Thomas More, in his Utopia, Book II, writes of the Utopian people,
They drink wine made of grapes, apple or pear cider, or simple water, which they sometimes mix with honey or liquorice, of which they have plenty. (From Logan and Adam’s 1989 Cambridge Texts series.)
In the original Latin: “Nam aut uuarum uinum bibunt, aut pomorum, pirorumue, aut denique aquam nonnunquam meram, saepe etiam, qua mel, aut glycyrizam incoxerint, cuius haud exiguam habent copiam.” Glycyrrhiza is still the genus name for the liquorice plant. It has the same Greek root as “glycerine”, meaning “sweet”.
This passage from Utopia is, as far as I know, is the first time I’ve heard of liquorice water.
It was a popular made-at-home drink in Scotland in the early twentieth century known as “sugarelly”. Liquorice root (not the modern candy) was infused into water. William, in the Just William books, apparently drinks it regularly. (A letter written by the books’ author, Richmal Crompton, gives a recipe.) The Egyptian drink Erk-soos is another variation on it.
The plant, more generally, is native to southeast Europe and the Middle East, and has been grown in Britain since at least the thirteenth century, when Henvry II taxed it. Several of Chaucer’s characters chew the root. See also, “The Licorice Fields of Pontefract”.) Liquorice seems to have been a ubiquitous sweetener and medicine in ancient Egypt and Greece and medieval England, at very least. It’s 50-150 times sweet than table sugar, writes Harold McGee in On Food and Cooking. (2004, p. 418)
As for liquorice water more specifically, however: given the lack of detail of food which Henry VIII’s erstwhile lord chancellor otherwise provides, it seems certain that he knew it as a common, healthful drink. Other than Utopia and the Just William books (a rare pairing!), I wonder if the drink shows up in any other works of literature?
In honor of Canadian Thanksgiving, a post about turkey. (It’s also London Restaurant Week. Less relevantly, Chocolate Week in the UK begins today.)
Turkey, the bird, is the most haphazardly named creature I know of. The bird is native to the Americas, to North America or the Yucatán, depending on the species. Thus, they were only introduced to the rest of the world in the fifteenth century at the earliest. In no way is the bird from Turkey, even in a period when the term could be used by Western Europeans to describe Muslims generally.
Neither are turkeys related to guinea fowls, which are natives of Africa, although Linneaus classified the North American one as such with the Latin name Meleagris gallopavo, the “guinea fowl chicken-peacock”.
English was not the only language to become geographically disoriented when faced with these birds. In French, the word for them is “dinde”, from “d’Inde”, meaning “of India”. Relatedly, the Dutch word for them, “kalkoen”, which, like the Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Estonian words for the animal, is from the Indian city Calicut. The birds are not Indian any more than they are Turkish, although in Turkish they’re called “hindi”. These languages do have the excuse, at least, that the bird comes from what was originally thought to be India, later the West Indies. They were never from Calicut in any way, though.
In Greek, the word is “gallopoula”, meaning a “French chicken”, while in Egyptian Arabic, it’s a Greek chicken. In Arabic more generically, it’s a Roman chicken. (That sounds more inconsistent than it is; it refers to the Eastern half of the Roman empire, which was based at Constantinople.) The Greek might well derive from a confusion between Gallus and gallus, the Latin words for “Gaul/France” and “a chicken”.
One of the vaguely more accurate names – placing the bird on the right landmass at least – is one of my favorites because it pairs so well with the country/bird confusion which English has in Turkey/turkey; which the bird (of the Galliformes, or chicken-shaped, order of animals), inherited from the Latin Gallus/gallus pair; and which is shown in all the variations on India after which it is named. In Portuguese, and in Hindi thanks to past Portuguese influence, the animal is called “peru”, confusing the bird with yet another country. Turkeys were not introduced to Peru until the sixteenth century; they were, you will recall, from further north in the Americas.
Surely there is no animal named after more countries than this one is!
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.
© S. Worthen 2009