The core of our diet is much older, and this is evident lexically. The words bread, meat, fish and cheese can be traced back to Old English, as can wine and beer. Later additions to the language are less generic, but they still strike us as having a venerable quality – we can imagine Chaucer tucking into what they denote. In Middle English we find bacon, mushroom and jelly, along with claret; Chaucer’s Summoner loves to consume ‘garleek, onions, and eek lekes, / And for to drynken strong wyn’, while in ‘The Merchant’s Tale’ the ageing January drinks several kinds of sweet wine in an attempt to boost his sexual potency. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see an influx of new items. Gervase Markham’s The English Housewife (1615) mentions ‘paste of Genoa’, which is made using soft quinces, and the recent introduction of hops, which resulted in a new distinction between ale and beer. The period’s other novelties include banana and anchovy, as well as tea, coffee and lemonade. Anchovy comes from Spanish, and is first sighted in English when Shakespeare’s Falstaff is found to have spent 2s. 6d. on an after-supper binge of wine and pickled fish. Bananas are mentioned by Purchas and Dampier, but a clue to their general unfamiliarity is Jules Verne’s explanation in Around the World in Eighty Days (published in French in 1872) that ‘the fruit … [is] as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.’ Both word and object possess a faint air of the ridiculous, which may explain the large number of colloquialisms involving them, from banana republic and banana oil (meaning nonsense) to talk of going bananas or being driven bananas. Five years after Verne’s novel, the first refrigerated ship was launched, and fresh foods of an ever greater diversity began to cross the seas.
In the eighteenth century we find meringue and ice cream; in the nineteenth, grapefruit, the Arabic kebab (an updated spelling of the older cabob) and Coca-Cola. The last of these is described, in an advertisement dating from 1887, as a ‘brain tonic and intellectual soda fountain beverage’. At five cents a glass, it was alleged to alleviate headaches and impotence. More recent accessions include Italian pizza and Arabic falafel; a slightly older one is goulash, the invention of Hungarian herdsmen – its name combining gulyas, ‘herdsman’, and hus, ‘meat’. The critical ingredient in goulash is paprika, which was introduced to Hungary by the Turks in the sixteenth century. It was initially known as Török-bors (Turkish pepper), but its Hungarian name was influenced by a Croatian word, and was the form that caught on across Europe.
A puzzling adoption, dating from the 1920s, is bistro. The Russian bystra means ‘hurry’, and it is sometimes suggested that the Russians who occupied Paris during the Napoleonic Wars would call this out when service was sluggish. Alternative explanations identify it as a word in the dialect spoken around Poitiers, meaning ‘junior servant’, or as a corruption of bistrouille, a term for low-grade eau de vie. The very mention of eau de vie is enough to set word-lovers’ tongues wagging, in any case. The reason for this excitement is that its name is a symptom of a strange and long-standing connection. The Scandinavians have their akvavit. The word whisky derives from uisge-beatha, a Gaelic calque of the Latin aqua vitae. Vodka is borrowed from Russian, and is a diminutive form of voda, meaning water. This association of water and intoxicating spirits testifies at once to the habit of identifying hard liquor as one of life’s essentials and to the tendency to pass it off as something innocent. The notion that alcohol offers health benefits is attractive; we can trace it back at least as far as the Greek physician Asclepiades in the first century BC. The semantic linkage between water and alcohol attests the latter’s symbolic and ritual use – its mythic, magical and metaphorical power.
Love of food has fostered a figurative debt to the kitchen. John Ray could record the saying ‘What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’ in 1670, while Robespierre is alleged to have been responsible for the observation that ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’54 A few words have entered the English lexicon as kitchen terms and have later become more generalized. For instance, liaison comes from the Latin ligari ‘to bind’, and was originally imported via French into the kitchen, where eggs were used to achieve the ‘liaison’ (‘thickening’) of sauces. It was first used to suggest intimate social links in the nineteenth century, and the OED cites Lord Byron as the first to use it of illicit relations – a sense adopted by his friend Shelley, who wrote of Byron’s ‘permanent sort of liaison’ with the Contessa Guiccioli.
As we can hardly fail to see, it is the French contributions to the menu that have been most profound. Menu itself was adopted from French in the nineteenth century, along with restaurant, à la carte and gourmet – the last a word that had originally meant a winetaster. From the time of the Norman Conquest at least, the techniques of French cooking have been influential. And the language of the kitchen is peppered with inimitable French words, such as aïoli, ratatouille and Provençal bouillabaisse. The last of these advertises in its name the two processes involved in making it – first boiling, then reducing (abaissement) – yet the word itself is dreamy. So is daube, a stew cooked from cold, which is named after the narrow-necked, big-bellied pot in which it is cooked, the daubière. In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf revels in describing the boeuf en daube prepared for the Ramsays by their cook: its ‘soft mass’ gives off ‘an exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice’, and Mrs Ramsay admires the pot ‘with its shiny walls and its confusion of savoury brown and yellow meats and its bay leaves and its wine’. The recipe is her grandmother’s – ‘Of course it was French. What passes for cooking in England is an abomination … It is putting cabbages in water. It is roasting meat till it is like leather. It is cutting off the delicious skins of vegetables.’
Resistance to French culinary methods has always been vociferous. Only in the eighteenth century did the sturdy sort of medievalism embodied in volumes like Robert May’s The Accomplisht Cook (1660) give way to a more progressive style, learnt from works such as François Massialot’s Le Cuisinier roial et bourgeois (1691).55 The French have written about food with a verve and sophistication unparalleled in English, and the very names of the great French food-writers are a succulent cavalcade: Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Edouard de Pomaine, Prosper Montagné, Alexandre Grimod de La Reynière, Antonin Carême. (Brillat-Savarin, however, was convinced that his own language’s resources were limited, and made a point of taking what he could from elsewhere.) English writers on the subject have tended to be more prosaic.
One of the enduring myths of the English kitchen is that Henry I died of a ‘surfeit of lampreys’ – eel-like fish that take their name indirectly from the Latin lambere, ‘to lick’, and petra, ‘stone’. It hardly conjures up a favourable picture of the national diet or eating habits. The first English cookbook, known as The Forme of Cury, was compiled around 1390 and gives such unappetising advice as ‘Cranes and Herons shul be armed with lard of Swyne and eten with gyng.’56 It also includes details of how to make a ‘salat’ out of parsley, sage and garlic, dressed with vinegar. Later volumes contained more tasty counsel. One example is Elizabeth Moxon’s successful English Housewifery (1741), which gives advice on how to pickle nasturtium buds or make a pie out of a calf’s feet. Yet practicality has always been paramount. It was a sophisticated foreigner, Brillat-Savarin, who furnished the nineteenth-century formula for a perfect dinner party, but the details were left to Mrs Beeton and The Habits of Good Society.
French food has always been served more seductively – as cuisine or, better still, haute cuisine, which translates cooking into a form of high art. The word chef is another nineteenth-century borrowing, suggestive of a presidential role far greater than the Old English cook. The Victorians soaked up French sauces – mayonnaise, béchamel, hollandaise – and acquired as well brioche, gâteau, éclair and crouton. Mayonnaise takes its name from Port Mahon in Minorca, captured by the French under the duc de Richelieu in 1756. Brie and Camembert are recorded in the fifth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which was published in 1876. Crème brûlée, first recorded
in France in the seventeenth century, became popular in Victorian Britain. Charcuterie also appears at this time, while patisserie, first attested in the late sixteenth century, becomes a common term.
Moving closer to the present, we can see the expansion of British gastronomic horizons. What links bruschetta and taleggio to crudités and salade niçoise? The answer is that the OED suggests that all are first attested in the writings of Elizabeth David, who pioneered the idea of the kitchenware shop and almost single-handedly persuaded a whole generation of Britons that food was among life’s chief pleasures. More recently, the proliferation of Indian and Chinese restaurants, together with growing numbers purveying the cuisines of Lebanon, Greece, Turkey and Japan, to name a few, have accustomed our palates to new sensations.
In the cuisine of Greece and southern India, for instance, a staple item is the soft, fleshy, smoky eggplant. This unattractive word can be traced back about 250 years. It seems originally to have referred to the white-fruited variety of the plant, although it has since been used of the dark-fruited kind. Eggplant remains the preferred term in the US, but in Britain the plant is usually known as the aubergine, and has been since the early nineteenth century. This word comes, via French, from the Catalan alberginia; the Catalan derives from the Arabic al-badinjan, which can itself be traced back to the Middle Indo-Aryan vatingana. Minus its prefix, the Arabic word also accounts for the Castilian berenjena and for the Anglo-Indian brinjal, which can still be heard in South Africa. In the Caribbean, brinjal has been corrupted into the rather more appealing brown jolly. Aubergine is much used in Italian cooking, and the Italian word for it is melanzana (‘mad apple’), which looks less remote if you change the initial letter to make it belanzana. The association between aubergines and madness is of long standing, dating back to old Arabic lore about the vegetable’s capacity to bring on melancholy.
The South Asian influence has become so entrenched that a good deal of it is hardly recognized as such. Many of us will have come across someone saying ‘What could be more English than a good curry?’ Famously, Britain’s most popular curried dish, chicken tikka masala, is unknown to Indians. In 2001 the Labour politician Robin Cook, who was Foreign Secretary at the time, gave a speech to London’s Social Market Foundation in which he celebrated Britishness. Cook cited chicken tikka masala as ‘a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences’. Explaining that chicken tikka was originally an Indian dish, he observed that the sauce was added ‘to satisfy the desire of British people to have their meat served in gravy’.57
Many twentieth-century borrowings from Indian languages have happened outside India and have shown this concern with food. ‘Concern’ may not quite capture the mood, though: as the example above shows, Indian cuisine has been enthusiastically bastardized. A large part of its international vocabulary is Urdu. The national language of Pakistan, Urdu is also the official language of Kashmir, is spoken in urban parts of Afghanistan, and can be heard in many Indian cities, such as Hyderabad and Bangalore. It will be familiar to many from the menus in so-called Indian restaurants, which are often run by immigrants from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Your lamb pasanda or karahi, your mutton korma, murgh masala, naan, paneer and creamy rogan josh are all Urdu by name and by nature. So are such familiar words as the previously mentioned nabob – first found in an English text 400 years ago – and pashmina, fashionable only since the 1990s, but in use since the Victorian era.
It is hardly a revelation that what we know of other cultures we often know through food and drink. But typically it reaches no deeper than familiarity with a few words. The nineteenth century bequeathed to the twentieth the conviction that knowing words was intrinsically a good thing – that the breadth of a person’s vocabulary signified the breadth of his or her intelligence. Knowledge of foreign words was believed to indicate sophistication, learning, cosmopolitanism. Yet it could often be little more than a smokescreen, a miasma of delusion. So it still can be. Furthermore, it has the potential to tell, obliquely yet agonizingly, of lost worlds, effaced cultures and obliterated identities.
14. Voodoo
A form of religious witchcraft, prevalent in the southern United States, ultimately of African origin
The noun probably comes from the word vodun (‘spirit’) in the Fon language, which is spoken in modern-day Benin.
In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the British Empire’s boundaries increased. The Empire came to comprise India, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, a substantial part of the Far East, and also a much greater portion of Africa, control having been gained over Kenya, Uganda, Sudan, Nigeria, Transvaal and the Orange Free State. By 1900 it comprehended 12 million square miles and around a quarter of the people on the planet. But its pre-eminence in industry and business was on the wane. All the while, the economy of the United States was growing; American productivity had soared in the second half of the century – the production of coal, for instance, climbing by 800 per cent between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the outbreak of the war with Spain in 1898. By 1914 the national per-capita income of the US was $377 a year, compared with $244 in Britain, $184 in Germany and $41 in Russia.1
Britain’s energies had been sapped by the so-called Scramble for Africa. The term, reportedly dating from 1884, summed up the madly internecine competition between Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. What had begun for the British as a mission to safeguard Indian Ocean sea routes had turned into a lust for the gold and gems buried in Africa’s interior. The continent’s promised riches could restore the nation’s balance of trade. Yet, while Britain assumed control of about a third of Africa’s population in the three decades leading up to the First World War, colonial Africa proved disappointing – a theatre for moral postures, but not the abundant mine of resources that its advocates had claimed. The climate and natural obstacles (deserts, deficient ports, apparently malevolent rivers) made settlement difficult and unattractive. The Treasury was reluctant to fund expansion, and public enthusiasm for an African strategy was meagre. The most significant products were not gold and gems, but rubber and ivory. Imports of the latter peaked in 1890, at more than 700 tons a year.2 It was used to fashion a range of consumer goods including chess sets, knife handles, billiard balls and piano keys. Such indulgent uses were symbolic of the destructive greed practised in colonial Africa. And when, in the twentieth century, the process of decolonization was played out, it too seemed to serve the gluttonous interests of Europe more effectively than it did the interests of Africans.
The lexical legacy of these scrambles into and out of Africa looks modest. It is broadly true that borrowed words of African origin have specialized uses, beyond which they have not been stretched. So, for instance, there are words like shifta, adopted from Somali to describe a group of armed nomadic freedom-fighters found in northern Kenya, and shea butter, a sort of gloop used in primitive soap-making and supposed to be a cure of rheumatism, which takes its name from the Bambara word for the tree whose kernels are its source. From Igbo comes the plant okra, the fruit of which is excellent for thickening a stew; from one of the languages of coastal Ghana, the wasting disease kwashiorkor; from Luganda, matoke, a dish of mashed green bananas. Much better known is safari, the most commonly used loanword from Swahili (it can be traced back to the Arabic safar, ‘a journey’), and from the same language we have adopted uhuru as a word to signify an African nation’s independence, piri-piri as the name for the hot red pepper sauce that tastes so good on barbecued chicken, the infectious fever dengue, the verb yam as a synonym for eat, and panga, a word for a serious-looking knife that is used for cutting undergrowth.
Knives, fevers, peculiar food: early visitors to Africa flinched from these things and spoke of the continent’s ‘strangeness’ and ‘dreadfulness’. Typical of its darker aspect was mumbo-jumbo, seemingly a corruption of the Mandingo name for a secret society. It appears in Francis Moore’s Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (173
8), and in Mungo Park’s Travels it signifies ‘a strange bugbear … much employed by the Pagan natives in keeping their women in subjection’. Jumbo was understood to signify something large and unwieldy; in due course, P. T. Barnum and Thomas Edison would coax the word in a more positive direction.3 Later contacts have given us tsetse, baobab and zebra, which come from Bantu languages, and Anglo-Zulu conflict in the nineteenth century created an awareness of other Bantu terms that have since fallen out of use. Another South African language, Xhosa, has contributed quite a number of items. Besides dagga, a word for a kind of mortar made out of mud and dung, and mbongo, a word for a political ‘yes-man’, there is tokoloshe, a delightful yet necessarily obscure term for a libidinous hairy dwarf believed to have a single buttock and a giant penis. Xhosa has also indirectly contributed the more familiar gnu and – a calque of umkhaya – homeboy.
One final word worth mentioning in this category is palaver, which first appears in journals kept by eighteenth-century seafarers. Traders and sailors picked it up in West Africa, where it was used in the local pidgins. It had been adapted by the inhabitants from palavra, the Portuguese for ‘talk’. Conversation with Portuguese traders had traditionally been quarrelsome, disputatious and uncomfortable; accordingly, palaver became a word for an argument, for complicated business, for all-round hassle. In fact palaver was the pre-colonial name for an assembly at which grievances were aired and consensus attempted – the institution has even been enshrined as part of the modern political framework of Mali – but to outsiders looking in it resembled raucous chaos, something to be dismissed rather than understood.
The Secret Life of Words Page 36