The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (4 page)

Linguist
Mark Liberman suggests
that we think of this overmentioning as a symptom of “status anxiety.” Expensive restaurants don’t use the word
ripe
(or
fresh
or
crispy
) because we assume that food that should be ripe is ripe, and everything is fresh. Middle-priced restaurants are worried that you won’t assume that because they aren’t fancy enough, so they go out of their way to reassure you. Protesting too much.

We can see a similar implication of Grice’s idea in the use of the word
real
on menus. You’ll find the word on lots of menus, but exactly which foods the restaurants claim are “real” depends sharply on the price. Cheap restaurants promise you real whipped cream, real mashed potatoes, and real bacon:

Chocolate Chip Pancakes:
served with
real whipped cream.

Home Made Meatloaf:
Served
with Real Mashed Potatoes, Vege
tables, and Gravy.

Chicken Cutlet:
Melted Swiss Cheese on a Roll with Lettuce, Tomato, Russian Dress
ing and Real Bacon Bits.

In slightly more expensive ($$) restaurants, real is used mainly to describe crab and maple syrup:

California Roll:
real crab and avocado

Blueberry Whole Grain Pancakes:
With real maple syrup

By contrast,
real
is barely used at all for more expensive ($$$ and $$$$) restaurants. This isn’t because the bacon isn’t real at these restaurants, but rather because consumers already assume that the bacon and whipped cream and crab are real. For a pricy restaurant to call its crab “real” would be to suggest that its realness might be in question and has to be defended. Once again, Grice’s principle is in play: if a restaurant says the butter is real, there must be a reason to say so, and a normal reason you might go to the trouble of saying that something is real is that you are worried the person you’re talking to thinks it’s fake and you want to reassure them. Expensive restaurants certainly don’t want to imply that any of their customers might think their butter is fake.

The history of which foods are called “real” or “genuine” on menus is a mini lesson on what was considered valuable enough to create a fake substitute. The 1990s had real bacon (not Bacon Bits). The 1970s and 1980s had real whipped cream (not Cool Whip) and real sour cream (not Imo). The 1960s menus had real butter (not margarine). The 1940s and 1930s had genuine calves’ liver.

Around 1900 the foods most frequently called “real” or “genuine” weren’t any of these. Back then it was fake beer and fake turtles that people were worried about. Menus of the day boast of “real German beer” and “real turtle.” German pale lager came to us in the great
German immigrations of the nineteenth century (along with hamburgers, frankfurters, seltzer, home-fried potatoes, potato salad, and the delicatessen). Before this, Americans only drank dark English-style ale. The pale cold-fermented lagers brewed by ethnic German entrepreneurs like Miller, Pabst, Schlitz, and Busch became popular by the turn of the nineteenth century, and restaurants boasted of being able to serve this new prestige product. Turtle soup was also a sought-after delicacy of the day, so much so that mock turtle soup, made of brains and calves’ heads (and not of Mock Turtles, whatever Lewis Carroll said) was common as a cheaper substitute. In fact,
Jane Ziegelman tells us
in her book
97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families
that New York restaurants “often nailed a real tortoise shell to the doorpost” as a sign that they served real green turtle soup.

The signs we use for prestige these days are less obvious than that tortoise shell, but they are still there in the menu. Of course these days we don’t use macaronic French. Our modern fancy menus are light and terse, with no cheap filler adjectives or endless protestations about what’s “real.” When you’re demonstrating high status, less is more, in words as in food. Fancy menus are lightly seasoned with something else instead: carefully selected obscure food words and pastoral images of green pastures and heirloom vegetables. If they offer you a menu at all.

And you should probably avoid that menu loaded with linguistic fillers like
crispy
,
crunchy
,
tangy
,
juicy
,
zesty
,
chunky
,
smoky
, or
fluffy
, adjectives written by a menu writer trying too hard to convince you. As for the word “exotic,” if you see it, don’t pay the surcharge that it implies. Instead, do what Calvin Trillin would do: sneak off down the street to the place that is authentic enough not to have to protest it so much.

Two

Entrée

LIVING IN SAN
FRANCISCO
means visitors, and visitors mean an excuse to wander down Bernal Hill and explore various delicious dinner options along Mission Street. My houseguests are always open-minded eaters, but they do sometimes find odd things to complain about. My cranky British friend Paul is irked by the interminable questions at cafes here (“Single or double? Small, medium, large? For here or to go? Milk or soy? Whole milk or nonfat?”). “Just give me a bloody coffee,” says Paul, who thinks Americans have control issues. Indeed, as we just saw, the profusion of choices offered by cafes, diners, fast-food, and other inexpensive outlets is matched only by the control we abdicate when selecting the tasting menus at our expensive restaurants.

Paul is also annoyed by our parochial word usage. For example, the word
entrée
in the United States means a main course while in France and the UK
entrée
means what we would call the appetizer course. Thus a French meal might consist of an entrée, the main course (the
plat
), and dessert, while a corresponding American meal would have appetizer, entrée, and dessert. Since the word
entrée
comes originally from French and literally means “entrance,” we Americans, Paul suggested to me at dinner one night, must have botched up the meaning of this word at some point.

Paul’s hypothesis seems reasonable, and since he also complains about my fork and knife etiquette (it turns out I don’t align my fork
and knife in the proper position on the plate to signal I’m done eating), I have lately been feeling quite the uncultured colonial from the Wild West.

The late Alan Davidson told us in his magisterial
Oxford Companion to Food
that (even if Paul is right) the meaning of entrée is just not worth investigating:

entrée, entremet:
A couple of French terms
which no doubt retain interest for persons attending hotel and restaurant courses conducted under the shadow of French classical traditions, but have ceased to have any real use, partly because most people cannot remember what they mean and partly because their meanings have changed over time and vary from one part of the world to another. Forget them.

But the redoubtable Davidson, although right about practically everything else, is off the mark here; the language of food ought to have an enormous amount to tell us about our history, our society, and our selves. So instead I’ll side with the late historian Fernand Braudel who once suggested that these same French terms might be cues to understanding food’s cultural history:

We might . . . follow fashion in food
through the revealing history of certain words which are still in use but which have changed in meaning several times: entrées, entremet, ragoûts, etc.

Entrée
is a good next step in our adventure in the language of food for another reason as well: it is an organizing word, describing the structure of a meal rather than a food itself, and thus bridges the previous chapter’s study of menu language with the succeeding chapters describing foods from main courses to desserts.

As for Paul’s hypothesis that the modern French meaning of entrée is the original one:
au contraire
! Let’s start with that
modern French definition
:

Mets qui se sert au début du repas, après le potage ou après les hors-d’œuvre.

[A dish served at the beginning of the meal, after the soup or after the hors d’oeuvres.]

Extracts from the menus from Aux Lyonnais in Paris and Frances in San Francisco (both Michelin 1-star restaurants) show the differing uses: the French
entrée
as the appetizer, the American
entrée
(or
entree
) as the main.

How did this difference in meaning develop? The word
entrée
first appears in France in 1555. In the sixteenth century, a banquet began with a course called
entrée de table
(“entering to/of the table”) and ends with one called
issue de table
(“exiting the table”). Here are two menus in Middle French (explaining the archaic forms and variable spelling) from the 1555 book
Livre Fort Excellent de Cuysine Tres-Utile et Profitable
excerpted from culinary historian Jean-Louis Flandrin’s excellent book
Arranging the Meal: A History of Table Service in France
:

Cest que fault pour faire
ung banquet ou nopces après pasques

As these menus show, the entrée is the first course of the meal, there can be multiple entrées, and after the entrée comes the soup, one or more roasts, and then a final course. Entrées in fourteenth- through sixteenth-century France were hearty sauced meat dishes (
Beef Palate
with Gooseberries, Wood Pigeons with Pomegranate, Chicken fricassee in verjus, Venison sirloins, Leg of lamb hash), savory pastries (Hot small venison pies), or offal (Roasted calf’s liver, Salted lamb tongues, Browned kid heads).

Over the next hundred years, the soup began to be eaten earlier in the menu, so that by about 1650 the soup was always the first course, followed by the entrée. In
Le Cuisinier François
(
The French Cook
), La Varenne’s famous 1651 cookbook, an entrée was still a hot meat dish, distinguished from the roast course. The roast course was a spit roast, usually of fowl or sometimes rabbit or suckling animals, while the entrée was a more complicated made dish of meat, often with a sauce, and something requiring some effort in the kitchen. The cookbook gives such lovely seventeenth-century entrées as
Ducks in Ragout
, Sausages of Partridge White-Meat, a Daube of a Leg of Mutton, and Fricaseed Chicken. An entrée was not cold, nor was it composed of vegetables or eggs. (Dishes that were cold or composed of vegetable or eggs were called
entremets
). So the entrée in 1651 is a hot meat course eaten after the soup and before the roast.