The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (40 page)

 
“
turkey well drest
”
:
Tusser (1573).

 
compared the “wilde Turkies” to “our English Turky”
: Smith and Bradley (1910), 60; Forbush and Job (1912), 489.

 
owes more to the autumn harvest festivals
: Baker (2009), Chapter 1; Smith (2006), 73; Ott (2012), ix.

 
Thanksgiving was linked in schools and newspapers with the Pilgrims
: Smith (2006), 67–82.

 
By 1658 an English pumpkin pie recipe
: Brook (1658).

 
Pompkin. One quart stewed and strained
: Simmons (1796), 28. For a very engaging and comprehensive history of the pumpkin, see Ott (2012).

 
Texas Pecan Pie. One cup of sugar
:
Ladies Home Journal
15, no. 8(July 1898), 32. http://books.google.com/books?id=LKwiAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA36-IA36.

 
pie crust filled with egg yolks, cream
: Recipe for “Pasteis de leite” in Newman (1964), 16; Austin (1964), 53.

 
Two pecan maps
: Based on the research of Bert Vaux and Joshua Katz: Katz (2013), Vaux (2003).

 
African American chef and food writer Edna Lewis
: Lewis (1976), 159.

 
archaeological evidence of pots from early slave settlements
: Yentsch (1994; 1995).

Seven: Sex, Drugs, and Sushi Rolls

 
pails of hot chicken tamales
: Peters (2013), 32.

 
sample from a positive restaurant review
: I’ve subtly modified the wording in both reviews to preserve anonymity as much as possible.

 
my colleagues on the menu study
: Jurafsky et al. (2014).

 
With computer scientists Julian McAuley and Jure Leskovec
: McAuley, Leskovec, and Jurafsky (2012).

 
how much more often a word occurs in good reviews
: The method we use, the weighted log odds ratio with informative Dirichlet prior (Monroe, Colaresi, and Quinn [2008]) involves a few other statistical tricks, like accounting for variance and controlling for how often we expect the words to occur by chance given their general frequency in English.

 
Linguist and lexicographer Erin McKean notes
: Erin McKean quoted in Teddy Wayne, “Obsessed? You’re Not Alone,”
The New York Times
, March 22, 2013.

 
“The girls nowadays indulge in such exaggerated statements”
: Montgomery (1915), 95.

 
more adjectives to describe pain than pleasure
: Rozin and Royzman (2001), 311.

 
vocabulary to describe people we dislike
: Leising, Ostrovski, and Borkenau (2012).

 
smaller vocabulary for smell
: Ankerstein and Pereira (2013).

 
richer olfactory vocabularies
: Another olfactory rich language is Aslian, spoken on the Malay peninsula: Majid and Burenhult (2014).

 
Cantonese is particularly rich in words for negative smells
: The word list and definitions are adapted from de Sousa (2011).

 
“perhaps the world’s oldest extant gastronomic treatise”
: Dunlop (2008), 106; Knoblock and Riegel (2000), 308–9.

 
“the variety of olfactory sensations experienced by their ancestors”
: de Sousa (2011).

 
genes coding for the detection of specific odors
: Gilad, Przeworski, and Lancet (2004).

 
grassy smell of sauvignon blanc
: McRae et al. (2012).

 
ability to detect the sulfurous smell of asparagus
: Pelchat et al. (2011).

 
biased to be especially aware of negative situations
: Rozin and Royzman (2001), 311.

 
Linguist Douglas Biber has shown
: Biber (1988; 1995).

 
the pioneering work of Texas psychology professor James Pennebaker
: See Pennebaker (2011) and Pennebaker, Booth, and Francis (2007).

 
Pennebaker and his colleagues identified
: Stone and Pennebaker (2002); Gortner and Pennebaker (2003); Cohn, Mehl, and Pennebaker (2004).

 
there are a lot of ways for things to go wrong in life
: Peeters (1971); Unkelbach et al. (2008).

 
Robert Parker began to emphasize the sensual pleasure
: McCoy (2005).

 
Literature professor Sean Shesgreen says
: Shesgreen (2003).

 
link between junk-food cravings and drug addiction
: Rozin and Stoess (1993); Rozin, Levine, and Stoess (1991); Hormes and Rozin (2010); Johnson and Kenny (2010); Ziauddeen, Farooqi, and Fletcher (2012); Stice et al. (2013).

 
Adam Gopnik
: Gopnik (2011), 254.

 
occur more frequently
: Have a higher log odds ratio.

 
Strauss found that Korean food commercials
: Strauss (2005).

 
The link between dessert and sex
: See, for example, Hines (1999).

 
Chris Potts has shown that this skew
: Potts (2011), Pang and Lee (2008).

 
the
Pollyanna effect
:
Boucher and Osgood (1969).

 
positive words are (on average) more frequent than negative words
: Rozin, Berman, and Royzman (2010); Augustine, Mehl, and Larsen (2011).

 
unmarked form is much more likely to be positive
: Zimmer (1964), 83.

 
When people forward news stories
: Berger and Milkman (2012).

Eight: Potato Chips and the Nature of the Self

 
“one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet”
: Moss (2013).

 
craft authenticity
:
Carroll and Wheaton (2009). See also Beverland (2006); Beverland, Lindgreen, and Vink (2008); and Johnston and Bauman, (2007).

 
Pierre Bourdieu, whose famous book
Distinction
:
Bourdieu (1984).

 
traditional
authenticity
:
“Design Notebook: Peter Buchanan-Smith and the Urban Ax,”
The New York Times
, June 30, 2010. See also Gilmore and Pine (2007) and Potter (2010).

 
ordering a plate of ketchup as his entire meal
: Roman (2010), 6.

 
“threw forty-seven raw eggs across the kitchen at my head”
:
Ogilvy (1963), 35–38.

 
“Don’t use highfalutin language”
: Ogilvy (1963), 141.

 
“not just who they are, but who they want to be”
:
Peters (2012), xiv.

 
working-class –
in
’ suffix
: Labov (1966).

 
appealing to more upscale voters
: Lisa Miller, “Divided We Eat,”
Newsweek
, November 22, 2010. http://www.newsweek.com/2010/1½2/what-food-says-about-class-in-america.html; Torjusen et al. (2001).

 
What they call the
interdependent self
:
Markus and Conner (2013).

Nine: Salad, Salsa, and the Flour of Chivalry

 
the Russian word for hospitality
: Smith and Christian (1984).

 
thousands of years of salt taxes
: Kurlansky (2002).

 
a grinding stone from Syria
: One of the British Museum’s quern stones from Abu Hureyra, Syria: http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pe/q/quern_stone_for_making_flour.aspx.

 
Anglo-Saxon
hlaf-dige
(loaf-kneader)
:
OED
entries for
lord
and
lady
.

 
bolting cloths
: David (1977).

 
“White was his face as payndemayn”
: Chaucer,
Tale of Sir Thopas
, line 35.

 
Payn purdyeu
: Hieatt (1988), 79.

 
“receive the flower of all, and leave me but the bran”
: Shakespeare’s
Tragedy of Coriolanus
, Act I, Scene I.

 
brown bread was looked down upon even by the poor
: David (1977), 48–49. See also the Worshipful Company of Bakers website, http://www.bakers.co.uk/A-Brief-History.aspx.

 
samidu
(high-quality meal)
: The exact definition of
samidu
and
semidalis
are still not clear; scholars disagree whether they both meant a finely ground flour or conversely one that was high quality by being dense and nourishing. See, for example, Sallares (1991), 323.

 
Yale Culinary Tablets
: Bottéro (2004).

 
Yiddish word
zeml
:
Marks (2010), 632.

 
“à la meunière”
:
OED
entry for
meunière
.

 
borrowed from Provençal
salada
:
OED
entry for
salad
.

 
Salat (c. 1390)
: From the
Forme of Cury
, in Hieatt and Butler (1985), 115.

 
“
If you eat it [cabbage] chopped
”
:
Cato (1934).

 
cookie
,
cruller
,
pancake
,
waffle
, and
brandy
:
Van der Sijs (2009).

 
“has a very pleasing flavor and tastes better than one can imagine”
: Benson (1987), 609.

 
Apicius
, a fourth-century Latin collection of recipes
: Grocock and Grainger (2006).

 
and scholar Charles Perry tells us
: Perry (1987), 501.

 
French
saulce vert
was made of parsley
: Scully (1988), 223.

 
Le Menagier de Paris
:
Greco and Rose (2009), 322.

 
Escoffier’s French
sauce verte
:
Escoffier (1921), 31.

 
Green Goddess Dressing
: Phillip Roemer, the Palace Hotel, San Francisco.

 
in a volume written over 800 years ago in 1190
: Wright (1857), 102.

 
Westphalian hams from formerly Celtic regions of what is now Germany
: Martial talks about the hams of the Menapians, a people in Flanders not far from the famous ham-producing region of modern Westphalia in Germany.