Food tales
Source of Recipe
Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
Recipe Introduction
If only our meals could talk.
On the downside, they might be tempted to almost spitefully spit out the
list of costs and calculations and dangers that commercial meals are now
required to provide: from calories to fat grams, sodium to cholesterol. But
if the mood struck our meals to be nice, they might tell us how things came
to carry the names they do.
There are many strange terms applied to ingredients and techniques used in
the kitchen, especially those that only seem strange because they were
borrowed from other cultures, other languages, sometimes even other
alphabets. Yet, in a sense, foreign terms are the most straightforward. In
the American vocabulary, foods that sound perfectly common sometimes have
the weirdest stories to tell.
Some of the
things you probably use often. Others are things you may never use. But once
you know the stories behind these, you may never assume that things simply
are what they're called again.
List of Ingredients
Allspice: As bakers should understand well, this is actually one spice, not
a collection or mixture of all spices. Though it's used in cuisines around
the world, allspice is native to Jamaica, where most of the stuff in
circulation continues to be grown. And in Jamaica, they don't even call it
allspice.
The people who grow it know it as "pimento," a sure recipe for confusing it
either with the Spanish word for pepper or those soft, marinated red things
sold in jars. Happily, the first non-islanders to taste the spice a few
hundred years ago declared that it tasted like a blend would taste if it
were made from all spices. The name formed quick, and it stuck -- everywhere
on Earth but Jamaica.
Bain marie: If you've ever constructed and used the French classical version
of a double boiler, then you, too, have spent time in "Mary's bath." It's
actually a pan full of near-boiling water into which some other vessel is
placed, so delicate sauces can be heated and chocolate can be melted without
danger of burning. The French phrase was adopted as is into English by cooks
in the early 1800s. But historically, it isn't about fixing dinner at all.
"Bain marie" is a direct translation of the Latin balnium Mariae, the name
given by medieval alchemists to the device they used trying to transmute
base metals into gold. The Mary in the name was not Mary, the mother of
Jesus (despite attempts to tie the gentleness of the person and the name
together), but Mary or Miriam, the sister of Moses. Alchemists liked the
idea of naming their mysterious "double boiler" after a woman in the Hebrew
Scriptures said to know the future.
Croissant: If you've ever noticed the similarity between the French pastry
called croissant and the everyday American crescent roll, then you're on the
road to understanding the name in history. In 1686, you see, Turkish
soldiers of the Ottoman Empire sought to overrun Budapest, Hungary, by
burrowing under the city's fortifications. Most of the city was asleep in
these predawn hours, but not the bakers of Budapest. Then as now, theirs was
the early shift.
These bakers not only alerted the city to the attack but also created
something like the current flaky pastry to commemorate their contribution to
the victory. The name may merely describe the crescent shape of the pastry,
but it's a specific reference to the crescent of the defeated Ottomans'
flags.
Dessert: Young writers always have trouble deciding when something is
spelled "dessert" (the final sweet course of a meal) and when something is
spelled "desert" (an arid and usually deserted piece of real estate). The
two words apparently have no connection. And besides, dessert is seldom
deserted.
Dessert is linked, instead, to the same Latin words that give us the phrase
"He got his just deserts." The root actually means to "un-serve" or to "remo
ve." So far from being a glowing culinary term, the word dessert began life
as something that showed up while the dishes and cutlery were being removed.
Apparently there was something of a popular vote involved, as it didn't take
dessert long to be something longed-for, not just something tolerated.
Enchilada: Historians guess that enchiladas, or something like them, have
been eaten in Mexico for hundreds of years. But the word didn't enter
popular usage, even in Mexico, until it was discovered from visitors from
the north in the late 19th century. It describes one of the bedrocks of
Mexican cooking: a tortilla filled with meat, cheese and sauce made from
chili peppers.
The path into English is so smooth that we might almost translate enchilada
as "enchilied," or at least as "filled with chilies." Interesting, the
word"tortilla" turns up in both Spanish and English accounts more than two
centuries earlier than anybody fesses up to eating an enchilada.
Fritter: If you've ever been accused of "frittering away your time," you're
not actually being accused of making the best fritters in this or any other
town. The Latin root of that expression means to "fracture" your schedule,
to break it up into seemingly useless fragments. The fritter that means
meat, seafood, vegetable or fruit battered and then fried in oil has a
different story to tell.
The Latin word frigere gives us our beloved word fry, as we see with the
13th-century French dish fricandeau (fried veal) or the South African dish
frikkadel (fried meatball). Beginning in the early 15th century, fritter and
any variation meant simply "fried thing." In our culture, as in others
before it, that is meaning enough.
Gyro: Surprisingly, there weren't any gyros (or "gyro sandwiches," if you
insist on redundancies like "pizza pie") served in Greece until American
tourists demanded them. Gyros and their name were the creation of
Greek-owned lunch counters in the United States, which were indeed serving a
dish known in Greece as souvlaki and other things.
A sandwich produced by roasting marinated lamb (or some compressed mixture
of lamb and other meats), slicing it and rolling it into a pita, the gyro
clearly draws upon the same Greek word guros that gives English both
gyroscope and gyrate. It's interesting to ponder that the word gyro
(properly pronounced something like yee-row) may have frustrated Americans
enough that they pinned a mangled version on a sandwich of their own. As the
French coquetier (egg cup) begat the alcoholic "cocktail," the Greek gyro
begat the hero.
Recipe
Hamburger: It takes no genius to see that the all-American hamburger must
have had something to do with Hamburg, Germany, just as the sandwich had
something to do with England's Earl of Sandwich. But what?
The people of Hamburg, it turns out, knew little what to do with (or on) a
sesame seed bun, but they did know how they liked their beef -- ground and
formed into a patty.
The hamburger arrived in the American vocabulary in 1834, via Delmonico's
restaurant in New York. For a long time, the bun was a rarity, as we learn
from numerous references to "hamburger steak." Steak in the style of
Hamburg. Burg is the German word for fort, while Ham is the German word for
port. So each double-with-extra-cheese we devour is actually a telling
tribute to Germany's famous Port Fort.
Iceberg lettuce: If only the Titanic had smashed into lettuce, instead,
Leonardo di Caprio would never have become "king of the world." In the past
decade or so, iceberg has become the lettuce we love to hate, replaced in
the public eye by more colorful and usually more flavorful salad greens.
The name "iceberg" clearly refers to the pale white of each head's inner
leaves, along with the fact that the stuff is almost always chilled when it
reaches our table. Though watercress, Belgian endive, escarole and Romaine
now rule the roost, this "crisphead" lettuce (as opposed to soft
"butterhead") remains the best leaf to wrap around a Chinese stir-fry with
water chestnuts, bamboo shoots and black mushrooms.
Jerusalem artichoke: Conversationally, the Jerusalem artichoke is often
compared to the Jordan almond. The Jordan almond isn't from Jordan, but at
least it has sense enough to be an almond. The Jerusalem artichoke is
neither from Jerusalem nor an artichoke.
This vegetable is a tuber like the common potato, with roots (literally and
figuratively) in North and South America. Introduced to the dining rooms of
Europe in 1617, it became the girasole articiocco in Italian because it
tasted like artichoke and because its flower followed the sun throughout the
day just like a sunflower (girasole). Within three decades of its embrace by
Europe, the English were already mispronouncing girasole ... "Jerusalem."
Ketchup: It's hard to think of any condiment more all-American than ketchup,
the stuff of a zillion French-fry fantasies. Except that the word isn't the
least bit all-American, whether we go with "ketchup," "catsup" or, looking
back to 1690, "catchup." The real story takes us to a portion of
southeastern China that spoke a dialect called Amoy.
This lingo gave the English language the word pekoe (for a tea the locals
treasured) and also the word ke-tsiap, meaning "brine of a pickled fish."
Obviously, Britons and finally Americans felt a need to adjust not only the
spelling but also the basic recipe.
Lobster: Can you think of any modern restaurant that would invite its guests
over to a tank to pick out the nicest-looking locust for dinner? Yet thanks
to a primitive system of classification devised by no less a mind than
Aristotle in the fourth century B.C., the words "lobster" and "locust"
started out synonymous. Both critters, you see, looked enough alike for
Aristotle, and both had blood that wasn't red.
By the time Old English came around, the word locusta (for the now-prized
10-legged shellfish) and the word loppe (for eight-legged spider) apparently
got together to form lopystre. The road to "lobster" was clear enough by
this point, but that didn't stop the ancient locust confusion from finding a
home in langusta, langostino and a dozen other variants lifted unlocustlike
from the briny deep.
Muffin: The word sounds warm and welcoming, perhaps reminding us of our
mothers. But history assures us this word's origins are warmer still. Both
in England and in the United States, despite differences in favored recipe,
"muffin" derives from the medieval Latin word muffula. It meant not snack
but fur-lined glove, a reference we see even now in "muffler" -- the kind
around our necks in winter, not the kind on our cars.
At various times, the allusion may have been to Latin mufro (a type of
sheep), to French moufle (a mitten) and finally to English "muff" (a fur
cylinder for warming the hands). There was enough of a similarity between
these cylinders and the baked item that the name crossed over. "Muffin"
means little muff.
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