H. Rider Haggard is not well-known for product placements (other than for firearms) in his tales of Englishmen having adventures in colonial Africa. This is why mention in Ch. 5 of She (1886) of “Paysandu” potted tongue stood out. His heroes had washed up on the shores of eastern Africa with only preserved goods to see them through.
Then, taking shelter from the sun under some trees, we made a hearty breakfast off a “Paysandu” potted tongue, of which we had brought a good quantity with us, congratulating ourselves loudly on our good fortune in having loaded and provisioned the boat on the previous day before the hurricane destroyed the dhow.
Paysandu potted tongue sustains the characters for a couple of meals before they are able to start hunting the local wildlife. In the same chapter: “So we lighted a lantern, and made our evening meal off another potted tongue in the best fashion that we could”.
Paysandu is a port, and the second largest city in Uruguay. Its potted tongue – and that of Uruguay generally – were military field staples at the end of the nineteenth and, according to this replica website, and through World War I as well. That tongue had a long history as high-status food for sea voyagers is reflected in the tradition, from long before 1703 until 1915, of giving a newly-commissioned captain in the British Royal Navy a cask of ox-tongues. (J. Macdonald, Feeding Nelson’s Navy, 121)
While there were other types of containers and preservation methods available, it’s entirely plausible that Holly and his companions, in She, were eating tinned tongue. Delightfully, here is a reproduction of an 1896 label for Paysandu canned ox tongue, as imported to London by McCall & Co. The lively package design would indeed have been an icon of English civility in more ways than one for colonialist travelers washed up after a storm, on the verge of adventure into the unknown
That I mostly go to Paris to see friends, and rarely to eat out, was brought home by the current Olive magazine. Its most interesting word, used by one author, Adrian Moore, of four writing on Paris, was “bistronomique”. The word is a French hybrid adjective of bistrot and gastronomique, a trend of the mid-90s, apparently, which is still going strong, even if the word itself is rarely heard in Paris these days. Like many other writers, Clotilde Dusoulier, in Clotilde’s Edible Adventures in Paris, uses “neo bistro” in preference to the awkwardness of “les bistronomiques”. (p. 46)
The term refers to restaurants with the casualness of bistrots and the food aspirations of restaurants, which are more formal affairs in France. Their chefs usually trained in Michelin-starred restaurants, but, eager to head up their own kitchen, open venues which are more affordable to both them and to their patrons. Several of the best known instances of “les bistronomiques” have been opened by former students of chef Christian Constant.
“Bistronomique” was coined by the journalist Sébastien Demorand, and popularized by the chef Yves Camdeborde. The New York Times Magazine writes that he “started the bistronomique trend fifteen years ago”. Jane Sigal, writing for Food and Wine magazine, specifies that “bistronomie” started in 1992, at La Régalade. No, it was 1991, according to this article. The coinage, however, substantially postdates the trend, coming into existence in 2004. Demorand, on the jury at that year’s Fooding awards, created the adjective. Sigal, instead, uses the noun.
The less frequently used noun form, “bistronomie” has since been anglicized to “bistronomy”, a rather awkward word which currently has a mere five and a half thousand hits on Google currently. In English, Google’s oldest hit is from 28 January 2007, from The NYT Magazine again, in an article entitled, simply, “Bistronomy”, by Christine Muhlke. I expect there are older uses of the term, at least in informal translations somewhere, but that still leaves this article as the likely popularizer of the term in English, as it has been used somewhat regularly in media sources since then. (If that can be said of a word which is used so rarely.)
Lucy Waverman in The Globe and Mail, on 13 March 2007, wrote that
Paris has been reinvented once again and the buzzword is “bistronomy.” Yves Camdebourg kicked off the trend in 2005 when he gave up his coveted post at La Régalade to open a small restaurant, Le Comptoir…
Except, of course, “bistronomy” isn’t really the buzzword at all. At most, it’s “bistronomique” which has that honor. Nouns do seem more likely to claim the glory; but in this case, the noun was derived from the adjective.
One country’s or time’s commonplace is another’s obscurity.
Yesterday was the first time I’d heard of pulque, a fermented drink made with the sap of the agave cactus, or “maguey plant”. I was at the British Museum’s new Moctezuma exhibit, and it was occasionally mentioned as an exclusively ceremonial drink for priests and sacrificial victims among the Méxica (or Aztecs). It was served in elegant spherical pitchers with long necks, widely consumed among the nobles and priests of early sixteenth-century Méxica, but not the majority of the population. One such jug was on display, decorated in swirling black and red.
Post-conquest, its consumption grew, peaking in the nineteenth century. An entire industry, with dedicated trains and delivery services, revolved around this form of alcohol. A campaign for beer, as a “hygienic and modern” drink, finally succeeded in largely killing off the drink, its consumption declining over the last century. It is largely a poor and rural drink in Mexico these days, and demand is dying. From an eGullet commenter, here’s a (largely unappealing!) description of its consistency and taste, along with a recipe for its use in salsa.
Pulque is also known as octli. At the end of the exhibit, a recent excavation in Mexico City unearthed jewelery made in honor of “the goddess of pulque”. Not named on the label, she is Mayahuel, goddess of the maguey and thus, by extension, of pulque.
I first realized that “mango” might mean anything other than the fruit, Mangifera indica, when reading John and Karen Hess’s The Taste of America. This fascinating polemic – which is largely about why American food is bad – includes several chapters on the development of cookbooks in America. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796) includes the recipe “To Pickle or make Mangoes of Melons”. (This cookbook, the first one both written by an American and printed in America, is also available via Project Gutenberg.)
“Mango” became a generic word for pickled foods in England and America, at least, thanks to the major means by which mango-the-fruit journeyed from its areas of cultivation in India and South-East Asia. The OED’s earliest attested use of the word in this sense comes secondhand from Peter King quoting John Locke in his Life of Locke (1679) on the riches and varieties of London: “Mango and saio are two sorts of sauces brought from the East Indies.” Locke wrote that the worldly edible variety of London comes from Bermuda oranges, Cheshire cheese, and Colchester oysters, in addition to the East Indies. (p. 134)
A mango might be made with walnuts or cucumbers (1699), melons (1728), peaches (1845), musk-melon stuffed with horseradish (1859), or green peppers (1940). Although its earliest instances were English, by the last two centuries, it seems to have become purely an Americanism. (Now a very obscure one if it is still used at all.)
A mango may not be a pickle any more, but it is still, in the U.S., in Ohio and Indiana, a name for green peppers. Pickled Mangifera indica passed its name onto pickles more generically which, by 1948, had passed their name on to the most frequently-found version of them in the region, pickled green peppers; similarly, “pickles” have acquired the generic meaning of “pickled cucumbers” in the U.S. today.
At first glance, the serving bowl held sausages, another meat in a feast of meats, platters or bowls of whole roasted quail or mutton with caper sauce. A closer look showed that the “sausages” were, in fact, the menu-promised Jerusalem artichokes, scrubbed but not skinned, rough and trailing roots. They were our one respite in that course from meat, meat, and more meat. The surfeit was the main feature, a Pepys-themed feast organized by Fergus Henderson for the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.
The Jerusalem artichokes were not sausages, but neither are they from Jerusalem or artichokes. They are roots of a plant in the sunflower family, Helianthus tuberosus, and the Italian word for “sunflower” is “girasole”, which sounds somewhat like “Jerusalem” in English. (The alternate etymology, according to The Oxford Companion to Food is that it’s a misunderstanding of Terneuzen, the Dutch town, better known as the home port of one version of The Flying Dutchman, from which they were first imported to England.) They do taste somewhat artichoke-like, although the plants are not related.
Jerusalem artichokes, also known as sunchokes, are natives of the Americas, Peru originally, although the first European to document them was Samuel de Champlain, in Canada. Their French name, topinambur, preserves the name of a Brazilian tribe, the Topinambous, six of whose members were brought to France in 1613, along with their local crop.
In England, they are used, punningly, to make Palestine Soup, bacon optional, of which A.E. Housman, the poet, wrote, “I was however agreeably surprised by a Palestine soup which had not the faintest trace of artichoke.” (Letters, 14 Sept. 1929. Found via the OED.) Jerusalem artichokes are robust easy to grow, a fact not unrelated to why Samuel de Champlain found them in Canada. Their weed-like profligacy early on inspired Robert Grenville, puritan and Roundhead general, who, in A Discourse opening the nature of that Episcopacie which is exercised in England (I. vi 16), wrote that “Error being like the Jerusalem-Artichoake; plant it where you will, it overrunnes the ground and choakes the Heart.”
© S. Worthen 2009