The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (24 page)

Why should a simple seasoning be so pervasive in our language? The answer is that the main use of salt throughout human history was to preserve foods. Cabbage salted into sauerkraut could last through the winter. Salted sausages, salami, ham, salt pork, and salted fish (like the salt cod called
bacallao
in Spanish) were able to last long enough to allow merchants and soldiers to travel across Europe and cross the Atlantic and the Pacific.

In the ancient European world, salted pork products were a specialty of the Celts. The geographer Strabo said that hams from the Celtic regions of France and Spain were famous in Rome, and
Westphalian hams from formerly Celtic regions of what is now Germany
were as beloved in Rome then as they are in modern times.

The salt is still there in the names for these pork products, most obviously in “salt pork,” but it’s there in Italian
salami
and
salumi
too, both formed from the root
sal
(salt) plus the noun-forming suffixes
–ame
and
–ume
. And it’s there in the word
sausage
, which we got from French, from late Latin
sals
cia
, originally from the phrase
salsa isicia
(salted
isicia
).
Isicia
was a kind of forcemeat, croquette or fresh sausage; there are recipes for isicia in
Apicius
.
Salsa isicia
was thus the dried salted preserved version of this sausage.

Salt is even there in corned beef, the salted beef famously associated with the Irish, modern descendants of the ancient Celts. Corned beef has nothing to do with maize. The word
corn
in Old English originally meant a “particle” or “grain”
of something (in fact it is the etymological cousin of the words
grain
and
kernel
), and here refers to the grains of salt used to preserve the beef.

Salting fish to preserve it is probably even more ancient than salting
meat, like the ancient fish sauces of Asia or the fish sauce called garos in Greek and garum in Latin eaten hundreds of years
BCE
.
Salt cod was a huge staple of the Middle Ages
, and played a central role in the economies of Europe and in the slave trade, where its use as a cheap food source resulted in the prevalence of salt cod in the modern cuisines of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and other Caribbean nations (and its availability in grocery stores in the Latin American neighborhoods of most American cities like San Francisco).

Until about 1800 then, preservation meant salting (or smoking, or soaking in vinegar, or candying in sugar), and food preservation was essential for a population to get enough to eat. Starting around 1790, two major scientific and technical advances led to superior methods of food preservation. The first was around 1790 when Nicolas Appert, a French confectioner who was used to boiling down syrups, thought to apply the boiling method to other foods in glass jars. He perfected the method by 1810, when he won an award from the French government and wrote
a book explaining how to preserve soups and stews
(pots-au-feu), a filet of beef, chicken and partridges, vegetables, fruit, and milk in glass jars. The second advance was refrigeration, invented in stages through the nineteenth century, widespread in commercial breweries by the 1880s, in meatpacking by 1915, and by the mid-twentieth century available to every American household.

The result of both inventions was that salt was much less important in food as a preservative. Since vegetables and meats, raw or cooked, can be canned or frozen, salt is now only needed for taste. But we’ve grown accustomed to salty foods. The Jewish foods I grew up on (lox, whitefish, herring,
pastrami
, corned beef) are all salted, preserved foods that we continue to eat even though fresh salmon, beef, and other fish are all perfectly available (and cheaper). As Bee Wilson says in her delightful
Consider the Fork
,
“Bacon serves no real purpose in a refrigerated age
, except that of pleasure, which can never be discounted.”

The history of flour tells us a similar story. Coarse medieval bolting left plenty of bran even in the most refined white flour, so even the rich got plenty of fiber from white flour. Only with the replacement of stone grist mills with
metal roller mills that completely removed bran
and germ has modern white flour become totally refined and optimally unhealthy.

The linguistic histories of
flour
and
salt
thus remind us of our ancient love for refined and salted foods. Yet English also offers us a hint about a different kind of seasoning. The word
season
or
seasoning
didn’t originally mean anything about adding salt or even spices or herbs to our food to add flavor. The word meant just what it sounds like:
season
comes from French
saison
, in the original meaning “to ripen fruit according to the seasons.” So although I adore refined white flour and salt (after all, it’s hard to beat a freshly baked sourdough baguette or the salty umami savor of fish sauce) these linguistic histories are a little reminder to enjoy the ripe fruits and seasonal vegetables and to go easier on those white powders.

Ten

Macaroon, Macaron, Macaroni

SPRING IS BEAUTIFUL
in San Francisco. The wild garlic and fennel cover Bernal Hill, Dianda’s Italian American Pastry down on Mission Street augments their usual delicious
amaretti
and
ricciarelli
with their special St. Honore cake for Easter, it’s Persian New Year (
Nowr
z
) and the Chinese Qingming Festival, and my family prepares for Passover, which means coconut macaroons.

For the last few years the city has also been full of another, trendier, macaroon: the Parisian macaron, a delicate pastel confection made of two almond cookies sandwiched with ganache
.
Parisian macarons are in every fancy pâtisserie and San Francisco, never a place to miss out on a trend, even has
macaron delivery
. The fad for these pricey chic French almond macarons has upstaged their humble relative, the chewy coconut macaroon.

Why this sudden fad for the expensive macaron, and how is it related to the humble coconut macaroons of my childhood? And why do both these words sound so much like macaroni? The answer involves not only a story of a favorite food created at the nexus of great civilizations, like sikb
j, ketchup, or turkey, but also a link to the important role of social status that we discussed in the chapters on menus, entrée, and potato chips.

The story begins in the year 827, when Arab and Berber troops from Ifriqiya (modern Tunisia) landed in Byzantine Greek–speaking Sicily, establishing a Muslim emirate that introduced many technologies (like paper) and foods (lemons, oranges, rice, pistachios, sugar cane)
to Europe. By then Sicily had been famous for its food for a thousand years; Plato commented on the superb Sicilian cuisine in his
Republic
(404d). The Arabs added to this culinary background, bringing a selection from the rich repertoire of nut-based sweets of the medieval Muslim world: the chewy nougats that became Italian
torrone
, Spanish
turrón
, American Snickers candy bars; the powdered starchy
f
l
dhaj
that is the ancestor of Turkish Delight; and the most famous of all,
lau
z
naj
.

Lauz
naj was a confection of almonds ground together with sugar, mixed with rosewater, and wrapped in a delicate pastry. The chefs of the Abbasid Dynasty in Baghdad had
borrowed lauz
naj from the Sassanid kings of Persia
, who ate sweets like this for
Nowr
z
.
Nowr
z
, literally “new day,” was the first day of the new year in the pre–Islamic Persian calendar, celebrated on the vernal equinox. The sixth-century Sassanid king Khosrau, who loved sikb
j, also delighted in lauz
naj, which he called
the “best and finest” pastry
.