The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (27 page)

A macaron in the style of Nancy

Despite these minor regional variations, though, the cookie from 1650 until about 1900 was
what the
Larousse Gastronomique
calls
“a
small, round biscuit [cookie], crunchy outside and soft inside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites."

In Italy the word
maccherone
meant only pasta by this time, so the cookies had other names like
marzapanetti
(little marzipans) in Siena or
amaretti
(little bitters) in Lombardy because they were made with bitter almond.
Name mixups persisted in English
until as late as 1834, with
macaroon
sometimes used to describe the pasta and
macaroni
the cookie.

Two innovations led to the modern macaroon/macaron divide. First, in America, a fad developed in the mid-1800s for an exotic food: coconuts (or rather cocoanuts, as the word was spelled in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century because of an early confusion with cocoa). Recipes for “Cocoa-nut Cake” appear as early as 1840, but
use of coconut increased greatly
after the Civil War along with increased trade with the Caribbean and greater production of coconut oil. Emily Dickinson was a fan; she mailed her recipe for Cocoanut Cake to a friend, and her poem “The Things That Can Never Come Back, Are Several” was first drafted
on the back of another recipe for the cake
.
Dickinson’s own recipe
is written with her idiosyncratic punctuation:

Cocoanut Cake

1 cup Cocoanut ..

2 cups Flour -

1 cup Sugar -

½ cup Butter ..

½ cup Milk -

2 Eggs -

½ teaspoonful Soda

1 teaspoonful Cream Tartar

This makes one half the Rule –

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

By the late 1800s manufacturers had set up factories to produce shredded coconut and everyone was making faddish new desserts: coconut cream pie, coconut custard, and
ambrosia
(originally made from oranges, powdered sugar, and shredded coconut). Recipes for another of these coconut concoctions,
coconut macaroons, also appear first quite early
, around 1830, but don’t take off until later in the century when they become common in Jewish cookbooks. Because the cookies do not contain flour, they became a standard during Passover celebrations, so much so that
matzo manufacturers like Streit’s
and Manischewitz began selling both almond and coconut macaroons for Passover in the 1930s.

Here’s the recipe from the first Jewish cookbook in America,
Esther Levy’s 1871
Jewish Cookery Book
, in which the almond paste heretofore traditional in macaroons is replaced by grated coconut:

Coconut Macaroons

To one grated cocoanut add its weight in sugar, and the white of one egg, beaten to a snow; stir it well, and cook a little; then wet your hands and mould it into small oval cakes; grease a paper and lay them on; bake in a gentle oven.

By the 1890s, coconut macaroons appeared in many American cookbooks and became the best-selling version in America. The graph below shows the slow increase in the number of times “coconut macaroons” (any spelling) appears in the Google Ngram corpus from 1840 to 2000, with the bumps in the 1890s and 1930s and the recent rise starting in the 1960s.

Just as coconut macaroons begin to take off midcentury in American cookbooks, a new innovation happens in France.
A Parisian baker, Pierre Desfontaines
(perhaps influenced by the earlier unfilled double-macaron of baker Claude Gerbet) creates a sandwich cookie by putting almond paste or ganache between two macarons. The new cookie was called
le macaron parisien
or
le macaron Gerbet
and was quickly popularized by the pastry shop and tea salon Ladurée. Today both the macaron parisien and many different versions of the traditional single macaron are prevalent throughout France.

In the United States, macaron refers only to the new ganache sandwich cookie, leaving macaroon to describe the coconut cookie, while of course macaroni for us now means only the elbow pasta.

Macaroni
used
to have a secondary meaning. In eighteenth-century England, rich young hipsters sported outlandish hairstyles (very tall powdered wigs with tiny caps on top) and affected clothing. (My prom hairdo was bad, but this was worse.) These young aristocrats were called “Macaronis” because on their travels in Italy they acquired a taste for pasta, a then-exotic foreign food fad. This may sound familiar from the song “Yankee Doodle”; the chorus mocks a disheveled “Yankee” soldier whose attempt to look sharp was to “stick a feather in his hat and call it macaroni.”

The Macaroni. A real Character at the late Masquerade
,
a 1773 engraving by political cartoonist Philip Dawe

The Macaronis weren’t the first members of the wealthy elite to start a fad by eating exotic foreign foods. In fact, the regal or merely rich play a role in borrowing each of the foods we’ve talked about in this chapter. The Arab caliphs of Baghdad borrowed lauz
naj from the Persians, wealthy Norman and Sicilian princes borrowed marzipan and dried pasta from the Arabs, rich British dandies borrowed macaroni from Italy, wealthy Americans borrowed coconuts (and other originally expensive foods like bananas) from the Caribbean, and now we’ve copied expensive macarons from Paris.

As for the Sassanid kings of Persia, it seems that they borrowed their
lauz
nag
,
too. Lauz
nag means “containing almonds,” but using the Semitic word for almond,
lauz
, not the Persian word, a linguistic clue that
the Persians probably got the almond pastry
from their Aramaic-speaking neighbors.

These borrowings, like those of sikb
j and ketchup (and sherbet, as we will see in the next chapter), illustrate
the ideas of sociologists Georg Simmel and Thorstein Veblen
, who at the turn of the nineteenth century noticed that fancy things (food, fashion, goods, or trends of any sort) tend to be introduced first by the wealthy elite. Like the French used in the expensive menus of Chapter 1 or Chapter 2’s entrée, these newly imported luxuries function as markers of high status, exotic delicacies that only the rich can afford. Once these goods appear, Simmel and Veblen point out, the middle class naturally wants them too, and so as these foods or goods become cheaper they are consumed by more and more people and become part of the popular culture. As Rachel Laudan shows in
Cuisine and Empire
, “High cuisines were the engine of culinary change,” but high-status goods eventually
trickle down to the masses
. Thus macaronic French becomes a sign of less expensive restaurants, and coconuts and cocoa, macaroni, nougat, and almond candy (and ketchup, originally an expensive Asian import used by English aristocrats) eventually became part of our everyday lives. Macaroni and cheese, a dish once associated with the aristocracy, became the widely popular American side dish that I grew up with, a staple for Sunday dinners in the South for both African Americans and whites, and a delight of small children everywhere. Even the expensive Parisian macaron is now available at discount prices at the wholesale warehouse Costco.