Cuisine and Language 1: Inventories
OK, now let’s begin on ten of the things that food historians might learn from historical linguistics.
Linguists estimate that there are somewhere between three thousand and ten thousand living languages, most plumping for the four or five thousand range.
How many cuisines are there? For all the outpouring of cookbooks, handbooks, and encyclopedias of food, so far as I know we have not the foggiest notion how many cuisines exist, nor have we gone about naming these cuisines (if it’s your own cuisine, it’s just what you eat). . Wouldn’t it be interesting to begin such an inventory? What about a map or maps of the world’s cuisines, now and in the past?
Of course, to make an inventory or to draw maps, we have to have criteria for deciding when two cuisines are really different, not just variants.
And that’s the point. The number of cuisines is not significant in itself. What is significant is it forces us to consider how we might differentiate cuisines, how one cuisine is related to another, how cuisines diverge, and many other questions.
By the by, I suspect there are fewer cuisines than languages. What do you think?
- What Can the Culinary Historian Learn from the Linguist? Preamble
- Cuisine & Language 2. Mutual unintelligibility means different cuisines
Fascinating question! What defines a “cuisine”?” Can we come up with a list of criteria and then map it out?
Some possible main criteria: staples, spices, techniques
Very exciting :)
Eylon, Thanks for this. A list of criteria is one way to go. There are others as well that I will come to. More soon.
Cuisine Shame.
Using language as an example, there is the phenomena of language/cuisine shame. Lowland Scots is a good example in the case of language. Large amounts of effort and money is spent on promoting Gaelic in Scotland, even in regions where is was not spoken historically. Lowland Scots (or just “Scots”), is basically ignored or actively despised, except in a few cases (like Burns’ Night), despite the fact that 10-30% of people in Scotland claim to speak Scots. It is seen as an inferior type of language, as expressed by the Education Department in the 40’s (general attitudes haven’t changed that much since then).
“…it is not the language of ‘educated’ people anywhere, and could not be described as a suitable medium of education or culture”.
So we have Scottish Gaelic, which is seen as worthy of promotion and Scots which is not. I think that a lot national/regional cuisines falls into this pattern. In addition, being seen as unworthy does not mean that a cuisine item can’t suddenly be promoted to worthiness or vice versa. Think of all the “peasant/humble origin cuisines” that are suddenly being promoted as the “true” representations of a national cuisine.
Thanks Adam. You know I did not even know lowland Scots was a language. Which just makes your point, right?
And on peasant/humble origin cuisines being promoted as the “true” representation of national cuisine, UNESCO today approved the indigenous cuisine of Michoacan as the paradigm of Mexican cuisine. The ironies . . .
> Some possible main criteria: staples, spices, techniques
Also taboos, religious or otherwise. Many peoples define themselves not just by what they don’t eat but by what they do (especially if the people just down the road do eat it).
Cuisines definitely don’t correspond exactly with languages – the boundaries can lie in different places.
Sheila, couldn’t agree more about the role of ideas in shaping cuisine. And no, you can have several languages and one cuisine (Niger Delta, for example), or one language and several cuisines (English language India with its very distinct cuisines, for example).