The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (11 page)

Take either salmon, cod, or any large fish, cut off the head, wash it clean, and cut it in slices as crimped cod is, dry it very well in a cloth, then flour it, and dip it in yolks of eggs, and fry it in a great deal of oil till it is of a fine brown and well done; take it out, and lay it to drain till it is very dry and cold. . . . have your pickle ready, made of the best white wine vinegar; when it is quite cold pour it on your fish, and a little oil on the top; they will keep good a twelvemonth, and are to be eat cold with oil and vinegar: they will go good to the East Indies.

This final note in Glasse’s recipe reminds us why this dish originated as a favorite of sailors and why it spread so quickly up the coasts of the Mediterranean. Fish sikb
j and its descendants were made of an ingredient
readily available at sea, and kept well for long periods, in this case preserved by the antimicrobial powers of the acetic acid in the vinegar, an immensely useful property in the days before refrigeration. As we’ll see in the next chapter, sailors and the need for food preservation played a similar role in the story of how an Asian salted fish developed into both ketchup and sushi, and even indirectly led to the invention of the cocktail.

By the early nineteenth century, the
Jews
began selling this cold fried fish in the streets of London. In
Oliver Twist
, first serialized in 1838, Dickens talks of the fried-fish warehouses of London’s East End:
“Confined as the limits of Field Lane
are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself: the emporium of petty larceny.”

In 1852, a
Times of London
reporter covering a story on London’s Great Synagogue complained of being forced to pass through strange Jewish alleys
“impregnated with the scents of fried fish.”
The
1846
A Jewish Manual
, the first Jewish cookbook in English, written by Lady Judith Cohen Montefiore, gives a recipe similar to Glasse’s, and distinguishes between Jewish fried fish and “English fried fish.” In “English” recipes, Montefiore tells us, the fish is dredged in bread crumbs and then fried in butter (or presumably lard, although Montefiore doesn’t talk about that) and served hot.
“Jewish” fried fish, by contrast
, is encased in an egg and flour batter and is fried in oil and served cold.

Roughly the same fried fish recipe, still eaten cold with vinegar, is considered “Jewish” as late as 1855 in Alexis Soyer’s
Shilling Cookery for the People
:

75. Fried Fish, Jewish Fashion.

This is another excellent way of frying fish
, which is constantly in use by the children of Israel, and I cannot recommend it too highly; so much so, that various kinds of fish which many people despise, are excellent cooked by this process. . . . It is excellent cold, and can
be eaten with oil, vinegar, and cucumbers, in summer time, and is exceedingly cooling.

By the mid-nineteenth century, potatoes fried in drippings came to London, probably from the north of England or Ireland. Modern fish and chips arose at the latest by 1860, as Ashkenazi Jews began to move into London and integrate Sephardic foods and customs. One of the earliest known fish and chips shops was opened by
Ashkenazi Jewish proprietor Joseph Malin
, combining the new fried potatoes with Jewish fried fish, and serving everything warm rather than cold.

The last time I was in London food writer Anna Colquhoun and linguist Matt Purver took me to an old-fashioned Dalston chippie where you can have your lovely fried haddock battered in matzo-meal batter, made from the pulverized matzos that Jewish mothers like mine still use as a breading. (It wasn’t until my twenties that I realized that matzo was not a main ingredient in other moms’ recipes for veal parmesan.)

So it seems that it’s not just melting-pot America whose favorite foods come from somewhere else. This family of dishes that are claimed by many nations as cultural treasures (ceviche in Peru, Chile, and Ecuador, fish and chips in Britain, tempura in Japan, escabeche in Spain, aspic in France) were prefigured by the ancient Ishtar worshippers of Babylon, invented by the Zoroastrian Persians, perfected by the Muslim Arabs, adapted by the Christians, fused with Moche dishes by the Peruvians, and brought to Asia by the Portuguese and to England by the Jews. And you can now find all these descendants of sikb
j, sometimes on the same block, in the ethnic restaurants that fill San Francisco and other bustling cities around the world.

I’d like to think that the lesson here is that we are all immigrants, that no culture is an island, that beauty is created at the confusing and painful boundaries between cultures and peoples and religions. I guess we can only look forward to the day when the battles we fight are about nothing more significant than where to go for ceviche.

Four

Ketchup, Cocktails, and Pirates

FAST FOOD IS
AMERICA’S
signature export, and one of its most pervasive: Every day another few outlets open in Europe or Asia, spreading the distinctively American diet to the world. It’s ironic, then, that—just like England’s fish and chips, Japanese tempura, or Spanish escabeche—America’s hamburgers, French fries, and ketchup are not even originally ours. The borrowing is clear from what we call them:
the large German contribution to American cuisine
is obvious in words like
hamburger
,
frankfurter
,
delicatessen
, and
pretzel
, while
French fries
make their Franco-Belgian origins plain.

And, of course,
ketchup
is Chinese.

Chinese food has always been important in San Francisco. The Cantonese who settled the region were from the seafaring southern coastal region of Canton, and Chinese fishing and shrimping villages dotted San Francisco Bay in the nineteenth century. But the path that ketchup took from China to America didn’t come through San Francisco at all.
Ketchup
originally meant “fish sauce” in a dialect of China’s other southern coastal region, mountainous Fujian Province, which also gave us the word
tea
(from Fujianese “te”).
Fujianese immigration to the United States has increased
in recent years, so you can now sample Fujianese dishes in Chinatowns up and down the East Coast, paired with the homemade red rice wine that is a specialty of the province. The history of this red rice wine is intertwined with that of ketchup—but while the wine has stayed
largely the same over the centuries, ketchup has undergone quite a transformation.

The story begins thousands of years ago, when people living along the coasts and rivers of Southeast Asia and what is now southern China began to preserve local fish and shrimp by salting and fermenting it into rich savory pastes. These groups didn’t leave written records but we know they spoke three ancient languages that linguists call Mon-Khmer (the ancestor of modern Vietnamese and Cambodian), Tai-Kadai (the ancestor of modern Thai and Laotian), and Hmong-Mien (the ancestor of modern Hmong). All three left
traces of their languages in the old names of many rivers
and mountains throughout southern China, and in the words and grammar of the southern Chinese dialects.

Especially further south and inland the Mon-Khmer and Tai lived on the freshwater fish that were plentiful in their rice paddies in the rainy seasons. To make it through the dry season they devised sophisticated preservation methods,
layering local fish in jars with cooked rice and salt
, covered with bamboo leaves, and left to ferment. The enzymes in the fish convert the starch in the rice to lactic acid, resulting in a salty pickled fish that could be eaten by scraping off the goopy fermented rice. Chinese historians recorded this recipe by the fifth century
CE
, and the exact same methods are still used by the Kam, a Tai-speaking hill tribe who make this dish, called
ba som
(sour fish) in the hills of China’s Guangxi province, the province where Janet’s father grew up. Anthropologist Chris Hilton, who lived with the Kam, describes a thirty-year-old ba som that literally melted in his mouth, salty but mellow like
“a Parma ham,” with a “distinct sourness.”

The Chinese people, who came from further north along the Yellow River, called these southerners the “Yi” or the “Hundred Yue,” and around 200
BCE
Emperor Wu of the Chinese Han dynasty began to expand the newly unified nation of China south and east toward the coast, invading the Mon-Khmer and Tai areas of what is now coastal Fujian and Guangdong. Chinese soldiers and colonists poured
in, pushing the Mon-Khmer speakers south into what is now Vietnam and Cambodia, and the Tai speakers west and south into Thailand and Laos, with some tribes like the Kam remaining west in the hills of Guangxi. Evidence from early Chinese sources demonstrates that it was during this period that the Chinese adopted these fish sauces; here’s one fifth-century account:

When the Han emperor Wu chased
the Yi barbarians to the seashore, he smelled a potent, delicious aroma, but could not see where it came from. He sent an emissary to investigate. A fisherman revealed that the source was a ditch in which was piled layer upon layer of fish entrails. The covering of earth could not prevent the aroma from escaping. The emperor tasted a sample of the product and was pleased with the flavor.

The Mon-Khmer and Tai speakers who remained in Fujian and Guangdong (Canton) intermarried and assimilated, becoming thoroughly Chinese but continuing to make their indigenous fish and shrimp pastes. Soon this fermented seafood was adopted widely throughout the Chinese empire and other products began to be developed there, including a fermented soybean paste (the ancestor of Japanese
miso
) that eventually gave rise to soy sauce and a paste made from the leftover fermented mash from wine making, which spread to neighboring countries as preservatives and flavoring agents.

By 700
CE
, for example, the Japanese began to use this Southeast Asian method of fermenting fish together with rice, calling this newly borrowed food
sushi
. This early fermented fish, now technically called
narezushi
in Japanese
,
is the ancestor of modern sushi. Sushi evolved to its modern fresh form in the eighteenth century as the lactic fermentation was replaced with vinegar, and again in the nineteenth century when the fish began to be eaten immediately rather than waiting for it to ferment.

Meanwhile, back in the original coastal areas of Fujian and Guang-dong,
fish and shrimp pastes remained a local specialty, as did another ancient fermented sauce: red-fermented rice (called
hongzao
in Mandarin), the lees or mash (used fermented rice) left over from making red rice wine. (The technique probably spread even further; sake lees,
sake kasu,
are used in Japan too as a marinade and flavoring in
kasuzuke
dishes like grilled kasuzuke butterfish.) Fujianese red rice wine and the resulting dishes like Red Wine Chicken, chicken browned in sesame oil with ginger and garlic and then braised in wine lees, became famous throughout China. You might like that dish too so I’m including the recipe here:

Fujian Red Rice Wine Chicken