mariners, starting with Vasco da Gama in 1497, sailed around Africa to reach Calicut directly by sea. On the way, they established colonies 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 local birds like the guinea fowl. Reaching Calicut in 1502, they quickly began to import spices as well.

  At the same time, the Portuguese acquired turkeys from the Spanish. The Spanish origin is clear in the Portuguese name for turkeys, galinha do Peru (Peruvian chicken). The Virreinato del Perú (the Viceroyalty of Peru) was the name for the entire Spanish empire in South America, modern-day Peru, Chile, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Argentina. The Portuguese most likely got turkey from the mid-Atlantic trade islands (the Canary or Cape Verde islands) where ships stopped to provision between the Americas, Africa, and Europe.

  Portuguese ships sailed back to Lisbon with products from all three colonial territories: spices and textiles from Calicut; ivory, gold, feathers, and exotic birds from West Africa; and turkey and corn from the Americas. Customs were paid in Lisbon, and then goods were shipped out again to Antwerp, the trading capital of northern Europe at the time. Sixteenth-century Antwerp was a bustling commercial metropolis experiencing its golden age and full of traders: the Portuguese with their colonial finds, the Germans with their copper and silver products, the Dutch with their herring, and the English, the largest contingent, with their textiles.

  In Antwerp, the Portuguese maintained a trading station and warehouse called a feitoria in which goods were stored (this is also the original meaning of our English word factory). The trader would bring goods to various open-air markets in squares throughout the city where wholesalers from the major trading nations of Europe would come and bargain for the Portuguese pepper, ivory, grain, and birds, German silver, English textiles, Dutch herring and so on, presumably amid cacophonies of squawking turkeys and piles of goods and food.

  The Antwerp Bourse, from a nineteenth-century postcard using Antwerp’s French name, Anvers

  By the middle of the cen
tury exchange trading moved to the newly built Antwerp Bourse, the world’s first building built specifically for financial and commodities trading, and from which both French and English get the word Bourse, meaning trading exchange. The exchange enabled common pricings to be established, and because goods could be sold by sample or even sight unseen, everyone avoided a lot of messy bird droppings.

  Meanwhile, France and England had been importing a satiny black African bird that looked extraordinarily similar to a small female turkey. Known today as a guinea fowl, the French and English first called this bird galine de Turquie (Turkish chicken) or Turkey cock, after the originally Turkish Mamluk sultans who first sold the bird to the Europeans in the 1400s. It was also called poule d’Inde (hen of India) because it was imported from Ethiopia (in the fifteenth century, “India” could mean Ethiopia as well as India).

  By 1550 the Portuguese began to reimport this African “turkey cock” guinea fowl from West Africa (where there are long oral traditions of breeding guinea fowl among the Mandinka and the Hausa) at the exact same time as they were shipping turkeys from the New World. Both quickly became sought-after commodities.

  At the same time, the Portuguese government imposed strict secrecy on all of its maritime explorations, with the goal of protecting its advantage in international trade. Publication of its discoveries was forbidden and maps and charts were strictly censored. Portuguese globes and nautical charts were not allowed to show the coast of West Africa, navigators were subject to an oath of silence, and the death penalty was prescribed for pilots who sold nautical charts to foreigners. It was thus impossible to know that one bird came from the Americas and the other from Africa. Because Portuguese goods were routed through Lisbon to pay customs, the two birds may have arrived at Antwerp on the same Portuguese ships, and might even have been traded sight unseen to the English or Germans in the new bourse. The two similar-looking birds were frequently confused, in Antwerp and throughout Europe.