by Dan Jurafsky
Pour faire de bonne Limonade
Sur une pinte d’eau mettez trois jus de Citron, sept ou huit zestes, & si les Citrons sont gros & bien à jus il n’en faut que deux, avec un quarteron de Sucre, ou tout au plus cinq onces; lorsque le Sucre est fondu & le tout bien incorporé, vous le passerez a la chausse, le ferez rafraichir & le donnerez a boire.
To make good lemonade
Add the juice of three lemons to a pint of water, along with seven or eight zests, and if the lemons are fat and full of juice you’ll only need two, with a quarter pound of sugar, or at most five ounces. When the sugar has dissolved and is completely incorporated, strain it, chill it, and offer it to drink.
So where did the idea and the technology come from for freezing these sherbets and lemonades to become the fruit ices that we now call sorbets or sherbets? Yes, people had been putting ice and snow into drinks to cool them for over 4000 years, but freezing sweetened fruit juice or cream requires a much lower temperature than just ice can achieve. (Pure water freezes at 0° C, but every gram of sugar added to a liter of water drops the freezing point by about 2° C.) Obviously liquid nitrogen, the darling freezing technology of modernist hipster cuisine, was not available in the sixteenth century.
The insight came from fireworks. In the ninth century, during the Tang dynasty, the Chinese first realized that saltpeter (potassium nitrate) could be mixed with sulfur and coal to create the explosive mixture we now call gunpowder. Gunpowder was quickly adopted by the Muslim world, where potassium nitrate was called “Chinese snow” in Arabic.
It was in the Arab world rather than in China that the process of purifying and refining potassium nitrate was perfected, and it was in Damascus that it was discovered, probably by the physician Ibn Ab Usaybi’a, in his 1242 History of Medicine (Uyn al-nb)—although he credits a lost work from an earlier Muslim physician, Ibn Bakhtawayh, from 1029—that saltpeter had refrigerating properties: when potassium nitrate (saltpeter) is added to water, it chills the water. Dissolving salts like potassium nitrate (KNO3) in water breaks the bonds between the potassium and nitrate ions, but it takes energy to break these bonds, and so heat is drawn from the surrounding water. This endothermic reaction, the basis of the modern cold pack, can drop the temperature of the water enough to freeze pure water, although not low enough to freeze fruit ices or ice cream.
An intimate character study of the Mughal Emperor Akbar, 1542–1605, drawn late in his life
By the early sixteenth century this discovery was widely used in Muslim India to chill water for drinking. At this time most of what is today northern and central India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as parts of Afghanistan, was ruled by the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. The Mughals were originally Turkic speakers from central Asia, and the royal line that conquered Delhi traced their descent from Genghis Khan (Mughal was the Persian word for “Mongol”), but had adopted the Persian language and culture. By the time of Akbar, the Persian-speaking court at Agra was a center for the arts, architecture, and literature. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata were translated from Sanskrit to Persian during this period, and Akbar’s keen interest in painting and architecture led to the development of styles of art that mixed Persian, Hindu, and European forms. Like many places where scientific and culinary innovation and mixing flourished (Moorish Spain, early Norman Sicily), Akbar’s reign was a beacon of relative religious tolerance, in which the tax on non-Muslims was eliminated and other religions were allowed self-government. Agra was steamy hot (as was his later court in Lahore), and drinks were cooled by spinning a long-necked flask in saltpeter-water. Here’s a 1596 description from the records of his empire, the Ain-I-Akbari:
Saltpetre, which in gunpowder produces the explosive heat, is used by his Majesty as a means for cooling water, and is thus a source of joy for great and small . . . One sér of water is then put into a goglet of pewter, or silver, or any other such metal, and the mouth closed. Then two and a half sérs of saltpetre are thrown into a vessel, together with five sérs of water, and in this mixture the goglet is stirred about for a quarter of an hour, when the water in the goglet will become cold.
Very quickly this idea of using saltpeter to cool water was adopted in Italy. Blas Villafranca, a Spanish physician working in Rome published the idea in 1550, saying that this saltpeter bath had become the common method of cooling wine in Rome. The figure on the previous page shows the method, with a bulbous flask clearly adapted from the Indian flasks. This shape makes it easy to turn the bottle in the cold bath, speeding up the cooling.
A goglet and bucket for cooling, from Blas Villafranca’s Methodus Refrigerandi ex Vocato Sale Nitro Vinum Aquamque (“Method for Cooling Wine and Water with Saltpeter”), after similar Mughal goglets
In 1589 the next step in ice cream technology was taken by the Neapolitan Giambattista Della Porta. In the second edition of his Magia Naturalis he experimented with adding saltpeter to snow rather than to water. The result successfully froze watered wine:
Wine may freeze in Glasses
Because of the chief thing desired at feasts, is that Wine cold as ice may be drunk, especially in summer. I will teach you how Wine shall presently, not only grow cold, but freeze, that you cannot drink it but by sucking, and drawing in of your breath. Put Wine into a Vial, and put a little water to it, that it may turn to ice the sooner. Then cast snow into a wooden vessel, and strew into it Saltpeter, powdered, or the cleansing of Saltpeter, called vulgarly Salazzo. Turn the Vial in the snow, and it will congeal by degrees.
Della Porta’s combination was a happy accident; it was not saltpeter’s endothermic reaction with water that caused cooling when mixed with ice, but a completely different chemical property. Adding a solute (a dissolved substance; practically anything will do) lowers the freezing point of water, by interfering with the crystal structure of the ice. Adding salt or potassium chloride slowly draws water out from its crystal mixture, and since the freezing point is lowered, turns into a salty slush. The phase shift from solid to liquid takes energy (another endothermic reaction), resulting in an even colder freezing brine that reaches -20° C, easily cold enough to freeze ice cream or fruit ices.
Sometime between 1615 and 1650, the Neapolitans combined the liquid Ottoman sherbets with the newly invented saltpeter-and-ice freezing method, resulting in a new food: frozen sherbets or frozen sorbets. The idea of freezing other liquids like milks and custards soon followed. We don’t have any of these early Italian recipes, the way we have early English and French recipes, but evidence for the Italian innovation comes from French ice cream makers like Nicolas Audiger who reported having to travel to Italy to learn how to make ices. Soon afterward the Italians also figured out that common salt worked better than saltpeter for freezing (salt is a smaller molecule than saltpeter; the smaller the molecule, the more ions from each gram of solute interfere with freezing); by 1665 the English chemist Robert Boyle said that “a Mixture of Snow and Salt” was the method “much employ’d” in Italy to chill drinks and fruit, “though little known, and less us’d here in England.”
By the 1700s European languages had settled on names for the new invention, with the French word sorbet and Italian sorbetto, the linguistic descendants of the Turkish word sherbet, now defined as frozen fruit ices rather than syrups. Ice cream was given completely new names, made from words meaning “frozen” (Italian gelato), or “ice” (German Eis, French glace, and our own ice cream).
Sherbet, sorbet, syrup, and ice cream aren’t the only modern descendants of these ancient sharabs and sharbats. The English word shrub used to be the name of a lime-sugar syrup, and also a drink made by sailors by combining the syrup with rum or arrack. In fact spirits historian David Wondrich suspects the presence of shrub on board British ships as a scurvy preventative may have influenced the invention of punch, the world’s first cocktail. Shrub became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, where raspberries were much more common than lemons. Raspberry shrub was made by boiling down ra
spberries, vinegar, and sugar into a syrup, which was bottled and then drunk with cold water in the summer.
Raspberry Shrub (1834)
Raspberry Shrub mixed with water is a pure, delicious drink for summer; and in a country where raspberries are abundant, it is good economy to make it answer instead of Port and Catalonia wine. Put raspberries in a pan, and scarcely cover them with strong vinegar. Add a pint of sugar to a pint of juice . . . scald it, skim it, and bottle it when cold.
As for the word sherbet, in the United States it refers to a low-dairy version of ice cream; the FDA requires that sherbet have very low (1 to 2 percent) milkfat and recipes for homemade sherbet generally use milk instead of cream (still distinguished from sorbets, which have no dairy at all).
But sherbet still retains something of its old meaning in Britain, where powders were preferred to syrups as early as the 1840s, when street vendors in London sold what was called “lemonade” or “Persian sherbet,” but which were just lemon-flavored powders mixed with water. These powders used sodium carbonate to add a delightful fizz. Here’s a recipe a street vendor gave journalist Henry Mayhew at the time:
Lemonade
1 lb. of carbonate of soda
1 lb. of tartaric acid
1 lb. of loaf-sugar
essence of lemon
The vendors kept the mixed powders in a jar, and for a ha’penny would mix a spoonful into a glass of water drawn from a stone jar, to produce what Mayhew called an “effervescing draught.”
Modern sherbet powder is now sold in Britain as a candy powder to be eaten, very much like the Pixy Stix or Pop Rocks that kids eat here. With candies like Pop Rocks the effervescence comes from pressured carbon dioxide. The sourness, of Pop Rocks, Kool-Aid, Tang, or the powdered lemonade of my own childhood, however, still comes from tartaric, citric, or malic acid.
Tartaric acid and citric acid are yet other examples of borrowing from the Muslim world. Tartaric acid was first distilled from wine-making residue, and citric acid from citrus, by the Persian and Arab chemists of the eighth to tenth centuries. Citric and phosphoric acids are the source of the perkiness in modern Coke and Pepsi and 7UP as well, sodas that were originally nineteenth-century drugstore patent syrups full of medicinal ingredients not so different from the thirteenth-century Cairo apothecary syrups that began our story. (Some of these ingredients have their own linguistic history; “cola” comes from the kola nut, a caffeine-rich nut traded by the Mandé and other people of West Africa since the fourteenth century, and brought to the New World with slavery.)
Oh and you might even have heard of the word we used to use in English for those apothecary sugar syrups. The word was julep, from the Persian word gulab (rosewater). It’s been a word for medicinal syrup since 1400, although by now we just use it in one drink, that delightful summer refresher at the Kentucky Derby, the mint julep.
In other words, every one of the icy refreshments of our summer: ice cream, gelato, sorbet, sherbet, lemonade, sodas, mint juleps (not to mention marmalade) are children of the medieval summer syrups and sharbats of the Muslim world. Even the modern instant drinks that I mixed up from spoonfuls of powders in the suburban California summers of my childhood date back 500 years, through the street vendors of early Victorian London, all the way to the street sellers of sixteenth-century Turkey and Persia.
Something beautiful was created as saltpeter and snow, sherbet and salt, were passed along and extended from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Mughals to the Neapolitans, to create the sweet lusciousness of ice cream. And it’s a nice thought that saltpeter, applied earlier to war, became the key hundreds of years later to inventing something that makes us all smile on a hot summer day.
On the way home from Dolores Park last summer, Janet and I stopped at a neighbor’s to get a glass of lemonade from the stand their kids had set up in front of the garage. I guess we still sell sharbats on the street here too.
Twelve
Does This Name Make Me Sound Fat?
Why Ice Cream and Crackers Have Different Names
SO FAR, WE’VE seen a lot hidden in the language of food. The Chinese history of ketchup and the Muslim histories of sherbet, macaroons, and escabeche tell us about the crucial role of the East in the creation of the West. The way we use words like heirloom, a la, delicious, or exotic on menus tells us about how we think about social class and about the nature of food advertising. But although we’ve talked about food words in terms of their history and the adjectives we use to describe them, I’ve said nothing so far about the sound of the food words themselves.
Why would the sound of a food word tell us anything? It’s not obvious why the sounds in the name of a word might be suggestive of, say, the taste or smell of the food. Shakespeare expressed this skepticism most beautifully in Romeo and Juliet:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
Juliet is expressing the theory we call conventionalism: that a name for something is just an agreed upon convention. English uses the word egg, but Cantonese calls it daan, and Italian uovo, but if accidentally it had evolved the other way around, it would be fine as long as everyone agreed. The alternative view, that there is something about a name that fits the object naturally, that some names might naturally “sound more sweet” than others, is called naturalism.
Conventionalism is the norm in modern linguistics, because we have found that the sounds that make up a word don’t generally tell you what the word means. Linguists phrase this by saying that the relation between sound and meaning is “arbitrary,” a word first used by political philosopher John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke pointed out that if there were a necessary relationship between sound and meaning, all languages would have the same words for everything, and the word for egg in English and Italian would be the same as the Chinese word.
A moment’s thought suggests another reason that conventionalism makes more sense than naturalism, at least for spoken (as opposed to signed) languages: spoken languages only have around 50 or so distinct “phones” (the distinct sounds that make up the sound structure of a language) and obviously have a lot more ideas to express than 50.
But 2500 years ago in the Cratylus, Plato points out that there are reasonable arguments for naturalism as well as conventionalism. Socrates first agrees with Cratylus’s position that there is an “inherently correct” name for everything for “both Greeks and barbarians.” One way to be natural or “inherently correct” is to use letters consistent with the meaning of the word. For example the letter o (omicron) is round, and “therefore there is plenty of omicron mixed up in the word goggulon (round).” Similarly, words with the sound (Greek rho, ρ, which was pronounced as a rolling trilled like modern Spanish) often mean something related to motion (rhein [flow], rhoe [current], tromos [trembling]).
But then Socrates turns right around and argues for the conventionalist position of Hermogenes by noting, for example, that even in different dialects of Greek words are pronounced differently, suggesting that convention is needed after all.
Linguistics as a discipline followed this latter line of reasoning, and Ferdinand de Saussure, the Geneva professor who is one of the fathers of modern linguistics, made the principle of the “arbitrariness of the sign” a foundation of our field. But research in the last few decades, following the earlier lead of giants of linguistics from the past century like Otto Jespersen and Roman Jakobson, has shown us that there was something to naturalism after all: sometimes the sounds of a name are in fact associated with the tastes of food.
We call the phenomenon of sounds carrying meaning sound symbolism. Sound symbolism has ramifications beyond its deep philosophical and linguistic interest. Like other linguistic cues to marketing strategies sounds are crucial to food marketing and branding.
Sound symbolism has been most deeply studied with vowels, and in particular the difference between two classes of vowels, front vowels and back vowels
, which are named depending on the position of the tongue when articulating the vowels.
The vowels i (the vowel in the words cheese or teeny) and I (pronounced as in mint or thin) are front vowels. Front vowels, roughly speaking, are made by holding the tongue high up in the front part of the mouth. The figure below left shows a very schematic cutaway of the head, with the lips and teeth on the left, and the tongue high up toward the front of the mouth.
By contrast, the vowel α (as in large, pod, or on) is a low back vowel; this sound is made by holding the tongue lower in the back part of the mouth; other back vowels are ο (as in bold) and (as in the word coarse or my mother’s New York pronunciation of caught). The figure at right on the preceding page shows a very schematic tongue position for these vowels; lower in general, and more toward the back of the throat.
A number of studies over the last 100 years or so have shown that front vowels in many languages tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words that refer to big, fat, heavy things. It’s not always true—there are certainly exceptions—but it’s a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little, teeny, or itsy-bitsy (all front vowels) versus humongous or enormous (back vowels). Or the i vowel in Spanish chico (front vowel, meaning “small”) versus the in gordo (back vowel, meaning “fat”). Or French petit (front vowel) versus grand (back vowel).