by Dan Jurafsky
Salt is even there in corned beef, the salted beef famously associated with the Irish, modern descendants of the ancient Celts. Corned beef has nothing to do with maize. The word corn in Old English originally meant a “particle” or “grain” of something (in fact it is the etymological cousin of the words grain and kernel), and here refers to the grains of salt used to preserve the beef.
Salting fish to preserve it is probably even more ancient than salting meat, like the ancient fish sauces of Asia or the fish sauce called garos in Greek and garum in Latin eaten hundreds of years BCE. Salt cod was a huge staple of the Middle Ages, and played a central role in the economies of Europe and in the slave trade, where its use as a cheap food source resulted in the prevalence of salt cod in the modern cuisines of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean nations (and its availability in grocery stores in the Latin American neighborhoods of most American cities like San Francisco).
Until about 1800 then, preservation meant salting (or smoking, or soaking in vinegar, or candying in sugar), and food preservation was essential for a population to get enough to eat. Starting around 1790, two major scientific and technical advances led to superior methods of food preservation. The first was around 1790 when Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner who was used to boiling down syrups, thought to apply the boiling method to other foods in glass jars. He perfected the method by 1810, when he won an award from the French government and wrote a book explaining how to preserve soups and stews (pots-au-feu), a filet of beef, chicken and partridges, vegetables, fruit, and milk in glass jars. The second advance was refrigeration, invented in stages through the nineteenth century, widespread in commercial breweries by the 1880s, in meatpacking by 1915, and by the mid-twentieth century available to every American household.
The result of both inventions was that salt was much less important in food as a preservative. Since vegetables and meats, raw or cooked, can be canned or frozen, salt is now only needed for taste. But we’ve grown accustomed to salty foods. The Jewish foods I grew up on (lox, whitefish, herring, pastrami, corned beef) are all salted, preserved foods that we continue to eat even though fresh salmon, beef, and other fish are all perfectly available (and cheaper). As Bee Wilson says in her delightful Consider the Fork, “Bacon serves no real purpose in a refrigerated age, except that of pleasure, which can never be discounted.”
The history of flour tells us a similar story. Coarse medieval bolting left plenty of bran even in the most refined white flour, so even the rich got plenty of fiber from white flour. Only with the replacement of stone grist mills with metal roller mills that completely removed bran and germ has modern white flour become totally refined and optimally unhealthy.
The linguistic histories of flour and salt thus remind us of our ancient love for refined and salted foods. Yet English also offers us a hint about a different kind of seasoning. The word season or seasoning didn’t originally mean anything about adding salt or even spices or herbs to our food to add flavor. The word meant just what it sounds like: season comes from French saison, in the original meaning “to ripen fruit according to the seasons.” So although I adore refined white flour and salt (after all, it’s hard to beat a freshly baked sourdough baguette or the salty umami savor of fish sauce) these linguistic histories are a little reminder to enjoy the ripe fruits and seasonal vegetables and to go easier on those white powders.
Ten
Macaroon, Macaron, Macaroni
SPRING IS BEAUTIFUL in San Francisco. The wild garlic and fennel cover Bernal Hill, Dianda’s Italian American Pastry down on Mission Street augments their usual delicious amaretti and ricciarelli with their special St. Honore cake for Easter, it’s Persian New Year (Nowrz) and the Chinese Qingming Festival, and my family prepares for Passover, which means coconut macaroons.
For the last few years the city has also been full of another, trendier, macaroon: the Parisian macaron, a delicate pastel confection made of two almond cookies sandwiched with ganache. Parisian macarons are in every fancy pâtisserie and San Francisco, never a place to miss out on a trend, even has macaron delivery. The fad for these pricey chic French almond macarons has upstaged their humble relative, the chewy coconut macaroon.
Why this sudden fad for the expensive macaron, and how is it related to the humble coconut macaroons of my childhood? And why do both these words sound so much like macaroni? The answer involves not only a story of a favorite food created at the nexus of great civilizations, like sikbj, ketchup, or turkey, but also a link to the important role of social status that we discussed in the chapters on menus, entrée, and potato chips.
The story begins in the year 827, when Arab and Berber troops from Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia) landed in Byzantine Greek–speaking Sicily, establishing a Muslim emirate that introduced many technologies (like paper) and foods (lemons, oranges, rice, pistachios, sugar cane) to Europe. By then Sicily had been famous for its food for a thousand years; Plato commented on the superb Sicilian cuisine in his Republic (404d). The Arabs added to this culinary background, bringing a selection from the rich repertoire of nut-based sweets of the medieval Muslim world: the chewy nougats that became Italian torrone, Spanish turrón, American Snickers candy bars; the powdered starchy f ldhaj that is the ancestor of Turkish Delight; and the most famous of all, lauznaj.
Lauznaj was a confection of almonds ground together with sugar, mixed with rosewater, and wrapped in a delicate pastry. The chefs of the Abbasid Dynasty in Baghdad had borrowed lauznaj from the Sassanid kings of Persia, who ate sweets like this for Nowrz. Nowrz, literally “new day,” was the first day of the new year in the pre–Islamic Persian calendar, celebrated on the vernal equinox. The sixth-century Sassanid king Khosrau, who loved sikbj, also delighted in lauznaj, which he called the “best and finest” pastry.
Lauznaj was so celebrated that every medieval Arabic cookbook had a recipe, from the tenth-century cookbook of al-Warrq to this (abridged) recipe from the thirteenth-century Baghdad cookbook Kitb al-Tabkh (The Book of Dishes), in Charles Perry’s translation:
Lauznaj
Take a pound of sugar and grind it fine. Take a third of a pound of finely ground peeled almonds, mix them with the sugar, and knead it with rose-water. Then take bread made thin . . . —the thinner, the better— . . . and put the kneaded almonds and sugar on it. Then roll up . . . and cut it into small pieces.
Some recipes for lauznaj left off the pastry shell, others were flavored with musk or were drenched in syrup flavored with rosewater, or were sprinkled with finely pounded pistachios.
Roger II, from a mosaic in the Church of the Martorana in Palermo
By 1072 the Normans had conquered Sicily (and England), and for a brief period the rule of Roger I and Roger II of Sicily was an experiment in mutual tolerance, at least compared to the rest of Europe: Greek, Arabic, and Latin were all official languages, government officials were drawn from all three cultures, and Muslims and Jews were governed by their own law. In Sicily, and in Toledo, Spain, another contact point between Muslim and Christian culture, pastries like lauznaj entered the European culinary repertoire and developed into desserts like the almond paste tarts called marzapane and caliscioni.
Marzapane (marzipan in English) comes from the Arabic word mauthaban, which originally meant the jars the tarts came in, and then by extension the pastry shell. The 1465 cookbook of Maestro Martino tells us that marzipan was originally filled with a mixture of almond paste, sugar, rosewater, and sometimes egg whites. The modern word marzipan means the almond paste confection itself (like the beautiful colored fruit shapes that my next-door neighbor, Mrs. Scheel, made when I was a kid). Here’s Martino’s recipe for the marzipan filling:
Marzipan
Peel the almonds well and crush. . . . When you crush them, wet them with a bit of rose water so that they do not purge their oil. . . . take an equal weight of sugar as of almonds . . . and add also an ounce or two of good rose water; and incorporate all these things together well. . . .
&nb
sp; Then take some wafers . . . made with sugar and wet them with rose water; dissolve them in the bottom of a pan and add this mixture or filling on top . . . cook in the oven . . . being very careful to apply moderate heat.
Caliscioni was a very similar dessert, pastries made of almond paste wrapped in or sitting on a sugar dough. Again it’s the shell that gives the pastry its name; caliscioni comes from the word for stocking or legging. (Calceus was the Latin word for shoe; think of French chaussure or chausson or the name Chaucer, originally “makers of leggings or footwear.”) Many desserts acquired their names from their former pastry “crusts”; our word custard was formerly crustade, from French croustade, akin to Italian crostata, from crostare, “to encrust.” Here’s Martino’s recipe:
How to Make Caliscioni
Take a similar filling or mixture like that described above for marzipan, and prepare the dough, which you make with sugar and rose water; and lay out the dough as for ravioli; add this filling and make the caliscioni large, medium-sized, or small, as you wish.
As is clear from these recipes, marzipan and caliscioni, even a few hundred years later, were still very close to the original recipes for lauznaj. The main change was that marzipan and caliscioni were baked (at low heat) while lauznaj was often not cooked. The details of the pastry had also changed in the transition, but the Europeans were basically still making confections of almonds, sugar, and rosewater wrapped in pastry. Sugar was still quite expensive, and so such desserts were still luxury products originally available mainly to the wealthy. Francesco Datini, a fourteenth-century merchant, wrote that marzipan torte was more expensive than a brace of peacocks.
The mention of ravioli in the caliscioni recipe brings up the second important development that was happening in Sicily at the same time: pasta. Grain-based gruels had long been common in the region, such as the Byzantine Greek gruel called makaria () eaten as a funeral food (from the Greek makarios [], “blessed”). But dough products closer to true pasta were also an old custom in many parts of the Mediterranean. As far back as the first century BCE, the Greeks ate a dish made from sheets of fried dough called laganum, which by the fifth century had become lagana, layers of boiled dough alternating with stuffing (says Isidore of Seville)—the ancestor of modern lasagne. But it was in the eastern Mediterranean that true dried pasta existed, most commonly eaten in soup or as a sweet dish. We know that the word itria was used for both dried and fresh noodles in Aramaic in Palestine in the fifth century (the word appears in the fifth-century Jerusalem Talmud), and in the tenth century itriyah was an Arabic word for dried noodles that were bought from a grocer.
It was thus in Sicily that modern dried durum wheat pasta developed out of these Mediterranean dried noodles. Durum wheat is harder and higher in protein than common wheat, producing firm, elastic dough whose long life makes it easy to store and hence trade great barrels of it by ship. Sicily had been the breadbasket of the Roman Empire because of its durum wheat production, and this hard local wheat was so successfully combined with the Arab noodle traditions that by 1154, Muhammad al-Idrisi, the Moroccan-born geographer of Roger II of Sicily, writes that Sicily was the center of dried pasta production for the whole Mediterranean, sending it by shiploads to Muslim and Christian countries. Different regions used different words for pasta, among them tria (from Arabic itriyah), lasagne, and vermicelli (“little worms”). (The idea that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy from China is a myth that grew accidentally out of a humorous piece from 1929 in a Minnesota trade publication called the Macaroni Journal; by the time Polo returned from China in 1296, pasta had been a major export commodity for almost 150 years.)
By 1200 noodles had branched north from Sicily, carried by both Jews and Christians, and in fact our first evidence for the word vermicelli is from France, where the eleventh-century French scholar Rashi (or possibly a commentary from one of the medieval Tosafist rabbis that followed him) uses the Yiddish word vermiseles, derived via old French vermeseil from Italian vermicelli, to describe dough that was either boiled or fried. Vermiseles soon evolved to vremzel and to the modern Yiddish word chremsel, the name of a sweet doughy pancake now most commonly made of matzo-meal and eaten at Passover.
The pasta and the almond pastry traditions merged in Sicily, resulting in foods with characteristics of both. As we saw above, early pastas were often sweet, and could be fried or baked as well as boiled. There is a kind of duality to many recipes from this period, which exist in both a savory cheese version and a sweet almond milk or almond-paste version that was suitable for the vast number of fast days (Lent, Fridays, and so on) that populated the medieval Christian calendar, when neither meat nor dairy could be eaten.
The almond pastry caliscioni, for example, had both almond and cheese versions. In fact, both versions still exist today. The almond descendant is called calisson d’Aix in Aix-en-Provence, where it is now a candy made of marzipan and dried fruit, iced with egg white and sugar. Calissons have been in Provence for a while; the seer Nostradamus (in his day job as an apothecary) published an early recipe for callisson in 1555, in between prophecies. As for the cheese descendant of caliscioni, you’ve likely eaten it; now called calzone, it is a kind of pizza stuffed with cheese and baked or fried.
Out of this culinary morass arises, circa 1279, the word maccarruni, the Sicilian ancestor of our modern words macaroni, macaroon, and macaron. We don’t know whether maccarruni came from Arabic, derives from another Italian dialect word (several dialect words have a root like maccare meaning something like “crush”), or even comes from the Greek makaria.
But like other dough products of the period, it’s probable that the word maccarruni referred, perhaps in different locations, to two distinct but similar sweet doughy foods: one resembling gnocchi (flour paste with rosewater, sometimes egg whites and sugar, served with cheese), the other very much like a slightly fluffier marzipan (almond paste with rosewater, egg whites, and sugar).
The earliest recorded examples of maccarruni (or its descendant in Standard Italian, maccherone) refer to a sweet pasta. Boccaccio in his Decameron (around 1350) talks about maccherone as a kind of hand-cut dumpling or gnocchi eaten with butter and cheese. (Incidentally, this idea of lumpy gnocchi alternating with clumps of butter and cheese as metaphors for a hodgepodge of Italian and Latin was the origin of the phrase “macaronic verse.”) The fifteenth-century cookbook of Martino tells us that Sicilian maccherone was made of white flour, egg whites, and rosewater, and was eaten with sweet spices and sugar, butter, and grated cheese.
Now back to almond sweets, which by the 1500s had spread beyond Sicily and Andalusia to the rest of modern-day Italy and from there to France and then England. In 1552, in a list of fantastical desserts in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, we find hard written evidence that the word macaron meant a dessert. Shortly thereafter the name appears in English as macaroon (most sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French words ending in –on are spelled with –oon when borrowed into English, like balloon, cartoon, platoon).
What did this sweet taste like? Martha Washington’s Booke of Cookery, a handwritten cookbook that the first First Lady’s family had brought to the New World, contains the first known recipe. It was probably written in the early 1600s (notice the archaic spelling):
To Make Mackroons
Take a pound & halfe of almonds, blanch & beat them very small in a stone morter with rosewater. put to them a pound of sugar, & ye whites of 4 eggs, & beat ym together. & put in 2 grayns of muske ground with a spoonfull or 2 of rose water. beat ym together till yr oven is as hot as for manchet, then put them on wafers & set them in on A plat. after a while, take them out. [yn when] yr oven is cool, set [ym in] againe & dry ym
This recipe tells us that in the first half of the seventeenth century, the macaroon still had the rosewater and musk of its medieval Arab antecedent, lauznaj. We also see that macaroons were set on a wafer after baking, a historical remnant of the pastry shell of the earlier recipes.
Eve
n as this recipe was being written, however, modern French cuisine began to evolve out of its medieval antecedents, as cooks replaced imported medieval spices like musk with local herbs. The chef whose work is often considered the turning point in this transition was François Pierre de La Varenne, and the first completely modern recipe for macaroons comes from the 1652 edition of his cookbook, The French Cook, in which he eliminates orange water and rosewater from the earlier instantiations. He also eliminated the pastry shell; the only remnant of the former wafer is a piece of paper that the macaron sits on:
Macaron (“La maniere de faire du macaron”)
Get a pound of shelled almonds, set them to soak in some cool water and wash them until the water is clear; drain them. Grind them in a mortar moistening them with three egg whites instead of orange blossom water, and adding in four ounces of powdered sugar. Make your paste which on paper you cut in the shape of a macaroon, then cook it, but be careful not to give it too hot a fire. When cooked, take it out of the oven and put it away in a warm, dry place.
In France distinct variations for La Varenne–style macarons developed by the seventeenth century in places such as Amiens, Melun, Joyeuse, Nancy, and Niorts. In St.-Jean-de-Luz, a French Basque town just across the border from San Sebastian, Spain, we visited Maison Adam, the pâtisserie that claims to have supplied their golden-brown round “véritables macarons” to Anne of Austria when she came for the 1660 wedding of her son Louis XIV to the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain. By the eighteenth century macarons were also commonly made in convents throughout France, both as a means of sustenance and, by selling them to the public, of financial support. After the French revolution, nuns who were ordered to leave their convents established macaron bakeries to support themselves in cities like Nancy, where the Maison des Soeurs Macarons is still in business, and Saint-Emilion, where food writer Cindy Meyers writes that the Fabrique de Macarons Blanchez bakery sells macarons according to the “Authentic Macaron Recipe of the Old Nuns of Saint-Emilion.”