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A review by jwsg
The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky
4.0
I love food lit and most of the books I’ve read from the genre have approached the topic through personalities (think all the chef memoirs or food writer memoirs), place/culture, or well, through ingredients and the dishes created from them. Jurafsky’s book examines food through the lens of language.
The bulk of the book centres on how the name of certain foods and ingredients can give us a clue as to their origins and how they have evolved to what we are familiar with today. So we learn about how ketchup, that tomato based condiment, has its origins in the fermented fish sauces of Southeast Asia. And how these fermented fish sauces inspired such diverse foods as sushi in Japan and Indonesian sauces like kecap manis. Or why the bird we know as a turkey seems to be named after a country, whatever language you use (e.g. turkey in English, dinde in French, hindi in Turkish, dik habash (Ethiopian bird) in Arabic, and Peru in Portuguese. Or that fish and chips, ceviche and tempura all have their origins in a sweet and sour stewed beef dish with vinegar that one of the Persian rulers in the 6th century loved to eat. Fascinating stuff.
But what Jurafsky also does in his book is to give you an appreciation for what he calls the “grammar of cuisine”, or how different cultures categorise ingredients and structure their meals very differently. These categorisations determine how ingredients are combined in a particular cuisine, creating that particular flavor profile of the cuisine. In terms of meal structure, there are broad similarities in American and European cuisine, where there are appetizers, a main and a dessert at the end. There are some differences: in Italy for instance, the grammar of the cuisine is such that there is a distinct pasta/risotto course, the primo before the meat based course, the secondo. In Chinese cuisine by contrast, the grammar of the cuisine is based not on distinct courses, but on two categories of ingredients – starch (e.g. rice) and non starch (sung). I’ve grown up eating both Western meals and Chinese cuisine and never really thought about how food was categorized and how meals were structured very differently until I read Jurafsky’s book. One of those observations that is basic and mind-blowing at the same time (why did I never think about that?).
The bulk of the book centres on how the name of certain foods and ingredients can give us a clue as to their origins and how they have evolved to what we are familiar with today. So we learn about how ketchup, that tomato based condiment, has its origins in the fermented fish sauces of Southeast Asia. And how these fermented fish sauces inspired such diverse foods as sushi in Japan and Indonesian sauces like kecap manis. Or why the bird we know as a turkey seems to be named after a country, whatever language you use (e.g. turkey in English, dinde in French, hindi in Turkish, dik habash (Ethiopian bird) in Arabic, and Peru in Portuguese. Or that fish and chips, ceviche and tempura all have their origins in a sweet and sour stewed beef dish with vinegar that one of the Persian rulers in the 6th century loved to eat. Fascinating stuff.
But what Jurafsky also does in his book is to give you an appreciation for what he calls the “grammar of cuisine”, or how different cultures categorise ingredients and structure their meals very differently. These categorisations determine how ingredients are combined in a particular cuisine, creating that particular flavor profile of the cuisine. In terms of meal structure, there are broad similarities in American and European cuisine, where there are appetizers, a main and a dessert at the end. There are some differences: in Italy for instance, the grammar of the cuisine is such that there is a distinct pasta/risotto course, the primo before the meat based course, the secondo. In Chinese cuisine by contrast, the grammar of the cuisine is based not on distinct courses, but on two categories of ingredients – starch (e.g. rice) and non starch (sung). I’ve grown up eating both Western meals and Chinese cuisine and never really thought about how food was categorized and how meals were structured very differently until I read Jurafsky’s book. One of those observations that is basic and mind-blowing at the same time (why did I never think about that?).