When I came across “aristology” in Julia Quinn’s To Catch An Heiress, I was momentarily surprised. How could I not have previously known a word meaning “the art or science of cooking and dining”? A mere 31,500 hits on Google reassured me it was, in fact, a word not in common circulation. Indeed, it has had a rather limited history of use, somewhat better known for its existence as an obscure word, beloved of vocabulary expansion programs, than actually much used in its own right.
Its first appearance was in 1835, when Thomas Walker published Aristology, or The Art of Dining. In it, he defines the term as his own coinage: “I call the art of dining Aristology, and those who study it, Aristologists.” Inasmuch as it could ever have been said to be popularized, a version of it was used in 1864 by Edward Abbot, whose cookbook, Cookery for the Many was labeled as “By an Australian Aristologist”. The book’s further distinction is that it was the first published Austrialian cookbook.
Mortimer Collins, the English novelist, is credited by the OED with first using the adjectival form, “aristological”. In Vol. 1, Ch. XV of Squire Silchester’s Whim (1873), he wrote,
You don’t get moor mutton with hot laver sauce every day. The author is inhibited by publishers and critics from aristological observations, or he would here describe a good Devonshire dinner. (pp. 191-2)
Fictionally, the word is best known from the name of a society, Ten for Aristology, investigated by Nero Wolfe in “Poison à la Carte”, a story in the Rex Stout collection, Three at Wolfe’s Door. (The full menu eaten in the story is available in The Nero Wolfe Cookbook.)
Quinn, in whose novel I ran across it, uses the word consciously as a vocabulary word, part of a “personal dictionary” of the book’s early nineteenth-century heroine. The character writes, “As a field of research and study, aristology is highly underrated.” (p. 280, intro to Ch. 18) I suspect the anachronism of its use in 1814 escaped the author.
Another commentary on the word is available at World Wide Words.
© S. Worthen 2009
‘Aristology’ is a lovely word. I was looking at that first Australian cookbook a while ago, though, and at its derivate, the first Australian Jewish coookbook and discovered, to my great sadness, that they are plagiarised. I only checked the Jewish cooking bits (because that was where my interest lay, just then) but it does make me wonder about the limits of aristology.
From what are they plagiarized? Are they word-for-word plagiarized, or at least adapted? (My entire knowledge of nineteenth-century cookbook transmission comes from reading Hess’s & Hess’s The Taste of America. My impression is that the majority of cookbooks in America then were adaptations of other parts of cookbooks, and that originality is all in the details and extra commentary.)
Since in modern English we don’t really need “aristology” much, I have had an inspiration since posting this. The word’s Greek root, ariston, means either breakfast or lunch – so why not appropriate it to mean “the art or science of brunch” instead of food generally?
As brunch is something on which I have strong opinions – and by which I am regularly disappointed in the UK – I feel this could be a very useful coinage to have. On the other hand, it would then beg the question of what to call the study of any other meal or snack.
Word-for-word, from The Jewish Manual 1846, even down to referring to butchers that were in London, not Melbourne or Hobart. I was hoping to find a source that showed me whether a chorissa or equivalent was avaiable in Melbourne by the 1870s, so I got very excited until I realised I had read those words before.
I rather like the thought of an aristologist as a particularly perfect bruncher.