by Dan Jurafsky
Interestingly, the East Asian lack of dessert seems to have played an important role in their results. They found that the North American ingredients with the most shared compounds are dessert ingredients like milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, eggs, cream cheese, strawberries, and peanut butter. Thus it’s possible that the difference in food pairing tendencies between East Asia and North America is caused by the fact that North America has dessert.
One last aspect of the grammar of cuisine has to do with cooking techniques rather than flavors. In Chinese cuisine, for example, ingredients need to be cooked before eating; a raw dish like a green salad just violates the structure of the cuisine. We might say that salad is “ungrammatical” in Chinese. Although salad is naturally now available in foreign restaurants (called sa leut in Cantonese), traditionally it would have been as bizarre in China to see someone munch on raw carrots or celery or bell peppers as it seems to most Americans to eat duck brains.
In early China cooking was associated with the concept of being civilized; neighboring cultures who ate their food raw were considered less civilized than those who cooked their food. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss suggested that this opposition between the raw and cooked is probably universal across cultures: that cooking is everywhere associated with civilization and with socializing and controlling nature.
But health is probably the most significant cause of the Chinese taboo on raw food, as suggested by the fact that even water is never consumed raw; it is always boiled before drinking. Drinking boiled water (and tea, with its antiseptic properties) presumably helped protect China from some of the water-transmitted epidemics suffered by the West. Americans and Europeans traditionally drank water raw, and partly as a consequence suffered epidemics of diseases like cholera until the nineteenth century when municipal water supplies began to be treated.
The Chinese cultural constraint against raw water runs very deep. Despite the fact that the municipal water in modern Hong Kong or Taipei is treated and perfectly safe and drinkable, people like my friend Fia who grew up in those very sophisticated cities still boil all their water, even keeping pitchers of preboiled water in the fridge.
The implicit cultural norms that make us think that desserts should be sweet, or that knishes should taste like chicken fat instead of butter, run just as deep. The discomfort of Fia in Taipei at the thought of drinking raw water, the shock of MFK Fisher’s friends at salad occurring at the wrong place in a meal, the disgust at frog fallopian tubes or raw carrots come from the fact that a cuisine is a richly structured cultural object, with its component flavor elements and its set of combinatory grammatical principles, learned early and deeply.
I suspect that it is the grammar of cuisine that underlies the recent fad for pork in dessert. Bacon ice cream violates an implicit rule of American cuisine, the rule that says desserts should be sweet and not meaty and savory. We delight in bacon ice cream not because this is necessarily the most delicious way to serve bacon but, at least in part, because it breaks the rules, it’s fun, it’s rebellious, it’s even . . . ungrammatical!
In fact, rebelling against these norms is one way that innovation happens. This is most evident with modernist cuisine (“molecular gastronomy” or “deconstructivist” cooking), which often uses ungrammatical dishes (popcorn soup, toffee of white chocolate and duck liver, caramelized tomato with hot raspberry jelly) as a creative tool. But consider as well the global borrowings that became our day-to-day foods like ketchup or ice cream or macaroons, borrowings that begin as an exotic import for the rich, and slowly became nativized. We haven’t yet explained what drives this nativization, what causes the specific changes in each of these foods as they adapt to their new cuisine. The grammar of cuisine is the explanation: exotic imported luxury foods became everyday dishes by changing to fit the implicit structures of cuisine. As medieval spices lost their centrality in the flavor principles of the food of Western Europe, macaroons and marmalades lost their medieval rosewater and musk. As tomatoes with sugar became one of Americas flavor principles (think ketchup, tomato soup, pasta sauce), the sweet-and-sour tomatoey version of a former fish sauce rocketed in popularity. Meanwhile in China, the grammar (remember starch+sung) led the dominant use of tomatoes to be, not ketchup or pasta sauce, but a stir-fry dish of tomatoes and eggs. The importance in European cuisine of milk and cream led to Eastern sharbats becoming Western ice creams and American sherbets. Because of the Lenten fasts central to the religion, culture, and diet of medieval Christianity, sweet-and-sour meat sikbj became fish and chips. Finally, as dessert became an integral part of our cuisine, newly imported ingredients led to new desserts like the macaroons, coconut cake, and ambrosia from newly imported coconut, or the pecan pie from native American foods like pecans. The grammar of cuisine even explains why fortune cookies, originally a small Japanese temple snack, grew into a standard dessert in American Chinese restaurants, filling the dessert gap in that cuisine for American eaters.
Dessert is more than just a sensual pleasure (even one that causes us to give higher restaurant review scores). It’s a reflection of the implicit cultural structures, the language of food hidden in plain sight, that underlie every bite we take.
Epilogue
ON ANY GIVEN Friday night there’s usually someone cooking with us at the sunny blue house on Bernal Hill; friends and family drop in to help make dinner, work our way through a new cuisine, or attempt recipes from the latest cookbook. Over the years many couples have met and eventually married while chopping garlic and ginger at our various houses and apartments, and their subsequent offspring have built gingerbread houses and stamped out cookies on the counters. The couples include Janet and yours truly; we met throwing a breakfast-for-dinner-themed cooking party and celebrate our anniversary now by cooking breakfast for dinner for everyone (having morning foods at night makes it an enjoyable violation of the grammar of cuisine).
Group cooking happens all over the world. In the Basque-speaking country of Spain where I spent sabbatical time, the private cooking clubs called txoko in Basque are a central part of the culture. (Basque, unrelated to any other languages of Europe, was illegal to speak during the Franco period, but like the Catalan language is undergoing a flowering among the younger generation.) The txoko (or in Spanish, sociedad gastronómica) was first created in the nineteenth century when members (originally only men) would get together to cook and eat at a communally organized kitchen. The clubs began in the Basque city of Donostia, San Sebastián in Spanish, but are now common throughout the Basque-speaking region. San Sebastián is set on a lovely curve of beach on the Bay of Biscay, between lush foggy green hills, and reminded me of home. Long a fishermen’s town, the city is now a brilliant center of culinary innovation, full of Michelin-star restaurants and innovative tapas (pintxos in Basque).
We were in San Sebastián a few years ago during the harvest moon. At home we celebrate the Chinese harvest moon Mid-Autumn Festival the traditional way: by inviting people over to wander outside with a drink and look at the full moon (given the tiny backyards in San Francisco, “outside” means “on the roof,” which can be a bit perilous because of the wine). In San Sebastián professor Eneko Agirre instead took us walking through the old city where we stopped at each bar for a glass of cider or the dry sparkling white wine called txakolin and a single seafood tapa: grilled squid, boquerones in vinegar, an innovative rose made out of grilled lobster in a blanket of dry-ice fog.
The food was superb everywhere, testifying to the Basques’ long obsession with seafood. As Mark Kurlansky notes in his wonderful book Cod, the Basques accidentally happened upon North America while chasing cod across the Atlantic, but didn’t bother to tell anyone because they wanted to keep the continent as a large private cod-drying rack. Food is not just an obsession of a few clubs or restaurants. Even outside of the formal txoko, there are many public kitchens available in San Sebastián for rent and group cooking is a common part of the culture.
What makes group cooking
special, whether in San Sebastián or San Francisco, is that the meal benefits from what everyone brings, quite literally, to the table: their favorite ingredients, their culinary techniques, their family spices. I’ll leave you with the thought that this “stone soup” metaphor is exactly what underlies the foods created by the great meetings of civilizations that also created our modern world. Ketchup, syrup, aspic, turkey, macaron, sherbet, and arrack are linguistic fossils of the high-class meals of Persian shahs, Baghdadi caliphs, Provençal princes, New York Astors, but also of Fujianese sailors, Egyptian pharmacists, Mexican nuns, Portuguese merchants, Sicilian pasta-makers, Amherst poets, and New York bakers, as each food passed along and changed to comply with the implicit structures of the borrowing cuisine: macaroons and marmalades losing their medieval rosewater and musk, fruit sharbats becoming luscious ice cream, vinegary meat sikbj becoming Christian fish dishes suitable for Lent. Although the foods change, the words remain behind, mementos of our deep debt to each other from our shared past, just as the word turkey reminds us of tiny Portugal’s obsession with naval secrets 600 years ago and toast and supper remind us of medieval pottages and toasty wassails.
How we talk about food also reflects human aspirations: our desire to live a healthy, natural, authentic life, to identify with our family and culture, and our deep strains of optimism and positivity. And it reflects our cognition: the link between vowel perception and the evolution of the human smile, the Gricean maxims that answer Katie’s question about what we implicate when we say too much, advertising “tomato” ketchup, overmentioning fresh or tasty on aspirational menus or health on junk-food packages.
In other words, the linguistic and culinary habits of our own tribe or nation are not the habits of all tribes and nations. Yet all languages and cultures share a deep commonality, the social and cognitive traits that make us human. These facets—respect for our differences, and faith in our shared humanity—are the ingredients in the recipe for compassion. That's the final lesson of the language of food.
Notes
Note: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED Online, September 2013, Oxford University Press) is herein referred to as OED.
Introduction
speed dates: McFarland, Jurafsky, and Rawlings (2013).
an author’s covert biases: Recasens, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jurafsky (2013).
how polite different people are on the web: Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2013).
One: How to Read a Menu
La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine: Trillin (1974), Chapter 1: The Travelling Man’s Burden, 13.
“continentalize your menu”: Seaberg (1973).
Le crabmeat cocktail: Zwicky and Zwicky (1980).
online menu collection: See Lesy and Stoffer (2013) for a beautiful sample from the collection.
“tiny, unostentatious, literary-looking lady”: The New York Times, June 3, 1906.
Astor House’s breakfast menu: The Astor House menu is available on the New York Public Library’s website, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?ps_rbk_701.
five times more than cheap restaurants: This result is based on software I wrote to analyze all 10,000 menus, using the menu prices to distinguish expensive restaurants and then examine their linguistic strategies; we’ll introduce these methods in detail a few pages from now. For more on the social role of macaronic French, see Haley (2011), 33.
We used a very large dataset: Jurafsky et al. (2013).
linguist Robin Lakoff pointed out: Lakoff (2006).
first discovered by Sibawayhi: Al-Nassir (1993), Carter (2004).
spent the rest of his life studying linguistics: Carter (2004), 10.
linguist George Zipf suggested: Zipf (1934).
Zwicky calls “appealing adjectives”: Zwicky and Zwicky (1980).
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in Freakonomics show: Levitt and Dubner (2006), Levitt and Syverson (2005).
Grice pointed out: Grice (1989). Grice actually used the word cooperative rather than rational, but that term can be confusing because he gave cooperative a technical definition, not of being “helpful,” but of participating in a particular agreed-upon communicative process.
Mark Liberman suggests: Liberman (2004).
Jane Ziegelman tells us: Ziegelman (2010).
Two: Entrée
“A couple of French terms”: Davidson (1999), 281.
“We might . . . follow fashion in food”: Braudel (1981), 189.
modern French definition: Rey (2011), entry for entrée.
“Cest que fault pour faire”: Flandrin (2007), 182. Menus drawn from Livre fort excellent de cuysine tres-utile & profitable contenant en soy la maniere dabiller toutes viandes. Avec la maniere deservir es banquets & festins. Le tout veu & corrige oultre la premiere impression par le grant Escuyer de Cuysine du Roy (Lyon: Olivier Arnoullet, 1555).
Beef Palate with Gooseberries, etc.: Flandrin (2007), 66–68.
“Ducks in Ragout,” etc.: Scully (2006).
The Compleat Housewife: Smith (1758), appendix. Figure © The British Library Board. 1037.g.9, f.415
a newly borrowed foreign word: The OED entry for entrée gives this quote from Verral: “Roasted ham. For this entrée is generally provided a new Westphalia or Bayonne ham.”
It was called a menu: OED entry for menu.
This service à la Russe took over: Flandrin (2007), 94–95; Colquhoun (2007), 251–56.
hors d’oeuvres began to be served earlier: Flandrin (2007), 76, 101.
menu . . . is from 1907: Image courtesy of the New York Public Library. Miss Frank E. Buttolph Menu Collection.
the newly built Blanco’s: Edwords (1914).
beloved fan dancer Sally Rand: Shteir (2004).
“insidious concoction”: Wondrich (2007), 73.
here at the old Bank Exchange: Toro-Lira (2010).
Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf: Miss Frank E. Buttolph Menu Collection, New York Public Library.
small 14-paged roast section: Escoffier (1921), 257–456, 469–75.
the modern Larousse Gastronomique: Larousse Gastronomique (2001).
“Ce mot ne signifie pas du tout”: Montagné and Gottschalk (1938).
sociologists call cultural omnivorousness: Peterson (1992); (2005). Haley (2011) suggests that this movement began as early as the turn of the twentieth century and was led by the middle class rather than the elite.
find the best kind of fish sauce: Johnston and Bauman (2007).
Google Ngram corpus: The Google Ngram corpus is at http://books.goo gle.com/ngrams. The original paper describing it is Michel et al. (2011).
Three: From Sikbj to Fish and Chips
Chinese fishing villages: “Chinese Fisheries in California,” Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Arts, Vol. I (January 21, 1954), 48.
Croatian methods: Briscoe (2002), 65.
Chilean and Peruvian miners introduced techniques: For the history of Chileans and Peruvians in the gold rush, see Chan (2000).
Diccionario de la lengua española: Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua española, vigésima segunda edición.
King Khosrau and Borzya: Library of Congress image LC-USZ62-58235.
an extensive canal system: The famous canals of Baghdad are described in Campopiano (2012) and Adams (1965).
Persia was at the center of the global economy: For more on the Sasanian period, see Yarshater (2000), Eilers (2000), and Watson (2000).
In one story, Khosrau sent a great number of cooks: The legend comes from Baghdad, 400 years after Khosrau’s time, in Nasrallah (2007), chapter 49.
from Nawal Nasrallah’s translation: Nasrallah (2007).
Meat Stew with Vinegar (sikbj): Here I’ve simplified and shortened Khosrau’s sixth-century Persian recipe as given by Al-Warruq, based on Nasrallah (2007), 248–49, Laudan (2013).
acetic acid is a potent antimicrobial: Entani et al. (1998).
Recipes for meat stews on these clay slabs: Bottéro
(2004), 85–86; Zaouali (2007), 23.
Caliph al-Mutawakkil was once sitting: Waines (2003).
The Book of the Wonders of India: Freeman-Grenville (1981).
of fish made out of gold, with ruby eyes: Freeman-Grenville (1981), story 41: The History of Ishaq, 62–64.
The Treasury of Useful Advice: Marin and Waines (1993). Translations from Zaouali (2007).
Medieval Cuisine of the Islamic World: Zaouali (2007).
Fish sikbj, Egypt, 13th century: Zaouali (2007), 98.
in southwestern France for scabeg, written in Occitan: Lambert (2002). The recipe is from a cookbook written in Occitan and Latin, Modus Viaticorum Preparandarum et Salsarum (How to Prepare Foods and Sauces), from the last decades of the fourteenth century.