The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (30 page)

By the 1700s European languages had settled on names for the new invention, with the French word
sorbet
and Italian
sorbetto
, the linguistic descendants of the Turkish word
sherbet
, now defined as frozen fruit ices rather than syrups. Ice cream was given completely new names, made from words meaning “frozen” (Italian
gelato
), or “ice” (German
Eis
, French
glace
, and our own
ice cream
).

Sherbet, sorbet, syrup, and ice cream aren’t the only modern descendants of these ancient sharabs and sharbats. The English word
shrub
used to be the name of a lime-sugar syrup, and also a drink made by sailors by combining the syrup with rum or arrack. In fact spirits historian David Wondrich suspects the presence of shrub on board British ships as a scurvy preventative may have influenced the invention of punch, the world’s first cocktail. Shrub became widespread in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States, where raspberries were much more common than lemons. Raspberry shrub was made by boiling down raspberries, vinegar, and sugar into a syrup, which was bottled and then drunk with cold water in the summer.

Raspberry Shrub (1834)

Raspberry Shrub mixed with water is a pure, delicious drink for summer; and in a country where raspberries are abundant, it is good
economy to make it answer instead of Port and Catalonia wine. Put raspberries in a pan, and scarcely cover them with strong vinegar. Add a pint of sugar to a pint of juice . . . scald it, skim it, and bottle it when cold.

As for the word
sherbet
, in the United States it refers to a low-dairy version of ice cream;
the FDA requires that sherbet
have very low (1 to 2 percent) milkfat and recipes for homemade sherbet generally use milk instead of cream (still distinguished from sorbets, which have no dairy at all).

But sherbet still retains something of its old meaning in Britain, where powders were preferred to syrups as early as the 1840s, when street vendors in London sold what was called “lemonade” or “Persian sherbet,” but which were just lemon-flavored powders mixed with water. These powders used sodium carbonate to add a delightful fizz. Here’s a recipe a street vendor gave journalist Henry Mayhew at the time:

Lemonade

1 lb. of carbonate of soda

1 lb. of tartaric acid

1 lb. of loaf-sugar

essence of lemon

The vendors kept the mixed powders in a jar, and for a ha’penny would mix a spoonful into a glass of water drawn from a stone jar, to produce
what Mayhew called an “effervescing draught.”

Modern sherbet powder is now sold in Britain as a candy powder to be eaten, very much like the Pixy Stix or Pop Rocks that kids eat here. With candies like Pop Rocks the effervescence comes from pressured carbon dioxide. The sourness, of Pop Rocks, Kool-Aid, Tang, or the
powdered lemonade of my own childhood, however, still comes from tartaric, citric, or malic acid.

Tartaric acid and citric acid are yet other examples of borrowing from the Muslim world. Tartaric acid was first distilled from wine-making residue, and citric acid from citrus, by the Persian and Arab chemists of the eighth to tenth centuries. Citric and phosphoric acids are the source of the perkiness in modern Coke and Pepsi and 7UP as well, sodas that were originally nineteenth-century drugstore patent syrups full of medicinal ingredients not so different from the thirteenth-century Cairo apothecary syrups that began our story. (Some of these ingredients have their own linguistic history;
“cola” comes from the kola nut
, a caffeine-rich nut traded by the Mandé and other people of West Africa since the fourteenth century, and brought to the New World with slavery.)

Oh and you might even have heard of the word we used to use in English for those apothecary sugar syrups. The word was
julep
, from the Persian word
gulab
(rosewater). It’s been a word for medicinal syrup since 1400, although by now we just use it in one drink, that delightful summer refresher at the Kentucky Derby, the mint julep.

In other words, every one of the icy refreshments of our summer: ice cream, gelato, sorbet, sherbet, lemonade, sodas, mint juleps (not to mention marmalade) are children of the medieval summer syrups and sharbats of the Muslim world. Even the modern instant drinks that I mixed up from spoonfuls of powders in the suburban California summers of my childhood date back 500 years, through the street vendors of early Victorian London, all the way to the street sellers of sixteenth-century Turkey and Persia.

Something beautiful was created as saltpeter and snow, sherbet and salt, were passed along and extended from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Mughals to the Neapolitans, to create the sweet lusciousness of ice cream. And it’s a nice thought that saltpeter, applied earlier to war,
became the key hundreds of years later to inventing something that makes us all smile on a hot summer day.

On the way home from Dolores Park last summer, Janet and I stopped at a neighbor’s to get a glass of lemonade from the stand their kids had set up in front of the garage. I guess we still sell sharbats on the street here too.

Twelve

Does This Name Make Me Sound Fat?

Why Ice Cream and Crackers Have Different Names

SO FAR, WE’VE
seen a lot hidden in the language of food. The Chinese history of ketchup and the Muslim histories of sherbet, macaroons, and escabeche tell us about the crucial role of the East in the creation of the West. The way we use words like
heirloom
,
a la
,
delicious
, or
exotic
on menus tells us about how we think about social class and about the nature of food advertising. But although we’ve talked about food words in terms of their history and the adjectives we use to describe them, I’ve said nothing so far about the sound of the food words themselves.

Why would the sound of a food word tell us anything? It’s not obvious why the sounds in the name of a word might be suggestive of, say, the taste or smell of the food. Shakespeare expressed this skepticism most beautifully in
Romeo and Juliet
:

What’s in a name? that which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

Juliet is expressing the theory we call
conventionalism
: that a name for something is just an agreed upon convention. English uses the word
egg
, but Cantonese calls it
daan
, and Italian
uovo
, but if accidentally it had evolved the other way around, it would be fine as long as everyone agreed. The alternative view, that there is something about a name that fits the object naturally, that some names might naturally “sound more sweet” than others, is called
naturalism
.

Conventionalism is the norm in modern linguistics, because we have found that the sounds that make up a word don’t generally tell you what the word means. Linguists phrase this by saying that the relation between sound and meaning is “arbitrary,” a word first used by political philosopher John Locke in
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
. Locke pointed out that if there were a necessary relationship between sound and meaning, all languages would have the same words for everything, and the word for egg in English and Italian would be the same as the Chinese word.

A moment’s thought suggests another reason that conventionalism makes more sense than naturalism, at least for spoken (as opposed to signed) languages: spoken languages only have around 50 or so distinct “phones” (the distinct sounds that make up the sound structure of a language) and obviously have a lot more ideas to express than 50.

But 2500 years ago in the
Cratylus
, Plato points out that there are reasonable arguments for naturalism as well as conventionalism. Socrates first agrees with Cratylus’s position that there is an “inherently correct” name for everything for “both Greeks and barbarians.” One way to be natural or “inherently correct” is to use letters consistent with the meaning of the word. For example the letter o (omicron) is round, and “therefore there is plenty of omicron mixed up in the word
goggulon
(round).” Similarly, words with the sound
(Greek rho, ρ, which was pronounced as a rolling trilled
like modern Spanish) often mean something related to motion (
rhein
[flow],
rhoe
[current],
tromos
[trembling]).

But then Socrates turns right around and argues for the conventionalist position of Hermogenes by noting, for example, that even in different dialects of Greek words are pronounced differently, suggesting that convention is needed after all.

Linguistics as a discipline followed this latter line of reasoning, and
Ferdinand de Saussure, the Geneva professor who is one of the fathers of modern linguistics, made the principle of the “arbitrariness of the sign” a foundation of our field. But research in the last few decades, following the earlier lead of giants of linguistics from the past century like Otto Jespersen and
Roman Jakobson
, has shown us that there was something to naturalism after all: sometimes the sounds of a name are in fact associated with the tastes of food.

We call the phenomenon of sounds carrying meaning
sound symbolism
. Sound symbolism has ramifications beyond its deep philosophical and linguistic interest. Like other linguistic cues to marketing strategies sounds are crucial to food marketing and branding.

Sound symbolism has been most deeply studied with vowels, and in particular the difference between two classes of vowels,
front vowels
and
back vowels
, which are named depending on the position of the tongue when articulating the vowels.

The vowels i (the vowel in the words
cheese
or
teeny
) and
I
(pronounced as in
mint
or
thin
) are front vowels. Front vowels, roughly speaking, are made by holding the tongue high up in the front part of the mouth. The figure below left shows a very schematic cutaway of the head, with the lips and teeth on the left, and the tongue high up toward the front of the mouth.