by Dan Jurafsky
LIVING IN SAN FRANCISCO means visitors, and visitors mean an excuse to wander down Bernal Hill and explore various delicious dinner options along Mission Street. My houseguests are always open-minded eaters, but they do sometimes find odd things to complain about. My cranky British friend Paul is irked by the interminable questions at cafes here (“Single or double? Small, medium, large? For here or to go? Milk or soy? Whole milk or nonfat?”). “Just give me a bloody coffee,” says Paul, who thinks Americans have control issues. Indeed, as we just saw, the profusion of choices offered by cafes, diners, fast-food, and other inexpensive outlets is matched only by the control we abdicate when selecting the tasting menus at our expensive restaurants.
Paul is also annoyed by our parochial word usage. For example, the word entrée in the United States means a main course while in France and the UK entrée means what we would call the appetizer course. Thus a French meal might consist of an entrée, the main course (the plat), and dessert, while a corresponding American meal would have appetizer, entrée, and dessert. Since the word entrée comes originally from French and literally means “entrance,” we Americans, Paul suggested to me at dinner one night, must have botched up the meaning of this word at some point.
Paul’s hypothesis seems reasonable, and since he also complains about my fork and knife etiquette (it turns out I don’t align my fork and knife in the proper position on the plate to signal I’m done eating), I have lately been feeling quite the uncultured colonial from the Wild West.
The late Alan Davidson told us in his magisterial Oxford Companion to Food that (even if Paul is right) the meaning of entrée is just not worth investigating:
entrée, entremet: A couple of French terms which no doubt retain interest for persons attending hotel and restaurant courses conducted under the shadow of French classical traditions, but have ceased to have any real use, partly because most people cannot remember what they mean and partly because their meanings have changed over time and vary from one part of the world to another. Forget them.
But the redoubtable Davidson, although right about practically everything else, is off the mark here; the language of food ought to have an enormous amount to tell us about our history, our society, and our selves. So instead I’ll side with the late historian Fernand Braudel who once suggested that these same French terms might be cues to understanding food’s cultural history:
We might . . . follow fashion in food through the revealing history of certain words which are still in use but which have changed in meaning several times: entrées, entremet, ragoûts, etc.
Entrée is a good next step in our adventure in the language of food for another reason as well: it is an organizing word, describing the structure of a meal rather than a food itself, and thus bridges the previous chapter’s study of menu language with the succeeding chapters describing foods from main courses to desserts.
As for Paul’s hypothesis that the modern French meaning of entrée is the original one: au contraire! Let’s start with that modern French definition:
Mets qui se sert au début du repas, après le potage ou après les hors-d’œuvre.
[A dish served at the beginning of the meal, after the soup or after the hors d’oeuvres.]
Extracts from the menus from Aux Lyonnais in Paris and Frances in San Francisco (both Michelin 1-star restaurants) show the differing uses: the French entrée as the appetizer, the American entrée (or entree) as the main.
Aux Lyonnais:
ENTREES PLATS
Planche de charcuterie lyonnaise Saint-Jacques en coquille lutée, salade d’hiver
Terrine de gibier, condiment coing/poivre Quenelles à la lyonnaise, sauce Nantua
Jeunes poireaux servis tièdes, garniture mimosa Vol-au-vent du dimanche en famille
Fine crème de laitue, cuisses de grenouille dorées Notre boudin noir à la lyonnaise, oignons au vinaigre
Frances:
APPETIZERS ENTREES
Lacinato Kale Salad–Pecorino, Grilled Satsuma Five-Dot Ranch Bavette Steak–Butter Bean Ragoût,
Mandarin, Fennel, Medjool Date Foraged Mushrooms, Bloomsdale Spinach
Squid Ink Pappardelle & Shellfish Ragoût–Green Garlic, Sonoma Duck Breast–Charred Satsuma Mandarin, Lady
Dungeness Crab, Gulf Prawn Apple, Cipollini Onion
Salad of Spring Greens–English Pea, Poached Farm Market Fish–Green Garlic, Full Belly Potatoes, Salsify,
Egg, Crisp Shallot and Potato Roasted Fennel Purée
How did this difference in meaning develop? The word entrée first appears in France in 1555. In the sixteenth century, a banquet began with a course called entrée de table (“entering to/of the table”) and ends with one called issue de table (“exiting the table”). Here are two menus in Middle French (explaining the archaic forms and variable spelling) from the 1555 book Livre Fort Excellent de Cuysine Tres-Utile et Profitable excerpted from culinary historian Jean-Louis Flandrin’s excellent book Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France:
Cest que fault pour faire ung banquet ou nopces après pasques
[What you need for a banquet or wedding after Easter]
MENU 1 MENU 2
Bon pain [Bread] Bon pain [Bread]
Bon vin [Wine] Bon vin [Wine]
Entrée de table [Table entrée] Entrée de table [Table entrée]
Potages [Soups] Aultre entrée de table pour yver
Rost [Roast] [Another table entrée for winter]
Second Rost [2nd roast] Potaiges [Soups]
Tiers service de rost [3rd roast] Rost [Roast]
Issue de Tables [Table exit] Issue de Tables [Table exit]
As these menus show, the entrée is the first course of the meal, there can be multiple entrées, and after the entrée comes the soup, one or more roasts, and then a final course. Entrées in fourteenth- through sixteenth-century France were hearty sauced meat dishes (Beef Palate with Gooseberries, Wood Pigeons with Pomegranate, Chicken fricassee in verjus, Venison sirloins, Leg of lamb hash), savory pastries (Hot small venison pies), or offal (Roasted calf’s liver, Salted lamb tongues, Browned kid heads).
Over the next hundred years, the soup began to be eaten earlier in the menu, so that by about 1650 the soup was always the first course, followed by the entrée. In Le Cuisinier François (The French Cook), La Varenne’s famous 1651 cookbook, an entrée was still a hot meat dish, distinguished from the roast course. The roast course was a spit roast, usually of fowl or sometimes rabbit or suckling animals, while the entrée was a more complicated made dish of meat, often with a sauce, and something requiring some effort in the kitchen. The cookbook gives such lovely seventeenth-century entrées as Ducks in Ragout, Sausages of Partridge White-Meat, a Daube of a Leg of Mutton, and Fricaseed Chicken. An entrée was not cold, nor was it composed of vegetables or eggs. (Dishes that were cold or composed of vegetable or eggs were called entremets). So the entrée in 1651 is a hot meat course eaten after the soup and before the roast.
By a hundred years later, in the eighteenth century, the French, English (and colonial American) banquet meal had standardized in a tradition called à la Française or sometimes à l’Anglaise. Meals were often in two courses, each course consisting of an entire tableful of food. All the offerings were laid out on the table, with the most important in the middle and the soup or fish perhaps at the head of the table, entrées scattered about, and the smallest courses (the hors d’oeuvres, literally “outside the main work”) placed around the edges (that is, “outside” of the main stuff).
After the soup was eaten, it was taken away and replaced on the table by another dish, called the relevé in French or the remove in English. A remove might be a fish, a joint, or a dish of veal. The other dishes (the entrées and entremets) stayed on the table. Sometimes a fish course was itself removed, just like the soup. Then the joint might be carved while the entrees and hors d’oeuvres were passed around. After this first course was completed, the dishes would all be cleared away and a second course would be brought in, b
ased around the roast, usually hare or various fowl such as turkey, partridge, or chicken, together with other dishes.
The figure opposite shows how the dishes were laid on the table in the two courses or servings à la Française from the first cookbook published in the American colonies, Eliza Smith’s very popular English cookbook The Compleat Housewife: or, Accomplished Gentlewoman’s Companion, first published in 1727 in England, and published in the American colonies in the 1742 edition.
Note the “soop,” with the Breast of Veal “ragood” remove, and the entrées like Leg of Lamb, 2 Carp Stew’d, and A Pig Roasted. Recall that the classic French roast course consisted of roast fowl; that would be the 4 Partridges and 2 Quails in the second course; roast beef and pork were served in the first course as entrées or removes. Also note that at this point, the word entrée was not yet used in English; at least it’s not mentioned in Eliza Smith, and the first usage listed in the Oxford English Dictionary is decades later, in William Verral’s 1759 A Complete System of Cookery, where it is marked in italics as a newly borrowed foreign word.
The next change in the ordering of meals was another hundred years later, in the nineteenth century, to a method known as service à la Russe, significantly closer to modern coursed dinners. Instead of the food being all piled on the table to get cold, dishes are brought in one course at a time on plates served directly to the guests. Thus, for example, meat is carved at the sideboard or the kitchen by servants rather than by the host at the table. Since the table was no longer covered in food, it was decorated with flowers and so on. And since the guests couldn’t know what food they were going to eat just by looking at the table, a small list of dishes was placed by each setting. The name for this list was borrowed (first in French and then English) from a shortening of the Latin word mintus, “small, finely divided, or detailed.” It was called a menu.
Placement of dishes in the two courses, from Eliza Smith’s 1758 The Compleat Housewife (16th edition)
This service à la Russe took over in France in the nineteenth century; in England and the US the custom shifted roughly between 1850 and 1890, and our modern meals are now served in serial courses à la Russe. We still maintain remnants in the US of the old-fashioned method of putting all the food on the table at once and having the host carve at the table, in very traditional meals like Thanksgiving dinner. (Thanksgiving is archaic in all other aspects as well, but we'll come back to that.)
By the nineteenth century the hors d’oeuvres began to be served earlier, even before the soup. So at this point (meaning the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth), the order of a traditional meal was something like the following:
1. Hors d’oeuvres
2. Soup
3. Fish (possibly followed by a remove)
4. Entrée
5. Break (sherbet, rum, absinthe, or punch)
6. Roast
7. Possible other courses (salads, etc.)
8. Dessert
The word entrée maintained this meaning of a substantial meat course served after the soup/fish and before the roast in Britain, France, and America until well after the First World War. The menu opposite is from 1907 from the newly built Blanco’s, the legendary O’Farrell Street restaurant and bordello whose fantastic marble columns and rococo balconies were the site of the unbridled drinking, gambling, whoring, and general bad behavior that characterized San Francisco’s Barbary Coast days but also symbolized the city’s rise from the ashes of the 1906 earthquake. Blanco’s later became the Music Box, the burlesque owned by San Francisco’s beloved fan dancer Sally Rand. It’s now the Great American Music Hall, one of the most beautiful concert venues in the city, but if you go around to the back alley you can still see the faded Blanco’s sign painted on the brick. Notice on the menu some of the pseudo-French we talked about in the previous chapter (“Celery en Branch,” the misspelling of “Parisienne,” and some unexpected accents).
Menu from Blanco’s Restaurant, San Francisco, 1907
As for the Pisco punch that separates the entrée from the roast, it was San Francisco’s signature drink in the nineteenth century. The punch was made from Pisco brandy, lemon juice, and pineapple syrup, and was an “insidious concoction which in its time had caused the unseating of South American governments and women to set world’s records in various and interesting fields of activity,” as cocktail historian David Wondrich recounts from a later memoir. Pisco punch was popularized and maybe even invented here at the old Bank Exchange at the corner of Montgomery and Washington, which made it through the earthquake of ’06 only to be replaced by the Transamerica Pyramid.
By 30 years later, the word entrée has expanded a bit in meaning. In US menus from the 1930s, the word is still used in its classic sense as a substantial “made” meat dish distinguished from roasts, but by now sometimes the term includes fish, and has lost the sense of a course in a particular order.
After the war, as separate roast and fish courses dropped out of common usage, the word entrée expanded once again to signify any main course. A 1946 menu from the “World Famous Cliff House,” perched on the cliffs at Land’s End overlooking the Pacific, refers to all main courses, including “Grilled Fillet of Sea Bass, Parsley Butter” as entrees. (The Cliff House is still there, but now the waves crash over the ruins of the Sutro Baths below, originally built by millionaire populist Adolph Sutro in 1896 with vast swimming pools fed by the ocean. In the romantic foggy midnights of my youth, we used to sneak around those ruins and through the long dark tunnels that run into the cliff.) By 1956 entrée came to be used even when there is no meat at all; that year in fact Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf offered “Fish Dinners” consisting of Crab Cocktail, Soup or Salad, Entree, and Dessert.
American meals by the 1950s thus standardized on the modern three-course meal consisting of appetizer, entrée, and dessert, perhaps augmented by a salad or soup.
What about in France? The French use of the word entrée in Escoffier’s 1921 Le Guide Culinaire was still the traditional one (“made” hot meat dishes served in the classic sequence before a roast). Escoffier classifies as entrées almost any meat or poultry dish that we would now consider a main course: steaks (entrecotes or filet de boeuf, tournedos), cassoulet, lamb or veal cutlets, ham, sausage, braised leg of lamb (gigot), stews or sautes of chicken, pigeon or turkey, braised goose, foie gras. Escoffier has over 500 pages of entrée recipes. Only roast fowl and small game animals are classified as roasts, in a small 14-paged roast section.
Thus, the change from the classic central heavy meat entrée to the modern light first course must have come after 1921 in France but before 1962, by which point the recipes Julia Child gives for entrées are light dishes, mainly quiches, soufflés, and quenelles. We see similar light dishes listed as typical entrées in the modern Larousse Gastronomique, the French culinary encyclopedia.
Actually, an older edition of the Larousse Gastronomique—the very first one from 1938, in fact—gives us even more insight in its definition of entrée:
Ce mot ne signifie pas du tout, comme bien des personnes semblent le croire, le premier plat d’un menu. L’entrée est le mets qui suit, dan l’ordonnance d’un repas, le plat qui est désigneé sous le nom de relevé, plat qui, lui-même, est servi après le poisson (ou le mets en tenant lieu) et qui, par conséquent, vient en troisième ligne sur le menu.
[This word does not mean, as many seem to believe, the first dish in a meal. In the ordering of a meal, the entrée is the dish that follows the relevé, the dish served after the fish (or after the dish that takes the place of the fish) and, therefore, comes third in the meal.]
What we have here is a “language maven” complaining about a change in the language. (Aux armes! The French masses are using the word entrée incorrectly!) Language mavens have probably been around pretty much since there were two speakers to complain about the vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar of a third. They can be very useful for historical linguists, be
cause grammar writers don’t complain about a change in the language until it’s already been widely adopted. So we can be pretty certain that in popular usage, entrée mostly meant “first course” in French by 1938.
So, to review: The word entrée originally (in 1555) meant the opening course of a meal, one consisting of substantial hot “made” meat dishes, usually with a sauce, and then evolved to mean the same kind of dishes but served as a third course after a soup and a fish, and before a roast fowl course. American usage kept this sense of a substantial meat course, and as distinct roast and fish courses dropped away from common usage, the meaning of entrée in American English was no longer opposed to fish or roast dishes, leaving the entrée as the single main course.
In French, the word changed its meaning by the 1930s to mean a light course of eggs or seafood, essentially taking on much of the meaning of earlier terms like hors d’oeuvres or entremets. The change was presumably helped along by the fact that the literal French meaning (“entering, entrance”) was still transparent to French speakers, and perhaps as more speakers began to eat multicourse meals the word attached itself more readily to a first or entering course. So both French and American English retain some aspects of the original meaning of the word; French the “first course” aspect of the meaning (although that had actually died out by 1651) and American the “main meat course” aspect, which has been the main part of its meaning for 500 years.
This shift has a deeper lesson about language change. We are carefully taught to clamp down on changes in language as if new ways of speaking are unnatural, adopted by ignorant speakers out of stupidity or even malice. Yet linguistic research demonstrates that the gradual changes in a language over time often lead to significant improvements in the language’s clarity or efficiency, as happened here with entrée. Everyday speakers in both France and America changed the meaning of entrée from an obscure third course in an archaic, aristocratic meal structure to a useful term for an appetizer (in France) or a main course (in America), sensibly ignoring the complaints of the 1938 editors of the Larousse Gastronomique.