The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (12 page)

2 tablespoons sesame oil

1 large knob of ginger, sliced

3 smashed and peeled cloves of garlic

3 chicken thighs, each cut through the bone into 3 pieces

3 tablespoons red rice wine lees

½ cup Fujian red rice wine (or Shaoxing rice wine)

2 tablespoons soy sauce (to taste)

1 teaspoon brown sugar (or pieces of Chinese rock sugar)

Salt to taste

4 dried shitake mushrooms, reconstituted in about ½ cup boiling water, removed and sliced, reserving the water

Heat sesame oil and sauté ginger and garlic until fragrant. Add chicken and sear the chicken pieces until browned, then flip and brown the other side. Push chicken aside, fry the red wine lees briefly until fragrant, then add the wine, soy, mushrooms, and mushroom liquid, stirring until the chicken is well coated. Turn the heat to low and simmer 10 or more minutes or until chicken is done and sauce begins to thicken, stirring occasionally.

By the year 1200
CE
, this shrimp-paste and red-rice eating region of Fujian became the bustling center of seafaring China. The port city of Quanzhou was one of the greatest and richest in the world, filled with Arab and Persian traders who prayed at the city’s seven mosques. Quanzhou was the start of the Maritime Silk Road, and Marco Polo marveled at the vast number of ships in the harbor as he passed through on his way from China to Persia. By the fifteenth century Fujianese shipwrights built the great treasure fleet of Chinese Admiral Zheng He that sailed to Persia and as far as Madagascar in Africa, and Fujianese-built ships took Chinese seamen and settlers to ports throughout Southeast Asia.

In Southeast Asia, fermented fish products rather than soy products had remained the most popular seasonings, and the Vietnamese, Khmer, and Thai had developed many sophisticated fermented seafood products, like the fish sauce called
nuoc mam
in Vietnamese or
nam pla
in Thai, a pungent liquid with a beautiful red-caramel color. Fish sauces occur in Europe and the Middle East as well, probably developing independently of the Asian sauces. The ancient
Babylonians had a fish sauce called
siqqu
, and classical Greece had a sauce called
garos
that probably came from their colonies along the Black Sea, a region that is still famous for salted fish products like caviar.
Garos
became the Roman fish sauce
garum
, eaten and made throughout the Roman world. The garum from Hispania was particularly prized; you can go tour the ruins of the garum factories under the streets of Barcelona.

One of the most prized modern fish sauces comes from Phu Quoc, a Vietnamese island off the coast of Cambodia in the Gulf of Thailand. Janet and I visited fish sauce factories there on our honeymoon, driving our motor scooter across the island in the rain to the old corrugated steel sheds along the river, the moist warm air pungent with the stench of fermenting fish. It’s all very romantic.
Anchovies from the
gulf were mixed with salt in huge ancient wooden tanks 10 feet high, painted bright Asian red but otherwise looking (at least to a couple of San Franciscans) like wine tanks in a Napa winery, with thoroughly modern stopcocks bored in and hoses snaking everywhere for mixing the sauce as it ferments.

Maybe these sixteenth-century
Fujianese traders and seamen saw some of the same factories
, and in any case they loved the fish sauce too, naming it
ke-tchup
, “preserved-fish sauce” in Hokkien—the language of southern Fujian and Taiwan. (
Hokkien, Cantonese, and Mandarin are as linguistically different
from each other as, say, Italian and French. I once took cooking classes in Taiwan, where Mandarin
is the official language but Hokkien is very widely spoken; the other students had to translate into Mandarin for me when the chefs drifted into Hokkien. I did manage to learn how to make Hakka braised pork belly and keep my wok clean.)

A Chinese oceangoing junk
running before the wind
From Zhou Huang’s
Liuqiu Guo Zhi Lue (Account of the Ryukyu Islands),
written in 1757

Of course, Hokkien isn’t written with the Roman alphabet, which explains why there are so many different spellings:
ke-tchup
,
catsup
,
catchup
, and
katchup
are all attempts by English, Dutch, or Portuguese speakers of the time to capture the sounds of the Chinese word. The word
ke-tchup
has died out of modern Hokkien, although I was still able to find it in old
missionary dictionaries from the nineteenth century
. The syllable
tchup—
pronounced
zhi
in Mandarin—still means “sauce” in Hokkien and in Cantonese. The syllable
ke
means “preserved fish” in Hokkien.
Ke
also looks like part of the Cantonese word for tomato,
faan-ke
, but that’s a coincidence, since Chinese dialects have lots of words that sound like
ke
and tomatoes weren’t added to the sauce until more than a century later.

Fujianese settlers took ke-tchup, soy, and their fermented red rice with them to Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. In Indonesia, they established
Chinese sauce-making factories
, small family businesses that fermented soy sauce and fish sauce. Soon the word
kecap
was adopted by Indonesians. It must have originally been borrowed from Hokkien in its original meaning of “fish sauce,” but as other sauces became more prominent over the intervening 400 years, kecap has generalized its meaning and now in Bahasa Indonesia, the language of Indonesia,
kecap
just means “sauce” (sweet soy sauce is
kecap manis
, fish sauce is
kecap ikan
, and so on). Linguists call this kind of generalization “semantic bleaching,” because part of the meaning (the salty fish part) got bleached out. (Almost the exact same kind of bleaching happened in the history of the English word
sauce
, which comes from the Latin word
salsus
originally meaning “salted”; just as in the Indonesian case, generalizing from meaning a briny sauce to meaning just any sauce at all.)

The red rice mash changed as well, turning out to be useful for more
than just a flavoring for clay pot dishes. The immigrants began to turn red rice wine into
arrack
, an early ancestor of rum, distilling the fermented rice together with molasses and palm wine. The word
arrack
comes from the Arabic
‘araq
(sweat), and is related to words for other distilled spirits like anise-flavored Levantine
arak
and the Croatian plum brandy
rakia
, as we’ll see. Arrack is a bit fiery and rough
,
as befits its archaic nature; you can taste it for yourself, since Batavia arrack (van Oosten brand) is still imported.

Chinese factories were established to make arrack on Java and Sumatra, using the Chinese pot still, a traditional Chinese method that boils the wort and drips the resulting arrack as condensing steam through tubes. The customers were presumably local, other Chinese and native Javans, or at least they were until two more groups of people wandered into Batavia and Bantam: British and Dutch merchants who had come to Southeast Asia looking for spices, textiles, and porcelain. Liquor was not yet well known at this time in England; this was before the invention of gin, and although Ireland and Scotland had already been drinking
usquebagh
, spirits in England were still purely medicinal.
Edmund Scott, an English trader on Java
, thus described arrack as “a kind of hot drink that is used in most of those parts of the world instead of wine.” British sailors in the tropics mostly drank sour wine and even sourer beer due to the fact that neither stood up well to tropical heat (even with the extra hops of India Pale Ale, a type of beer that in any case wasn’t developed until a few hundred years later).

Thus when Scott learned of arrack in 1604 from the Chinese tavern-keeper next door who distilled it in a backyard shed for his customers it was a revelation. Distilled spirits don’t go bad in the tropical heat, and they don’t oxidize. While this made arrack an exciting discovery for the British in general, this revelation wasn’t such a happy one to Scott himself. Under the cover of the noise of boiling water and clamor of tubs full of mash in the distilling shed, the Chinese tavern-keeper next door tunneled under Scott’s warehouse to steal the treasure Scott had buried
in jars: 3000 silver Spanish pieces of eight from the mines in Bolivia, the same silver mines from which, 250 years later, Chilean and Peruvian miners brought mining techniques to the California gold fields of 1849. But I digress.

Before long the British were buying immense quantities of arrack, despite its expense; after all, navies full of British sailors needed something to drink, and rum hadn’t yet been invented. The Chinese settlements in Java were concentrated in Batavia (modern-day Jakarta), and it was here that the main industrial production occurred. Almost immediately, around 1610, arrack became the main ingredient in what cocktail historian David Wondrich calls
“the original monarch of mixed drinks”
: punch—a combination of arrack, citrus, sugar, water, and spice. Wondrich thinks this first cocktail was likely invented by British sailors, making good use of the lemons they were supplied with as the recently discovered cure for scurvy, and punch quickly became the
“common drink”
of all Europeans in Asia.

While acquiring a taste for arrack and punch, British sailors acquired a taste for something else they bought from Chinese merchants in Indonesia: ke-tchup. Shipboard fare—salt pork and the dry crackers called hardtack—was pretty bland, so ke-tchup may have helped enliven their diet, but it’s also possible traders just figured they could market it back home as an exotic Asian sauce
.
The British had a trading post in Bengkulu on Sumatra in the 1690s and one of the earliest recipes for ketchup in 1732 is for “Ketchup, in Paste. From Bencoulin in the East Indies.” It’s therefore likely that it is at one of such posts on either Java or Sumatra that the word
ketchup
first came into English.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, fish sauce and arrack had become as profitable for British merchants as they were for Chinese traders, as we see from the reports of a trader for the East India Company, Charles Lockyer, who traveled to Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, China, and India in 1703. His
An Account of the Trade in India
, a kind of vade mecum for would-be global capitalists, explains the vast sums of money
to be made in Asia, and how to get rich by bargaining with the Chinese and other foreigners: