The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu

by Dan Jurafsky

  A macaron in the style of Nancy

  Despite these minor regional variations, though, the cookie from 1650 until about 1900 was what the Larousse Gastronomique calls “a small, round biscuit [cookie], crunchy outside and soft inside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites."

  In Italy the word maccherone meant only pasta by this time, so the cookies had other names like marzapanetti (little marzipans) in Siena or amaretti (little bitters) in Lombardy because they were made with bitter almond. Name mixups persisted in English until as late as 1834, with macaroon sometimes used to describe the pasta and macaroni the cookie.

  Two innovations led to the modern macaroon/macaron divide. First, in America, a fad developed in the mid-1800s for an exotic food: coconuts (or rather cocoanuts, as the word was spelled in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century because of an early confusion with cocoa). Recipes for “Cocoa-nut Cake” appear as early as 1840, but use of coconut increased greatly after the Civil War along with increased trade with the Caribbean and greater production of coconut oil. Emily Dickinson was a fan; she mailed her recipe for Cocoanut Cake to a friend, and her poem “The Things That Can Never Come Back, Are Several” was first drafted on the back of another recipe for the cake. Dickinson’s own recipe is written with her idiosyncratic punctuation:

  Cocoanut Cake

  1 cup Cocoanut ..

  2 cups Flour -

  1 cup Sugar -

  ½ cup Butter ..

  ½ cup Milk -

  2 Eggs -

  ½ teaspoonful Soda

  1 teaspoonful Cream Tartar

  This makes one half the Rule –

  Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

  By the late 1800s manufacturers had set up factories to produce shredded coconut and everyone was making faddish new desserts: coconut cream pie, coconut custard, and ambrosia (originally made from oranges, powdered sugar, and shredded coconut). Recipes for another of these coconut concoctions, coconut macaroons, also appear first quite early, around 1830, but don’t take off until later in the century when they become common in Jewish cookbooks. Because the cookies do not contain flour, they became a standard during Passover celebrations, so much so that matzo manufacturers like Streit’s and Manischewitz began selling both almond and coconut macaroons for Passover in the 1930s.

  Here’s the recipe from the first Jewish cookbook in America, Esther Levy’s 1871 Jewish Cookery Book, in which the almond paste heretofore traditional in macaroons is replaced by grated coconut:

  Coconut Macaroons

  To one grated cocoanut add its weight in sugar, and the white of one egg, 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.

  By the 1890s, coconut macaroons appeared in many American cookbooks and became the best-selling version in America. The graph below shows the slow increase in the number of times “coconut macaroons” (any spelling) appears in the Google Ngram corpus from 1840 to 2000, with the bumps in the 1890s and 1930s and the recent rise starting in the 1960s.

  Just as coconut macaroons begin to take off midcentury in American cookbooks, a new innovation happens in France. A Parisian baker, Pierre Desfontaines (perhaps influenced by the earlier unfilled double-macaron of baker Claude Gerbet) creates a sandwich cookie by putting almond paste or ganache between two macarons. The new cookie was called le macaron parisien or le macaron Gerbet and was quickly popularized by the pastry shop and tea salon Ladurée. Today both the macaron parisien and many different versions of the traditional single macaron are prevalent throughout France.

  In the United States, macaron refers only to the new ganache sandwich cookie, leaving macaroon to describe the coconut cookie, while of course macaroni for us now means only the elbow pasta.

  Macaroni used to have a secondary meaning. In eighteenth-century England, rich young hipsters sported outlandish hairstyles (very tall powdered wigs with tiny caps on top) and affected clothing. (My prom hairdo was bad, but this was worse.) These young aristocrats were called “Macaronis” because on their travels in Italy they acquired a taste for pasta, a then-exotic foreign food fad. This may sound familiar from the song “Yankee Doodle”; the chorus mocks a disheveled “Yankee” soldier whose attempt to look sharp was to “stick a feather in his hat and call it macaroni.”

  The Macaroni. A real Character at the late Masquerade, a 1773 engraving by political cartoonist Philip Dawe

  The Macaronis weren’t the first members of the wealthy elite to start a fad by eating exotic foreign foods. In fact, the regal or merely rich play a role in borrowing each of the foods we’ve talked about in this chapter. The Arab caliphs of Baghdad borrowed lauznaj from the Persians, wealthy Norman and Sicilian princes borrowed marzipan and dried pasta from the Arabs, rich British dandies borrowed macaroni from Italy, wealthy Americans borrowed coconuts (and other originally expensive foods like bananas) from the Caribbean, and now we’ve copied expensive macarons from Paris.

  As for the Sassanid kings of Persia, it seems that they borrowed their lauznag, too. Lauznag means “containing almonds,” but using the Semitic word for almond, lauz, not the Persian word, a linguistic clue that the Persians probably got the almond pastry from their Aramaic-speaking neighbors.

  These borrowings, like those of sikbj and ketchup (and sherbet, as we will see in the next chapter), illustrate the ideas of sociologists Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen, who at the turn of the nineteenth century noticed that fancy things (food, fashion, goods, or trends of any sort) tend to be introduced first by the wealthy elite. Like the French used in the expensive menus of Chapter 1 or Chapter 2’s entrée, these newly imported luxuries function as markers of high status, exotic delicacies that only the rich can afford. Once these goods appear, Simmel and Veblen point out, the middle class naturally wants them too, and so as these foods or goods become cheaper they are consumed by more and more people and become part of the popular culture. As Rachel Laudan shows in Cuisine and Empire, “High cuisines were the engine of culinary change,” but high-status goods eventually trickle down to the masses. Thus macaronic French becomes a sign of less expensive restaurants, and coconuts and cocoa, macaroni, nougat, and almond candy (and ketchup, originally an expensive Asian import used by English aristocrats) eventually became part of our everyday lives. Macaroni and cheese, a dish once associated with the aristocracy, became the widely popular American side dish that I grew up with, a staple for Sunday dinners in the South for both African Americans and whites, and a delight of small children everywhere. Even the expensive Parisian macaron is now available at discount prices at the wholesale warehouse Costco.

  Macaroon, macaron, and macaroni remind us that the rare imported luxury of yesterday is the local popular culture of today—borrowed, maybe fluffed up a bit with egg whites or coconut to make it our own, a treat for each of us as we celebrate the coming of spring.

  Eleven

  Sherbet, Fireworks, and Mint Juleps

  THE SAN FRANCISCO MIDSUMMER fog was late in coming last year, which means Janet and I got a fantastic view of the Fourth of July fireworks from the top of Bernal Hill (both the municipal shows and the not-quite-so-legal ones that San Franciscans set off from rooftops throughout the city). Hot days are rare in our “cool gray city of love,” so random strangers were smiling at each other on Mission Street, the sidewalks were jammed with long lines in front of the ice creameries, and groups of people were picnicking in Dolores Park with icy cans of soda or cups of agua fresca or lemonade.

  You may not be aware of the close relationships among these summer phenomena. Ice cream was invented by modifying a chemical process originally discovered for fireworks, and applying it to the fruit syrups that became lemonade, agua fresca, and sodas. And as we’ll discuss in the next chapter, the way ice cream flavors are named turns out to have a surprising relationship with the evolutionary origin of the human smile.

  Ice cream has always been popular in Sa
n Francisco; Swensons, Double Rainbow, and It’s It were all founded here, and Rocky Road ice cream was invented across the bay in Oakland during the Great Depression. The latest inventions draw on the recent fads for molecular gastronomy and unusual flavor profiles. At Smitten in Hayes Valley they’ll make your ice cream fresh when you order it, freezing the slurry with liquid nitrogen. At Humphry Slocombe you can get foie gras, pink grapefruit tarragon, or strawberry black olive flavors. Bi-Rite Creamery will happily sell you honey lavender, balsamic strawberry, and that modern classic, salted caramel. Mitchell’s specializes in Filipino and other tropical flavors like halo halo, lucuma, purple yam, and avocado. And Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous seems to keep running out of their latest hip flavor, orange blossom:

  One day in the daily flavors at Mr. and Mrs. Miscellaneous, the San Francisco ice creamery

  Well, actually, 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-1600s, 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 us what may be the English royal recipe, handwritten in Grace Countess Granville’s Receipt Book by the 1680s:

  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 wth Sugar and 3 spoonfulls of Orrange flower water, & fill yor pan ¾ full . . .

  By about 1696, a later edition of the cookbook attributed to La Varenne suggests using fresh orange flowers:

  Neige de Fleur D’orange

  You must take sweet cream, and put thererto two 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 take candied, with a drop of good Orange Flower water, and put all into a pot . . .

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

  Where did these flavors come from? And who first invented the freezing technology, the bath of salt and ice that these recipes share with modern homemade ice cream machines? 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.

  The story begins with the fruit and flower syrups, pastes, and powders of the Arab and Persian world. In Cairo, for example, medieval cookbooks give recipes for cooking quince down into pastes with honey or sugar, flavored with vinegar and spices. Quince, a fruit that looks like a golden-yellow pear, has been renowned since classical Greece for its medicinal powers, which may account for its great acclaim. Quince paste spread from Cairo as far west as Muslim Andalusia, where it appears in a thirteenth-century cookbook manuscript. Its descendants are still popular today: in South America and Spain, where one is called membrillo (Spanish for “quince”) and in England and the United States, where we call another descendant “marmalade” (from Portuguese marmelo, “quince”). Marmalade meant “quince paste” in English until the start of the seventeenth century, and somewhat longer in the United States. Early British recipes had the musk and rosewater of their Moorish Andalusian antecedents, but by the time the recipe made it into Amelia Simmons’s 1796 American Cookery, the first American cookbook, the ingredients were just quince, sugar, and water:

  To make Marmalade.

  To two pounds of quinces, put three quarters of a pound of sugar and a pint of springwater; then put them over the fire, and boil them till they are tender; then take them up and bruize them; then put them into the liquor, let it boil three quarters of an hour, and then put it into your pots or saucers.

  To digress briefly, by about the same time in Britain, the Seville orange replaced the quince as the standard marmalade ingredient and orange marmalade became a breakfast staple, starting in Scotland. Here’s a Scottish recipe that food historian C. Anne Wilson gives from the 1760s:

  To Make Orange Marmalade

  Take the largest best Seville oranges, take the same weight of single refined sugar; grate your oranges, then cut them in two, and squeeze out the juice; throw away the pulp; cut down the skins as thin as possible, about half an inch long; put a pint of water to a pound of sugar; make it into a syrup . . . put in your rinds and gratings, and boil it till it is clear and tender; then put in your juice, and boil it till it is of a proper thickness . . .

  More often than pastes, however, these medieval Arab sweet fruit concoctions were left in syrup form, where they were swallowed medicinally or combined with water to form refreshing beverages. The Arabic word for these syrups was shara-b, from a root meaning “drink.” Here’s a syrup recipe from the medieval apothecary manual of a Jewish druggist in Cairo in 1260:

  Rhubarb syrup

  Opens liver obstruction and strengthens the liver. Take twenty dirhams of rhubarb, sprinkle over it three ratls of water for a day and a night and simmer over a low fire and thicken with three ratls of hard loaf sugar. Let it reach the consistency of syrups, remove and use.

  When these Arab medical manuals were translated into Latin this word sharab became the medieval Latin word siropus, the ancestor of our English word syrup.

  In medieval Persia, similar syrups were extracted from flowers like rose petals or orange blossoms, or fruits like sour cherry or pomegranate. These syrups were called sharbat, from another form of the same Arabic word, and sharbat was also the name of the refreshing drinks made by combining the syrups with water, cooled with snow and ice brought down from the mountains. When the Ottomans came, they enthusiastically adopted these sharbat, pronouncing them sherbet in Turkish.

  The idea of bringing snow and ice from the mountains and storing them in icehouses to cool drinks in the summer is an ancient worldwide custom. The earliest recorded icehouses were pits lined with tamarisk branches 4000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but icehouses were common in ancient China and Rome and they are even mentioned in the Bible. Sharbats are still quite popular in Persia and Turkey and indeed throughout the eastern Mediterranean. Claudia Roden talks nostalgically of the sharbat of her childhood in Egypt, sharbat flavored with lemon, rose, violet, tamarind, mulberry, raisin, or liquorice. Here’s a modern Persian recipe from Najmieh Batmanglij:

  Lime Syrup (Sharbat-e ablimu)

  6 cups sugar

  2 cups water

  1½ cups fresh lime juice

  Garnish:

  Springs of fresh mint

  Lime slices

  In a pot, bring the sugar and water to a boil. Pour in the lime juice and simmer over medium heat, stirring occasionally, for 15 minutes. Cool, pour into a clean, dry bottle, and cork tightly.

  In a pitcher, mix 1 part syrup, 3 parts water, and 2 ice cubes per person. Stir with a spoon and serve well chilled. Garnish with sprigs of fresh mint and slices of lime.

  By the sixteenth century French and Italian travelers had brought back words of these Turkish and Iranian sherbets. In one of the earliest mentions of the word in Europe, the French naturalist Pierre Belon in 1553 described sherbets in Istanbul made of figs, plums, apricots, and raisins. Thirsty passersby would buy a glass of syrup from wandering sellers or stands, mixed with water and chilled with snow or ice to ward off the summer heat. Sherbets were most often sour. Lemons and sour cherries were some of the most popular flavors—and even vinegar was used.

  In Turkey and Egypt, sherbet was often made from powders or tablets as well, as we see in this report from Jean Chardin, a seventeenth-century French traveler to Persia and the Ottoman Empire:

  In Turky they keep them in Powder like Sugar: That of Alexandria, which is the most esteem’d throughout this large Empire, and which they transport from thence every where, is almost all in Powder. They keep it in Pots and Boxes; and when they would use it, they put a Spoonful of it into a large glass of Water.

  While erbet in modern Turkey is mostly made from syr
up now, old-style sherbet tablets, colored red and flavored with cloves, are still used to make a hot spiced sherbet called lohusa erbet served to new mothers after the birth.

  By 1662 sherbets were available across Europe. The London coffeehouse Morat’s in Exchange Alley advertised “sherbets made in Turkie of Lemons, Roses, and Violets perfumed.” And by 1676 in France, sherbets were the business of the guild of limonadiers, in charge of lemonades, iced waters, ices of fruits and flowers, sherbets, and coffee. The Arabs had earlier brought lemons and sweetened lemon juice to Sicily and Spain. Although at first lemons were available only to the wealthy, by the seventeenth century lemons were more widely available in London and Paris. Nicolas Audiger, a limonadier of Paris, published La Maison Reglée in 1692 with the first French recipe for lemonade: