The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (34 page)

Throughout Europe, however, the tendency of sweet dishes to be served toward the end of the meal was not yet a strict requirement in the Middle Ages. Many sweet dishes were served in the middle of the meal, and savories like capon pie or venison at the end. In fact the drop in the price of sugar around the turn of the sixteenth century led to an increase in sweet recipes throughout the meal (as
well as linguistic consequences—"sweet" was one of Shakespeare’s favorite adjectives). Savory and sweet were intermingled, and a leg of mutton might be simmered with lemons, currants, and sugar, or chicken might be served with sorrel, cinnamon, and sugar, as in the following recipe for “Chekyns upon soppes” (basically chicken on cinnamon toast) from the 1545 early Tudor cookbook
A Propre Newe Booke of Cokerye
:

Chekyns upon soppes
.

Take sorel sauce a good quantitie

and put in Sinamon and suger

and lette it boyle

and poure it upon the soppes

then laie on the chekyns.

From their medieval position scattered throughout the latter half of the meal, however, sweet foods began to move slowly toward their modern place at the very end of the meal. Culinary historian Jean-Louis
Flandrin carefully annotated the presence of sugar
in French recipes over time, and found a sharp drop in the use of sugar in meat and fish dishes as French cuisine developed from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, corresponding to a rise in sweet desserts. The use of sugar and fruits with meat, still prevalent in Moroccan, Persian, Central Asian, and even parts of Eastern European cuisine, slowly began to die out in France.

The year 1600 marks about the halfway point in this transition toward a modern meal; at this time, French meat dishes were still often sweetened and
dessert
mainly still used to mean a light after-dinner snack or nuts, especially fruit or nuts. We know this from the first mention of dessert in 1612 in English, where it is described as a foreign “French” word in an early health
and dietetics manual, William Vaughan’s
Natvrall and Artificial Directions for Health
: “such eating, which the French call desert, is vnnaturall, being contrary to Physicke or Dyet.”

You might applaud Vaughan’s early warning about fat and sugar in rich “foreign” desserts, but in fact dessert still didn’t yet mean all those rich foods. Vaughan was referring to fresh fruit, and expressing concern about how hard it was to digest fruit at the end of the meal unless it was thoroughly cooked. This is an opinion that my Grandma Anna would have thoroughly agreed with; dinner at her apartment in the Bronx meant boiled chicken or boiled fish with boiled potatoes, and boiled fruit for dessert. When she visited us in California in the 1970s she would pick luscious ripe apricots and peaches from the trees and promptly boil them for compote.

By a hundred years later, in the eighteenth century, the word
dessert
was borrowed into both British and American English.
In British English the word retained its meaning
of a light after-course. Given the American attitude toward food (something on the order of “Why eat an apple when you can eat an entire plate of cake and ice cream with whipped cream and chocolate syrup instead?”), you will not be shocked to know that by the time of our revolution, the word had shifted here to include more substantial sweet fare like cakes, pies, and ice cream. We know this because George and Martha Washington threw a party after Washington’s New York City inauguration of 1789, at their Manhattan mansion on Cherry Street, and Pennsylvania Senator
William Maclay put down the menu in his diary
: “The dessert was, first apple pies, puddings, etc.; then iced creams, jellies, etc.; then water-melons, musk-melons, apples, peaches, nuts.”

By the nineteenth and twentieth century, the idea that sweet things belong only in the dessert course became relatively strict in the classical French cuisine represented by Escoffier. There were
exceptions, but they were specific, like Escoffier’s
canard a l’orange
, and the vogue, especially after the rise of Nouvelle Cuisine, for duck magret with cherries or pan-seared foie gras with grapes or fruit conserves.

In American food the boundary is a bit less rigid, as Catalan super-chef Ferran Adrià once observed (
“A hamburger with ketchup
and Coca-Cola? That’s the most intense symbiosis of sweet and savory imaginable”). And there are further remnants of medieval tastes in meats, what
historian Ken Albala calls “throwbacks”
—sweet-and-sour in barbecue, brown sugar and cloves for hams, fruit sauces with duck, or meats with cranberry sauce, apple sauce, and candied yams—preserved mainly in old-fashioned meals like Christmas and Thanksgiving. The great anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz, who pioneered the modern anthropology of food, notes that these fragments “demonstrate what anthropologists have long contended—that
holidays often preserve what the everyday loses.”

Besides these exceptional cases, however, we generally eat the savory things earlier in the meal and the sweet things for dessert.

Tracing the history of dessert demonstrated that a procession of the meal through savory courses with a sweet course at the end is a recent development in European cuisine. In other words, this particular sequence, and the idea of dessert, is something that some cuisines have (modern American, ancient Persian) and some don’t (classical Greek and, as we will see, Chinese).

To explain how and in what way cuisines are different or similar, and how they change over time, I propose a theory called the “grammar of cuisine,” which suggests that a cuisine is like a language. The metaphor comes from linguistic grammar. The grammar of English, for example, consists of implicit rules that specify that adjectives tend to come before nouns (we say “hot fudge,” not “fudge hot”), or objects come after verbs (“eat chocolate” not “chocolate eat”). A
grammar defines how linguistic parts are structured into a linguistic whole.

Just as a language has an implicit grammar that native speakers know even if they can’t explain, a cuisine has an implicit structure, a set of rules about which foods go together, what constitutes a “grammatical” dish or meal in that cuisine. This implicit structure of cuisine consists of rules about how dishes are structured out of ingredients, meals are structured out of dishes, and entire cuisines out of particular flavor combinations and required cooking techniques. Each of these kinds of structuring helps explain the nature of cuisines and their similarities and differences.

We’ve already seen one aspect of the grammar of cuisine: the ordering of meals. One constraint of American and European cuisine is “dessert comes at the end” and another, related to entrée, the default ordering of the American dinner, which we might represent as a kind of “rule” with sequence of dishes (using parentheses to indicate optional dishes):

American dinner = (salad or appetizer)  main/entrée  (dessert)

This rule states that an American dinner consists of a main course, preceded by an optional salad or appetizer (or both), and possibly followed by dessert.

By contrast, French cuisine makes use of a cheese course, and a light green salad is often eaten after the main rather than before (and of course dessert at the end or, as the French say,
salé puis sucré
);

French dinner = (entrée)  plat   (salade)   (fromage)  (dessert)

Even moving one country over in Europe things change again; Italian cuisine has a distinct course (
primo
) that often consists of pasta or risotto:

Italian dinner = (antipasto)  primo  secondo  (insalata)  (formaggi)  (dolce)

Some shifts in the ordering of the American meal are even more recent. Americans used to eat salad later in the meal, much as the French still do. The late MFK Fisher, one of America’s greatest prose stylists and my favorite food writer, suggests that the modern custom of eating salad before the main course arose in California in the early twentieth century. Fisher grew up in Whittier, just east of Los Angeles, around the First World War, eating fresh lettuce salad before the meal, and writes that her “Western” custom of starting a meal with salad shocked her friends from the East Coast who all ate salad after. (Meals on the East Coast in the first half of the twentieth century might instead begin with grapefruit, a custom that my other New York grandmother, Grandma Bessie, kept to all her life.)

Despite the differences outlined above, the American and Western European meal sequences are pretty similar. By contrast, in Chinese cuisine a dessert course is not part of a meal at all. There was traditionally no exact Chinese word for dessert. The most frequently used modern translation,
tihm ban
in Cantonese, or
tian dian
in Mandarin, is most likely an extension, via borrowing from the West, of a word originally just referring to sweet snacks, not to dessert. The end of a traditional Cantonese meal, for example, is instead often marked by a serving of savory soup, or only occasionally (after the table is cleared) by fresh fruit.

This explains why the tradition of fortune cookies developed in America as dessert. Jennifer 8. Lee’s
The Fortune Cookie Chronicles
tells us that little snacks stuffed with fortunes have been eaten in Japan since the nineteenth century. But only in the twentieth century in California did they begin to be served in Japanese and then Chinese restaurants as a dessert. The grammar of cuisine explains
why: Chinese cuisine traditionally had no dessert course, and fortune cookies filled a kind of evolutionary niche for the final sweet cravings of American diners.

The lack of dessert also explains why baking and hence ovens have a much smaller role in Chinese cuisine; there were no ovens in my kitchens in China, and even now Janet’s mom uses the oven in her kitchen in the San Gabriel Valley as a convenient place to store pots.

Of course Chinese cuisine does have sweet foods, like the lovely sweet soups called
tong sui
(literally “sugar waters”), which
can
now be served as desserts, but more often act like snacks or small late-night meals. Janet and I often enjoy a one a.m. snack at my favorite sweet soup restaurant, Kowloon Tong out on Geary: the peanut soup called
fa seng wu
(
) with rice dumplings (
tongyun
), tofu curds with honey, red bean soup, tortoise jelly, although I’m not quite as fond of the Chinese red dates with frog fallopian tubes (don’t ask).