Much more often there is borrowing of bits and pieces. Could it not be argued that much of contemporary “fusion” cuisine actually involves only the borrowing of ingredients.  Cooks use, say, Asian spices or condiments in dishes that remain Western in their basic structure.

And going back in history, would it not clarify discussions of events such as the Columbian exchange to distinguish exchange of cuisine (of which there was very little at least in the west-east direction), of technique (ditto), and of ingredients, that is stored or preserved or processed raw materials (ditto) and raw materials, that is plants and animals (of which there was a fair bit)?  I’ve blogged about this before here and here.

Languages die out.  The world is littered with dead languages, most of which are unknown to us.  Cuisines die out.  We no longer have the cuisine of Shang China, nor of the Celts, nor of the British Raj, nor of the Britain I grew up in.  (Hence my cynicism about the possibility of preserving cuisines).

Why?  All sorts of reasons in the case of language. Sometimes languages or driven underground by conquerors; sometimes, as is happening now and doubtless happened in the past, the speakers of smaller languages decline in numbers until the language is no longer viable; sometimes the social circumstances that supported them change; and sometimes over time they change so much that there is no alternative but to speak of a new language.

The general reckoning among linguists seems to be that in about a thousand years a given language changes so much that its earlier manifestation is incomprehensible to modern speakers, the history of English being an example familiar to most of us here.  Most of us get the general drift of Shakespeare without translation, can make a stab at Chaucer, and are at a complete loss with Beowulf.

Do cuisines change so much as to be unrecognizable in the same way?  It would appear so. The Greek and Roman cuisines of the ancient world had successors but these are so different that they warrant being called different languages.

Some words appear to be more resistant to change than others, such as words for the more striking parts of the body (finger), the lower numerals, close relatives (mother, father), basic natural features (sun, moon), and basic necessities (bread).[i]

Are there elements in cuisine that are similarly resistant?  Does bread in the cuisines of Europe play this role or rice in the cuisines of much of Asia.  Can we go beyond the basic staple?  Is the flavor profile, for example, very stable?

How are new languages created? Sometimes by fission from their parent languages (the Romance languages from Latin, for example).  Sometimes by fusion with different languages (perhaps Hinglish in India today). Rarely do conscious attempts to create a new language succeed (Esperanto).

What are examples of cuisines created by fission?  Perhaps Spanish cuisine of the sixteenth century was created by splitting off from earlier Roman Cuisine (though it’s not quite so simple because there was also fusion with Celtic and Germanic cuisines). Certainly American Cuisine was created by fission from British (again with fusion with German, Dutch, Italian, etc).

What are example of cuisines created by fusion? Perhaps Mexican, though I tend to think of Mexico as having two tiers of cuisine rather than a fusion cuisine.

Can totally new cuisines be created and gain currency?  I think perhaps the new European cuisine of the sixteenth century, particularly as it developed in France, fits this category.  Perhaps also Buddhist Cuisines though I’d put Christian and Islamic more firmly in the fusion category.

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[i] David W. Anthony,  The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 40.

This draws on a paper that I gave at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery in 2009 and subsequently published in the Proceedings, Food and Language.  You can find the earlier entries on inventorying cuisines, on mutual unintelligibility,  on families and sub-families of cuisine, on  being bi-cuisinal, and on the geographic expansion and contraction of cuisines.

Only rarely is it by the natural growth of the original group that speaks the language (the Pacific Island case).

More often it is by military or spiritual conquest.  Take the spread of Spanish and Portuguese throughout the world and their transformation into different varieties, Barranquenho, a Portuguese variety on the Portugal-Spain border, Portuguese- and Spanish-based creoles, Andean Spanish, and so on.[i] Clearly this expansion was closely connected with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  So too the English language spread with the British Empire in the nineteenth century.

Cuisines too  spread with the Portuguese, Spanish and British Empires.  In the case of the British Empire, it was most successful in the settlement colonies, less so in the African tropics, and even less so in India with its own vigorous culinary traditions.

Sometimes language change is forced by political powers. Consider the imposition of written Aramaic in the Assyrian and Persian empires in Antiquity. Is it possible that this, by making inaccessible the written recipes of the high cuisine of Ancient Mesopotamia, led to their demise?

Or consider Algeria where rapid political changes have caused rapid changes in language so that three generations of the same family may speak Berber, French and Arabic respectively  (thanks to Susan Park for the example).  Are there culinary equivalents?

In short, is it possible to make any generalizations about the expansion and contraction of cuisines?

Is it possible to be bicuisinal? How many people in the world are bicuisinal?   Are the reasons for becoming bicuisinal the same as the reasons for being bilingual?  How does one become bicuisinal?

Speaking from personal experience, after living, say, for twelve years in Mexico, learning a good bit about the cuisine, and listening to my walking companions (all professional women) discuss what to prepare for occasions ranging from an ordinary family dinner, a Rotary pot luck, a visit from Italian in-laws, to weddings, baptisms, and Christmas, I am still not as fluent in Mexican Cuisine as in English Cuisine.

When I am tired, I do not reach for a comal and a couple of dried chiles to make a salsa roja.  When I am planning meals for visitors, I still don’t have a good enough grasp of what to serve to whom and on what occasion to feel comfortable preparing a Mexican meal for Mexicans.  Instead I serve some version of English.

On the other hand, I would say that many middle-class Mexicans are much closer to being bicuisinal.  For centuries the maize cuisine of the indigenous has co-existed side-by-side with the wheat cuisine of Europe, a major, perhaps the dominant thread in middle-class cooking.

If the roux can give trouble (approximating “salsa gravy”  by simmering beef bones and then thickening with mashed potato) to Mexicans, so can the Mexican salsa to Americans (approximating by using canned tomatoes and sliced chiles).  Neither is morally wrong, is it necessary to say? nor do they taste bad.

They do, however, reveal a lack of understanding of the basic techniques of the other cuisine.  Even so by and large, Mexican middle class women of my generation are more bicuisinal that American or English women.

It’s much easier, obviously,  to learn a cuisine that is simply a different dialect than it is to learn a a cuisine that is in a different family altogether.  Since I grew up with English as my first cuisine, it was easy to learn American (and it would have been easy to learn Canadian or Australian).  Nor was it particularly difficult to learn French, given the common roots and constant interaction between the two cuisines for centuries.

Spanish or Italian, more distant from English, are harder. And the maize part of Mexican Cuisine more difficult yet.  For (say) the cuisines of India and China, in different families altogether, I am restricted to loan dishes.

Another way of saying this is that true fusion cuisines (not a term I like) are pretty hard to bring off.

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?

Because the topic bears on the question of how to think about the history of cuisine that lurks behind the submissions to the Intangible Heritage Program of UNESCO I have been writing about, because the Proceedings have very limited distribution, I’ve decided to post the paper here.

Today I offer the preamble.  I will follow up in the coming days with the ten suggestions and some commentary where my ideas have moved along. As always, I welcome comments.

What Can the Culinary Historian Learn from the Linguist? Ten Suggestions

Some years ago, I lived in Hawaii.  If you can penetrate the cloud of marketing put out by the tourist industry, you realize that this is one of the most multi-cultural lands on earth.

A population of only a million people is made up of roughly equal numbers of three great diasporas: one from the South Pacific, one from Europe and America, and a third from Asia.  Each of those diasporas is in itself complex: native Hawaiians, Samoans and Tongans; British, Germans, Mexicans, and Americans; and Hakka and Han Chinese, Japanese and Okinawans, Tagalog and Ilocano Filipinos, Koreans, Vietnamese and Thais, who arrived at different times and for different reasons.

With no group in the majority, with no group having cultural or economic dominance, living in a few hundred square miles of the most isolated inhabited land on earth, it was a case of learn to live together or perish.

As a result, the inhabitants of Hawaii created a creole language, known to Islanders as Pidgin and linguists as Hawaii Creole, so that they could communicate. It is now the main language in the islands, the first language of half a million people, and has its own printed literature.

They also created in lunch wagons and restaurants a fusion cuisine known to residents as Local Food. Everyone in the Islands drew parallels between cuisine and language.  A book in pidgin describing Local Food, Pupus to Da Max (roughly translatable as “everything you need to know about the foods you take to a pot luck) is a long-time best seller in Hawaii. Greeting cards chirping phrases such as “It musubi your birthday” fly off the shelves, everyone enjoying the play on the word musubi, the nori-wrapped, Spam-topped rice log ultimately of Japanese origin that is the  favorite quick lunch sold in every convenience store.[i]

The parallel creation of a creole language and a creole food made me think about the possibility that the culinary historian could learn from the linguist.

Since the study of language history goes back further–through the great scholars of the nineteenth century, the work of William Jones in the late eighteenth century, and the studies of antiquarians in the Renaissance—and has engaged more scholars than the history of cuisine, the  question is what can the culinary historian learn from the way that linguists have framed questions about the history of languages that will offer new perspectives or open up new lines of research?

The possibility that we can learn something from linguists is made yet more plausible when we consider the parallels between language and cuisine. While many different species communicate and while all species feed themselves, no other species carries these activities to the same level as humans. Human language, both spoken and written, is vastly more elaborate and complex than that of other species. Human alimentation is similarly elaborate and complex, being based on cooked, not raw foods.

Before I proceed, let me clarify a couple of issues.

First, comparing language and cuisine as means of human expression, or as ways of expressing identity, although a perfectly legitimate enquiry (indeed one to which the Hawaii case lends itself) is not my major interest. Exploring the parallels between the changing global distribution of languages and of food is.[ii]

Second, I am no expert in historical linguistics.  What I have learned I have learned from books for a general audience. I have no considered opinion on theoretical debates such as the origin of words or the emergence of syntax.

To start, we need to decide what in the culinary sphere corresponds to language.   Language is clearly a system, comprising at the least sounds, words, ways of combining words (grammar), the context in which words are used, and the meanings words are given. Because the concept “food” is so vague and general, so lacking in any sense of system, it does not seem an adequate equivalent. I propose instead to use the concept “cuisine” for the system of ingredients, rules and techniques for combining them into dishes and meals, and understandings about context and meaning.[iii]

So, OK, to many cuisine reeks of elitism and in English is used as a synonym for high cuisine. Yet since there is no good English equivalent for, say, the Spanish cocina meaning both the kitchen and the way of cooking, and since even among English speakers cuisine is increasingly used to suggest a way of cooking (as the titles of many cookbooks indicate), I think it is quite reasonable to use this as our unit of analysis.

Cuisine captures the system of the way we eat just as language captures the system of the way we communicate. Linguists defend the idea that all languages, understood as ways of expressing the needs of their users, are equal in the sense that “there is nothing intrinsically limiting, demeaning, or handicapping about any of them.”[iv] For the purposes of this paper, all cuisines too are equal in the sense that they make up the panorama of the way humans feed themselves.

Those preliminaries over, I now offer ten suggestions for research, based on lines of investigation already established in historical or comparative linguistics, that as a culinary historian I think might open up new frontiers of research or new analytical tools.

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Commentary.  Here I urge that for historical purposes scholars should treat all cuisines as equal just as linguists treat all languages as equal, since both serve the purposes of their users.  This is one reason why I feel uneasy about UNESCO essentially handing out gold stars to some cuisines and not others.  We would be very uneasy about selecting certain languages for special status.

This is not to say I am a relativist about languages or cuisines.  I think some are better than others, depending on the needs and wants of their users.  French High Cuisine served the purposes of international diplomacy extremely well.  Arctic Cuisine allowed people to survive in one of the most hostile environments possible. Both excellent for the job at hand, but apples and oranges if your aim is to rank them.

[ii] See the special section edited by Annie Hauck-Lawson in Food, Culture and Society, Spring 2004, 24-146.

[iii] Many distinguished students of food, including Jack Goody, Sidney Mintz, and Stephen Mennell, have found the term cuisine indispensable.  Since, however, there is no agreement on exactly how to define it, I feel free to use it in my own way.

[iv] David Crystal, Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6.

Brillat-Savarin, just to remind you, published in 1825 a work on gastronomy called Physiologie du Goût (in English The Physiology of Taste)  self-described as “a lasting foundation for the science of gastronomy.”  It’s been in print ever since, was translated into English by the renowned author M.K. Fisher, and as the blurb to that translation says “remains among the most comprehensive, stimulating, and plain enjoyable works ever published on the subject of the palate and its pleasures.”

Well, I just don’t get it.  Perhaps it’s that M.K. Fisher was not the ideal person to translate this.  She knew food and she knew French but she did not know the subtleties of the political and scientific words about food following the Revolution.

But I’m not sure that’s it.  Way back in my historian of science days, I spent hours and hours working through books by French intellectuals in this period–Cuvier, Lamarck, Fourier, Comte, Chateaubriand, Guizeau, among others–and found them in French or in English quite brilliant, provoking me to rage or enthusiastic agreement, but in either case pointing to questions and propounding theories that demanded attention.  Not surprising given that politically and scientifically France had transformed the world for better or worse and that this had to be confronted.

And then there’s dear old B-S.  Just such a let down.  Arch, anecdotal, derivative, and just plain boring.  And this at a time when every truism about food–truisms that were centuries or millennia old– were up for grabs.

What am I missing?

I’ll spare you the anthropologizing. But I do find it interesting to report from time to time on what is actually eaten in Mexico as opposed to the recipes presented in books for the American public. Last time I reported on what my neighbors would serve as an economical home meal. Here we’re going to the other end of the scale.

The last two days we’ve been dissecting a wedding that took place last week end. Here’s the menu, served to the 650 (yes, 650) guests in the marquee in an ex-hacienda.

To start.

Jamon serrano on Italian chapata, a polenta of some kind, and salmon with cranberries.

For the main course.

Smoked pork loin with blackberry sauce

For dessert.

A choice of different desserts

To drink.

A choice of rum, brandy, tequila or cognac plus soft drinks.

That was for the comida at the usual mid-afternoon hour. The party went on, the dancing to a live band was enjoyed by all so that about about 10 a cena was called for. For the roughly half the guests that remained, there were tacos al pastor.

I find it hard to wrap my mind around serving 650 people in a place without any kitchen facilities. And I was interested in the commentary that midday weddings were more expensive than evening ones because you had to serve two meals (though it is true that for an evening wedding you have to serve breakfast about about 5 or 6 in the morning) and because the staff and the facility have to be rented for longer.

Edit. By sheer coincidence, Bob Mrotek has a post on a rancho wedding about 30 miles away from this society wedding. Check it out. Oh those carnitas. The only way to have carnitas is from a whole, freshly slaughtered hog with all the little odd bits, the innards, the skin, the lot.

Sheila Levine masterminds the superb food and wine list put out by the University of California Press. The books are of high scholarly quality, beautifully produced, and, cheers, almost never written in a dry academic style. They range from Ted Bestor’s study of Tsukiji, the Japanese fish market, to Marion Nestle’s series of books on food politics (pet food politics being the next offering), to a reprint of Martino’s Art of Cooking, central to understanding the cooking of Renaissance Italy. If you don’t know this series, check it out.

Also look at Gastronomica, that the journals wing of the Press publishes, edited by Darra Goldstein.

Rob Arndt is in charge of Yes Press which has just one book to its credit, Culinary Biographies, edited by his late wife Alice. I was a tad skeptical when Alice told me her plans for this and twisted my arm into doing entries on Accum (see below) and Appert (the Frenchman who demonstrated the possibility of canning in the early nineteenth century). The result, however, makes compulsive reading and it was enthusiastically reviewed by the New York Times and other prestigious organs.

Opening it at random, I can go from Marion Harland, celebrity cookbook author in nineteenth-century America, to Dorothy Hartley, collector of English culinary folklore, to Nika Hazelton, German-Italian cookbook author who did much to introduce Americans to European cookery following World War II.

So if you don’t have it, it’s a book worth thinking about. And since in a few years there will be a second edition, think of suggestions for new entries. Rob particularly wants to strengthen non-American, non-European entries.

Ann Dolamore and her husband run Grub Street. It has reprinted some of the very best cookbooks of the last century, with a British emphasis, including ones by Elizabeth David, who had fame in England as great as the fame of Julia Child in the United States, Jane Grigson, who combined style, scholarship, research and great recipes whether for charcuterie, fruit, or vegetables, and Claudia Roden, of middle eastern food fame.

Less well known but just as interesting are Margaret Patten and my favorite Mary Norwak. She wrote the first cookery column I ever read on the back page of the Farmer’s Weekly no less. Her book on English Puddings Sweet and Savoury that Grub Street has reprinted ranges much more widely than the title suggests and opens the eyes to a world that has nearly gone.

Finally, there Phil Zuckerman, president of Applewood Books. He sells all kinds of interesting food books at great discounts. He reprints historic food books, mainly American and ranging much more widely than just cookbooks, and sells them at quite ridiculously low prices.

And if you visit his web site Foodsville, you can join discussion groups, do social networking (as I’ve learned to call it), and–get this–read those hundred plus reprints free. What a service.

I quickly checked out Accum’s Treatise on the Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons (1822), Bertha Haffner Ginger, California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook (194), Lafcadio Hearn’s Creole Cookery (1885), and Cheese and Cheemaking with special reference to Fancy Continental Cheeses (1896)–basically how Americans could get in on the growing cheese business.

Well, I thought, why don’t I ask my walking companions, all of them expert cooks, all of them Mexican, what they would do? So last week I explained the challenge. Here are their off-the-cuff answers.  Realize they are in shorthand with glowing descriptions, seasonings, etc. left out.

To start

A vegetable soup. For example a julienne Mexican-style. Finely slice inexpensive vegetables, chayote, calabaza (zucchini), carrots, and lightly fry in oil (for economy). Blend tomatoes, onion and garlic (standard start to all sorts of dishes). Pour over vegetables, add water, simmer until done, salt to taste.

Or a crema, the same kinds of vegetables whizzed in a blender to a cream (though no actual cream added).

Or a “dry soup” of fideos. Fry fideos (short cut vermicelli) until golden, pour over tomato-garlic-onion mixture, simmer until done.

Or of spaghetti.

For a main dish

Everyone voted for chicken as the main possibility being not only cheap but universally acceptable.

So chicken spread with mustard and mayonnaise, topped with rounds of potato and onion and baked in the oven

Or fried chicken pieces with the spaghetti.

Or albondigas (beef and pork meatballs) with a tomato chipotle sauce

Or bistek (small, thin-sliced beef, roughly US minute steak)

Or milanesa (breaded thin-sliced steak).

On the side

Overwhelmingly the favorite accompaniment was a green salad (lettuce, probably iceberg, or de-phlegmed cucumber).

Dessert

Overwhelmingly gelatina (jello in the US, jelly in the UK).

Not mentioned but probably taken for granted

A salsa of some sort with the main course.

Beans after the main course. Perhaps tortillas on the side depending on the menu.

An agua fresca (fruit water made by blending fresh fruit with lots of water and sugar to taste–think lemonade) to drink.

Commentary

1. To many, this may not look very Mexican. Where are the enchiladas, the tacos, the tostadas, etc? Well, those are not usually for the main meal among the middle class.

2. The vegetable soups. These come in wondrous and amazing variety in Mexico and are a favorite way of having vegetables.

3. The multi-course pattern. Still standard. You have much of your filler before you reach the meat course.

4. Salad has become standard, perhaps because so much lettuce is now grown for the export market.

5. Gelatina. Not to be sniffed at. It may come from a packet. But it may be made with fresh juices. Too bad it’s gone downmarket in the US and UK because it can be delicious.

And your comments?