The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu

by Dan Jurafsky

  The result is that the English “turkey cock” or “cocks of Inde,” and the French “poules d’Inde” were used sometimes for turkeys, sometimes for guinea fowl, for the next hundred years. The two birds were confused in Dutch too, and even Shakespeare sometimes got it wrong, using “turkey” in Henry IV, part I (act II, scene 1) when he meant guinea hen.

  The English confusion between the two birds was only resolved when both were commercially farmed in England. In any case, our modern word arrived just in time for “turkey” to be actually eaten in the Renaissance, thus explaining the ubiquity of giant turkey legs in today’s “Renaissance Faires.”

  Other languages were left with a similarly confused atlas of names; French dinde from “d’Inde,” Dutch kalkeon, many names (like Polish indik) dating from later reference to the Americas as the West Indies, and Levantine Arabic dik habash alone still pointing to Ethiopia, the source of the guinea fowl. German used to have a dozen names for turkey (Truthahn, Puter, Indianisch, Janisch, Bubelhahn, Welscher Guli, etc.).

  French naturalist Pierre Belon’s drawing of turkeys (“Cocs d’Inde”), from his 1555 book L’Histoire de la Nature des Oyseaux (The Natural History of Birds)

  Another memorial to the early confusion remains in the genus name for turkey that Linnaeus, the Swedish zoologist who is the father of modern taxonomy, mistakenly took from the Greek name for guinea fowl: meleagris, explaining Sophocles’ chorus of “turkeys.” Ovid tells us that the name meleagris for guinea fowl came from the Greek hero Meleager, who was foretold at birth to live only as long as a log burning in his mother’s fire. Although his mother saved the log, Meleager later met a tragic end anyhow and his black-clad sisters cried so many tears over his tomb that Artemis turned them into guinea fowl, Meleagrides, changing their tears into white spots all over their bodies.

  The turkey became particularly popular in England. It was eaten widely 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.”

  It was just at this time that the turkey made the journey back to the United States. The English colonists brought domestic turkeys with them to Jamestown in 1607 and the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1629, and in both places compared the “wilde Turkies” to “our English Turky.”

  You probably know that the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony didn’t really have a “First Thanksgiving” turkey feast (although they certainly ate a lot of wild turkey). While there were many days of thanksgiving declared at different points in the American colonies, a day of thanksgiving for the passionately religious Separatists would have been a religious holiday to be spent in church, not a dinner party with the neighbors. Instead, the joint feast to which “Massasoit with some ninety men” brought five deer is described in a 1621 Pilgrim letter as celebrating “our harvest being gotten in,” and owes more to the autumn harvest festivals long celebrated in England.

  So if the English and the Wampanoag did eat turkey together at that feast (and we may never know for sure), it was not a newly invented American ceremony, but a fine old English tradition of Christmas and festival roast turkey celebrations.

  Thanksgiving itself took hold partly from the efforts of Sarah Josepha Hale, a prominent nineteenth-century magazine editor, antislavery novelist, and supporter of female education (and the author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb”) whose activism for a national day of thanksgiving to unify the country eventually convinced Abraham Lincoln in 1863. Within 20 years Thanksgiving was linked in schools and newspapers with the Pilgrims and the schoolchildren of our great immigrant wave of 1880 to 1910 (including my Grandma Anna) brought home a new holiday, a metaphor of gratitude for safe arrival in a new land.

  Or at least they brought home the desserts. Like the mestizo mole, the sweet dishes that grew to symbolize Thanksgiving combine New World ingredients (cranberries, sweet potatoes, pumpkins, pecans) with the medieval spices, sweet and sour flavors, and custards that date back to the Arabic influence on Andalusia and Italy. By 1658 an English pumpkin pie recipe with eggs and butter was flavored with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, sliced apples, and also savory spices like pepper, thyme, and rosemary. Our modern American pumpkin pie appears in the first cookbook written by an American, Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery:

  Pompkin.

  One quart stewed and strained, 3 pints cream, 9 beaten eggs, sugar, mace, nutmeg and ginger, laid into paste . . . and baked in dishes three quarters of an hour.

  Recipes for pecan pie are more recent. The earliest I have seen, called Texas Pecan Pie, appeared in The Ladies Home Journal in 1898 (pecan is the Texas state pie):

  Texas Pecan Pie

  One cup of sugar, one cup of sweet milk, half a cup of pecan kernels chopped fine, three eggs and tablespoonful of flour. When cooked, spread the well-beaten whites of two eggs on top, brown, sprinkle a few of the chopped kernels over.

  The milk, eggs, and sugar in these early recipes (corn syrup only came later) remind us that the original pecan pie, like pumpkin pie, was really a custard, a descendant of early European recipes for custard pies. Recipes for an open-topped pie crust filled with egg yolks, cream, and spices appear in fifteenth-century cookbooks from both England and Portugal. You can still find them as pastel de nata in Portuguese bakeries, and the Portuguese brought them to Macao, where they became hugely popular by their Cantonese name daan tat or “egg tarts.” Egg tarts are now a mainstay of dim sum and many Chinese bakeries sell both a Portuguese and a Chinese version. You can even get them at KFC in Macao now. Here in San Francisco, it’s the Golden Gate Bakery on Grant Avenue whose egg tarts make an excellent dessert addition for a Chinese American Thanksgiving.

  Unlike most other Thanksgiving food names, the word pecan is Native American. English borrowed it from Illinois, a language of the Algonquin family. The original word was pakani, although we now pronounce our borrowing in many ways. My best friend from kindergarten, James, got married on a warm summer evening along the Brazos River of eastern Texas in what I was distinctly informed were “pickAHN” groves. But the word is PEE-can in New England and the Eastern Seaboard, pee-CAN in Wisconsin and Michigan, and something closer to peeKAHN in the west and many other parts of the country.

  Why this difference? The region of the pronunciation pickAHN corresponds remarkably to the native range of the pecan tree. This is because the pickAHN pronunciation is closest to the original in the Illinois language (/paka : ni/). In other words, people in the area where the Illinois gave the word to English still use a traditional pronunciation, while dialects farther away have a modified pronunciation influenced by the spelling.

  Two pecan maps. Top: Rough outline of dialect regions where pickAHN is the dominant pronunciation (based on the research of Bert Vaux and Joshua Katz). Bottom: Rough outline of natural habitat of the pecan tree (data from US Forest Service maps).

  Although it’s not widely known, the guinea fowl came to America too, as part of the slave trade. Slave ships to the Americas included West African flocks as provisions, and slaves raised guinea fowl on small plots of land. 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, passed on “from generation to generation by African-Americans.” Her cookbook The Taste of Country Cooking describes traditional ways of stewing guinea fowl in clay pots that—based on archaeological evidence of pots from early slave settlements—probably date back to African Mandinka recipes for stewing guinea fowl in earthenware pots hundreds of years ago in West Africa.

  So the real message of turkey is not that Portuguese trade secrecy caused sixteenth-century Europeans to confuse two birds, although it did, or that the turkey was traded in Europe’s first commodities exchange building, although it probably was, or even any of the fantastic myths about a collection of spices being blown by the wind into a seventeenth-cen
tury stockpot in Puebla, Meleager’s sisters being turned into guinea fowl, or Pilgrims inviting Massassoit for a Thanksgiving turkey dinner.

  The real meaning of our Thanksgiving foods is that 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, just as the Native Americans and the Spanish, despite struggles and massacres and suffering, managed to merge elements of their cuisines to create the mestizo mole poblano de guajolote that helps preserve the food culture of their ancestors.

  That’s another beautiful myth about America, and maybe this is finally one we can believe: that we’ve created something truly extraordinary in our stone-soup mestizo America by throwing into the pot, each of us, ingredients from the beautiful traditions our grandmothers and grandfathers passed down to us.

  Seven

  Sex, Drugs, and Sushi Rolls

  YOU CAN ALWAYS GET a good argument going in San Francisco by asking people for their favorite taqueria. I lean toward the carnitas at La Taqueria on Mission, but our friend Calvin can be pretty eloquent on the subject of the al pastor at Taqueria Vallarta on Twenty-Fourth. San Franciscans are similarly contentious about the best dim sum, and have been politely disagreeing about tamales since the 1880s, when the city was famous for the vendors plying the streets every evening with pails of hot chicken tamales. (Some things, of course, are simply not a matter of opinion, like the best place for roast duck—it’s Cheung Hing out in the Sunset, but don’t tell anybody else, the line is already too long.)

  It’s not just San Francisco. You can’t go on the Internet these days without stumbling over someone’s lengthy review of a restaurant, wine, beer, book, movie, or brand of dental floss. We are a nation of opinion-holders. Perhaps we always have been: in De Tocqueville’s prophetic study of the American character, the 1835 Democracy in America, he noted that in the United States “public opinion is divided into a thousand minute shades of difference upon questions of very little moment.”

  Consider online restaurant reviews, those summaries of the wisdom of the crowd that have become a familiar way to discover new places to eat. Take a look at this sample from a positive restaurant review (a rating of 5 out of 5) on Yelp (modified slightly for anonymity):

  I LOVE this place!!!!! Fresh, straightforward, very high quality, very traditional little neighborhood sushi place. . . . takes such great care in making each dish . . . You can tell the chef really takes pride in his work. . . . everything I’ve tried so far is DELICIOUS!!!!

  And here are bits of one negative review (a rating of 1 out of 5):

  The bartender was either new or just absolutely horrible . . . we waited 10 min before we even got her attention to order . . . and then we had to wait 45—FORTY FIVE!—minutes for our entrees . . . Dessert was another 45 min. wait, followed by us having to stalk the waitress to get the check . . . he didn’t make eye contact or even break his stride to wait for a response . . . the chocolate soufflé was disappointing . . . I will not return.

  As eaters we use reviews to help decide where to eat (maybe give that second restaurant a miss), whether to buy a new book or see a movie. But as linguists we use these reviews for something altogether different: to help understand human nature. Reviews show humans at their most opinionated and honest, and the metaphors, emotions, and sentiment displayed in reviews are an important cue to human psychology.

  In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have employed the techniques of computational linguistics to examine these reviews. With Victor Chahuneau, Noah Smith, and Bryan Routledge from Carnegie Mellon University, my colleagues on the menu study of Chapter 1, I’ve investigated a million online restaurant reviews on Yelp, from seven cities (San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, Washington), covering people’s impressions between about 2005 and 2011, the same cities and restaurants from our study of menus. With computer scientists Julian McAuley and Jure Leskovec, I looked at 5 million reviews written by thousands of reviewers on websites like BeerAdvocate for beers they drank from 2003 to 2011.

  As we’ll see, the way people talk about skunky beer, disappointing service, or amazing meals is a covert clue to universals of human language (like the human propensity for optimism and positive emotions and the difficulty of finding words to characterize smells), the metaphors we use in daily life (why drugs are a metaphor for some foods but sex is a metaphor for others), and the aspects of daily life that people find especially traumatizing.

  Let’s start with a simple question. What words are most associated with good reviews, or with bad reviews? To find out, we count how much more often a word occurs in good reviews than bad reviews (or conversely, more often in bad reviews than good reviews).

  Not surprisingly, good reviews (whether for restaurants or beer) are most associated with what are called positive emotional words or positive sentiment words. Here are some:

  love delicious best amazing great favorite perfect excellent awesome wonderful fantastic incredible

  Bad reviews use negative emotional words or negative sentiment words:

  horrible bad worst terrible awful disgusting bland gross mediocre tasteless sucks nasty dirty inedible yuck stale

  Words like horrible or terrible used to mean “inducing horror” or “inducing terror,” and awesome or wonderful meant “inducing awe” or “full of wonder.” But humans naturally exaggerate, and so over time people used these words in cases where there wasn’t actual terror or true wonder.

  The result is what we call semantic bleaching: the “awe” has been bleached out of the meaning of awesome. Semantic bleaching is pervasive with these emotional or affective words, even applying to verbs like “love.” Linguist and lexicographer Erin McKean notes that it was only recently, in the late 1800s, that young women began to generalize the word love from its romantic core sense to talk about their relationship to inanimate objects like food. As late as 1915 an older woman in L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island complains about how exaggerated it was that young women applied the word to food:

  The girls nowadays indulge in such exaggerated statements that one never can tell what they do mean. It wasn’t so in my young days. Then a girl did not say she loved turnips, in just the same tone as she might have said she loved her mother or her Saviour.

  Semantic bleaching is also responsible for meaning changes in words like sauce or salsa from their original meaning of “salted,” but I am getting ahead of myself. For now there’s much more to learn from reviews.

  Let’s start with the negative reviews. Consider the very specific and creative words used to express dislike (sodalike, metallic, wet dog water, force-carbonated, razor thin) in this strongly phrased negative beer review from BeerAdvocate:

  Clear light amber with a sodalike head of white that immediately fizzles to nothing. Very sodalike appearance. Aroma is sweet candy apricot with slight metallic wheat notes. Flavor is wet dog water infused with artificial apricot. Bad, bad, bad. Mouthfeel is razor thin, watery, and highly force-carbonated. Drinkability? Ask my kitchen sink!

  My colleagues and I automatically extracted the positive and negative words. While reviewers generally called beers they disliked “watery” or “bland,” they tended to describe the way they were “bad” by using different negative words for different senses, distinguishing whether the beer smelled or tasted bad (corny, skunky, metallic, stale, chemical), looked bad (piss, yellow, disgusting, colorless, skanky), or felt bad in the mouth (thin, flat, fizzy, overcarbonated).

  By contrast, when people liked a beer, they used the same few vague positive words we saw at the beginning of the chapter—amazing, perfect, wonderful, fantastic, awesome, incredible, great—regardless of whether they were rating taste, smell, feel, or look.

  The existence of more types of words, with more differentiated meanings, for describing negative opinions than positive ones occurs across many languages and for many kinds of words, and is called negat
ive differentiation. Humans seem to feel that negative feelings or situations are very different from each other, requiring distinct words. Happy feelings or good situations, by contrast, seem more similar to each other, and a smaller set of words will do.

  Negative differentiation comes up in all sorts of domains. For example, across languages there seem to be more adjectives to describe pain than pleasure. We use more varied vocabulary to describe people we dislike than people we like. People even describe attractive faces as more similar to each other while unattractive faces differ more from each other. This generalization that there are more different ways to be negative than to be positive was most famously stated by Tolstoy at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  Words for smell seem particularly disposed to the negative trend. English, for example, has no commonly used positive word meaning “smells good” that corresponds to delicious for taste or beautiful for sight. Languages generally seem to have a smaller vocabulary for smell than for other senses, relying on words for tastes (like sweet or salty) or names of objects (like gamy, musky, skunky, or metallic).