by Dan Jurafsky
In many cultures, salt is then added again. Bread and salt (khubz wa-milh) is an Arabic phrase that means the bond created by sharing food; the Russian word for hospitality is similarly khleb-sol (bread-salt), and bread and salt (and candles) is what my mom gave me, following Jewish tradition, when I moved to a new house.
But the link between flour and salt goes beyond their shared constituency in bread. These two ancient white powders are some of the earliest examples of processed, refined foods, dating back to the ancient human transition from hunter-gatherer societies to settled agriculture. This transition required finding new sources of salt, since when humanity subsisted by hunting and gathering, we got enough salt from meat. This need led to an extensive industry of salt mining and seawater evaporation across the world, not to mention thousands of years of salt taxes. The transition to agriculture also meant the need to mill wheat into flour, a technology visible in Neolithic quern stones; the British Museum has a grinding stone from Syria that dates to 9500–9000 BCE.
These days we spend a lot of time on efforts to rein in our unhealthy love of refined, salty foods. Potato chip advertisers, aware of the unhealthiness of the products, overcompensate by talking about how they are “healthier” and “low fat” with the “lowest sodium.” And online reviewers are equally aware, referring to “addicting wings” and “cupcakes like crack.” In this chapter we’ll examine the linguistic history of these ancient industrial foods to demonstrate that our craving for these salty, refined foods is old and unchanging—although they now come in more convenient snack-sized packages. We’ll start by looking at the linguistic history of flour, from the period when Anglo-Saxon was enriched with a vast French vocabulary brought by the Norman invasion.
Bread itself was so central to the medieval English diet that the word for the Anglo-Saxon ruler in his great mead hall was hlaf-weard (loaf-keeper), from his role in controlling the mills that ground grain into flour and distributing bread to his dependents. This word is perhaps more familiar in the modern form into which it evolved: lord. Our word lady similarly comes originally from the Anglo-Saxon hlaf-dige (loaf-kneader).
After the 1066 invasion of the Normans, this association of food with the lordly class was maintained. The French spoken by this new ruling class began to be used instead of Anglo-Saxon for words that persist to modern-day English: pork, veal, mutton, beef, venison, bacon (from Old French porc, veal, mouton, boeuf, and so on). But while only the Norman lords could afford to regularly eat meat, it was Anglo-Saxon-speaking serfs who raised the cows and pigs that the meat came from. Thus we use French pork for meat from the pig but still use old Anglo-Saxon words like pig (and hog and sow) for the animal itself. We still use Anglo-Saxon cow, calf, and ox, but refer to their meat with French beef and veal.
As part of this French invasion, sometime in the thirteenth century, a word spelled variously flure, floure, flower, flour, or flowre first appeared in English, borrowed from the French word fleur, meaning “the blossom of a plant,” and by extension, “the best, most desirable, or choicest part of something.” This second meaning occurs in the modern French word fleur de sel, which means the finest of the sea salts—delicate crystals harvested from the surface of evaporation pools.
The new English flur adopted both of the French meanings, pushing aside the old Anglo-Saxon word blossom, and coming to describe the best and choicest of all sorts of fancy high-class stuff. Thus we see phrases in Chaucer like “flower of chivalry” or “flower of knighthood” to describe the knights of the noble class.
Also in the thirteenth century, the phrase “flower of wheat” or “flower of meal” began to be used to describe the very finest, choicest part of wheat meal, made only of the white or endosperm of the wheat. A kernel of wheat has three parts: the endosperm, containing carbohydrates and protein; the fat and vitamin-rich “germ”; and the fibrous outer bran. Most bread in medieval times was made from the entire grain, sometimes with a portion of the bran removed. “Flower of wheat,” by contrast (or flure of huete as it might have been spelled at the time) meant the very fine white flour created by repeatedly sifting the wheat through a fine-meshed cloth. Each pass removed more of the bran or germ, leaving a finer and whiter flour. This process of sieving through cloth was called bolting and these bolting cloths were specially woven from canvas, wool, linen, and, much later, fine silk.
A medieval woman selling bread
The first breads made from these fine white flours were called payndemayn or paindemain, most likely derived from the Latin panis dominicus (lordly bread). The fine new payndemayn became a metaphor for whiteness as in Chaucer’s description of the handsome Sir Thopas in The Canterbury Tales: “White was his face as payndemayn, his lips red as a rose.”
Payndemayn is what is called for in the recipe I gave for “sops” and also in most early recipes for French toast. French toast was a common recipe in English cookbooks, first appearing around 1420 as payn per-dew, from the French pain perdu (lost bread), presumably after the staleness of the bread. (The name “French toast” doesn’t appear until the seventeenth century, and wasn’t common here in the United States until the nineteenth century.) Here’s one of the earliest French toast recipes, from a fifteenth-century manuscript. See if you can read the Middle English; most of the words, albeit differently spelled, are still part of modern English (like frey hem a lytyll yn claryfyd buture for “fry them a little in clarified butter” and eyren drawyn thorow a streynour for “eggs passed through a strainer”):
Payn purdyeu
Take payndemayn or fresch bredd; pare awey the crustys. Cut hit in schyverys [slices]; fry hem a lytyll yn claryfyd buture. Have yolkes of eyren [eggs] drawyn thorow a streynour & ley the brede theryn that hit be al helyd [covered] with bature. Then fry in the same buture, & serve hit forth, & strew on hote sygure.
By the fourteenth century the English word flower (or flour) could mean any of these three things: a blossom, a finely ground wheat meal, or something which was the finest or best of something—both spellings were used to describe all of these until the modern spellings standardized around 1800. Shakespeare puns on these latter two meanings in Coriolanus, using “the flower of all” to mean the best of everything and “the bran” to mean whatever is left over: “All from me do back receive the flower of all, and leave me but the bran.”
In this Elizabethan era of Shakespeare, the rich ate a white bread successor of payndemayn called manchet, a fine white bread that could also be made with milk and eggs. Besides manchet and manchet rolls, finely bolted white flour was mainly eaten in cakes, cookies, and pastries. Even for the wealthy, however, white bread was reserved for special occasions.
Over the next few hundred years, white bread slowly became more and more favored. Partly this had to do with technology, as new silk bolting cloths imported from China in the eighteenth century made it possible and cheaper to make more finely bolted white flour. But mainly this had to do with the changing nature of tastes and the increasing desire for refined foods. By the mid-seventeenth century the Brown-Bakers guild specializing in dark loaves of rye, barley, or buckwheat merged with the White-Bakers guild and white bread and white flour came to dominate; social journalist Henry Mayhew reports that by 1800 brown bread was looked down upon even by the poor.
These days we can use the word flour to mean any finely ground grain, whether it is whole wheat flour or even corn, spelt, rice, or barley flour. But the word still maintains something of its original usage; if you asked a neighbor to lend you a cup of flour, you probably wouldn’t be surprised if what you got handed was a cupful of fine, sifted, ground, white endosperm of wheat.
One of the Yale Culinary Tablets, in Akkadian from the Old Babylonian Period, ca. 1750 bc. Yale Babylonian Collection.
English does have other quite different words for flour. An English word for flour with particularly ancient roots is our semolina, the coarsely ground grains of the endosperm of hard durum wheat. Semolina comes from Latin simila (fine flour) and
Greek semidalis, both of which come from the Akkadian word samidu (high-quality meal). Akkadian was the language of ancient Assyria and Babylon, and samidu occurs in recipes in the world’s oldest known cookbook, the Yale Culinary Tablets. These were written in cuneiform around 1750 BCE and also include recipes for what is probably the ancestor of the vinegar stew sikbj.
Samidu’s Latin descendant simila also gave rise to the English simnel cake, and to the Middle High German word Semmel, originally a roll made of fine wheat flour, a sense it still maintains in the Yiddish word zeml. In modern German the word Semmel refers to the Austrian or Bavarian white Kaiser rolls or hard rolls, also favored in the United States in Wisconsin and other areas with German or Austrian roots. Next time you eat a bratwurst on a Sheboygan hard “semmel” roll remember that the name goes all the way back to the Assyrians.
Flour is also referenced in the name sole meunière, the classic French dish of fish fillets dredged in flour and pan-fried crisp in butter. A meunière is a miller’s wife, so a dish called “meunière” or “à la meunière” means one that is likely to be served in a miller’s house, hence containing flour.
What about that other white powder, salt? When we think of adding flavor to our food, we think of spices and herbs, peppers and ketchups and salad dressings and soy sauce, but the original food additive was salt. Salt’s importance in cuisine is visible in the vast number of foods in English with salt in their name. Salad and sauce (from French), slaw (from Dutch), salsa (from Spanish), salami and salume (from Italian) all come originally from the Latin word sal and originally meant exactly the same thing: “salted.”
The word salad, originally from Medieval Latin salata, came to English from Old French, borrowed from Provençal salada. The very first written recipe for salad in English is in the first English cookbook, the 1390 Forme of Cury. Despite the Middle English vocabulary it’s a pretty modern recipe, chock-full of greens and herbs (I’ve translated the ones that might be harder to figure out), dressed with oil, vinegar, garlic, and, naturally, salt:
Salat (c. 1390)
Take persel, sawge [sage], grene garlic, chibolles [scallions], letys, leek, spinoches, borage, myntes, porrettes [more leeks], fenel, and toun cressis [town cress, i.e., garden cress], rew, rosemarye, purslarye; laue and waische hem clene. Pike hem. Pluk hem small with thyn honde, and myng [mix] hem wel with rawe oile; lay on vyneger and salt, and serue it forth.
The Provençal salada that became English salad itself developed out of the Late Latin salata, in the context herba salata (salted vegetables). This medieval term was not used by the Romans of the classical period, although classical Romans definitely ate vegetables with a brine sauce. In fact Cato gives a recipe for a salted cabbage salad in his De Agricultura, from around 160 BCE: “If you eat it [cabbage] chopped, washed, dried, and seasoned with salt and vinegar, nothing will be more wholesome.”
Much later, cabbages with salt and sometimes vinegar, often preserved longer, became prevalent in northern Europe, and later came to America. This is the origin of our sauerkraut, from the German “sour vegetable.” An even older American immigrant is the word cole slaw, from Dutch kool (cabbage) and sla (salad, from a Dutch shortening of the Dutch word salade). The Dutch had a huge influence on the development of New York (originally New Amsterdam), with a culinary legacy in American English that also includes the words cookie, cruller, pancake, waffle, and brandy. The first mention of what is probably cole slaw was in 1749, when Pehr Kalm, a visiting Swedish Finnish botanist, describes an “unusual salad” served to him in Albany by his Dutch landlady Mrs. Visher, made from thin strips of sliced cabbage mixed with vinegar, oil, salt, and pepper. Kalm says this dish “has a very pleasing flavor and tastes better than one can imagine.” This original koolsla gave way later to our modern mayonnaise-based dressing.
The word sauce in French and salsa in Spanish, Provençal, and Italian again come from popular Latin salsus/salsa, referring to the salty seasonings that made food delicious. Chaucer talks in 1360 of “poynaunt sauce,” by which he meant a sauce that was pungent or sharp, the old meaning of poignant. And various recipes for sauce, by now with or without salt, start appearing in cookbooks from the thirteenth century. (There are lots of sauces in the older cookbook known as Apicius, a fourth-century Latin collection of recipes written by various authors, but the word used for sauce there is ius, the ancestor of our word juice.)
Many of my favorite sauces are called “green sauce,” like Mexican salsa verde of tomatillos, onions, garlic, serranos, and cilantro, or Italian salsa verde, of parsley, olive oil, garlic, lemon or vinegar, and salt or anchovies. For Italian salsa verde Janet and I tend to add in whatever green herbs are growing in our gardens; here are the ingredients we tend to use:
Salsa Verde
1 cup Italian parsley leaves
¼ cup chives or wild garlic stems
leaves from 6 sprigs thyme
leaves from 2 sprigs tarragon
leaves from 2 sprigs rosemary
2 cloves garlic
¼–½ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2 anchovies
¼ teaspoon salt or to taste
Chop herbs with anchovies and garlic by hand, and then mix in oil, lemon juice, and salt.
I called it “Italian” salsa verde but from the twelfth to the fourteenth century green parsley sauces were made all across Europe. In Arabic salsa was called sals, and scholar Charles Perry tells us it was one of the few recipes that moved east from European Christians to the Muslim world rather than west from Muslims to Christians. A thirteenth-century cookbook from Damascus, the Kitab al-Wusla, told how to make “green sals” by pounding parsley leaves in a mortar with garlic, pepper, and vinegar. French saulce vert was made of parsley, bread crumbs, vinegar, and ginger in the fourteenth-century French cookbook Le Viandier, or made of parsley, rosemary, and sorrel or marjoram in Le Menagier de Paris.
There are other modern descendants of this sauce. In the twentieth century, Escoffier’s French sauce verte called for pounding blanched parsley, tarragon, chervil, spinach, and watercress and using the “thick juice” to flavor mayonnaise. This mayonnaise sauce verte was modified in 1923 at San Francisco’s Palace Hotel by adding sour cream and anchovies to create the recipe for Green Goddess Dressing, still served in the Garden Court at brunch.
The Palace Hotel has been around for almost 150 years; Sarah Bernhardt brought her pet baby tiger there, Enrico Caruso stayed there on the night of the ’06 earthquake, and the Maxfield Parrish painting of the Pied Piper in the bar is a San Francisco landmark. My high school prom was there, too, back when Donna Summer and Peaches and Herb were at the top of the charts. In the prom picture I just dug out to show Janet, I certainly rocked the bowtie, but unlike the original recipe for Green Goddess Dressing, below, our perfectly feathered hair did not stand the test of time.
Green Goddess Dressing
1 cup traditional mayonnaise
½ cup sour cream
¼ cup snipped fresh chives or minced scallions
¼ cup minced fresh parsley
1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
3 anchovy fillets, rinsed, patted dry, and minced
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
Stir all the ingredients together in a small bowl until well blended. Taste and adjust the seasonings. Use immediately, or cover and refrigerate.
The earliest known recipe for one of the green sauces, however, seems to be an English recipe written mainly in Latin with some Norman French and English in a volume written over 800 years ago in 1190 by English scholar and scientist Alexander Neckam. The recipe was called verde sause and it called for parsley, sage, garlic, and pepper, and ends “non omittatur salis beneficium,” which translates roughly to “Don’t forget the salt.”
Why should a simple seasoning be so pervasive in our language? The answer is that the main use of salt throughout human history w
as to preserve foods. Cabbage salted into sauerkraut could last through the winter. Salted sausages, salami, ham, salt pork, and salted fish (like the salt cod called bacallao in Spanish) were able to last long enough to allow merchants and soldiers to travel across Europe and cross the Atlantic and the Pacific.
In the ancient European world, salted pork products were a specialty of the Celts. The geographer Strabo said that hams from the Celtic regions of France and Spain were famous in Rome, and Westphalian hams from formerly Celtic regions of what is now Germany were as beloved in Rome then as they are in modern times.
The salt is still there in the names for these pork products, most obviously in “salt pork,” but it’s there in Italian salami and salumi too, both formed from the root sal (salt) plus the noun-forming suffixes –ame and –ume. And it’s there in the word sausage, which we got from French, from late Latin salscia, originally from the phrase salsa isicia (salted isicia). Isicia was a kind of forcemeat, croquette or fresh sausage; there are recipes for isicia in Apicius. Salsa isicia was thus the dried salted preserved version of this sausage.