The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (13 page)

The cover of Charles Lockyer’s
1711 memoir of his travels in Asia

Soy comes in tubs from Jappan
, and the best
Ketchup
from Tonqueen [northern Vietnam]; yet good of both sorts, are made and sold very cheap in
China
. . . . I know not a more profitable Commodity.

Lockyer would buy tubs of ketchup
and soy and draw off the sauces into bottles for the return journey. The expensive bottled ketchup quickly became a prestige product in England. The great expense of this Asian import soon led to recipes in British and then American cookbooks for cooks attempting to make their own ketchup,
imitating the taste of the expensive imported original
. Ketchup wasn’t the only attempt to counterfeit a luxury Asian import. Worcestershire sauce was created later in the nineteenth century to imitate a sauce from Bengal, and budget replacements for arrack were also developed, using local sugar in the Caribbean. You probably know the most popular of these imitation arracks: it is called “rum.”

Here’s a ketchup recipe from a 1742 London cookbook in which the fish sauce has already taken on a very British flavor, with “eschallots” (shallots) and mushrooms:

To Make KATCH-UP that will keep good Twenty Years
.

Take a Gallon of strong stale Beer, one Pound of Anchovies wash’d and clean’d from the Guts, half an Ounce of Mace, half an Ounce of Cloves, a quarter of an Ounce of Pepper, three large Races of Ginger, one Pound of Eschallots, and one Quart of flap Mushrooms well rubb’d and pick’d; boil all these over a slow Fire till it is half wasted, and strain it thro’ a Flannel Bag; let it stand till it is quite cold, then bottle and stop it very close. . . . This is thought to exceed what is brought from
India
.

The mushrooms that played a supporting role in this early recipe soon became a main ingredient, and from 1750 to 1850 the word
ketchup
began to mean any number of thin dark sauces made of mushrooms or even walnuts, often used to flavor melted butter. Jane Austen’s family seemed to prefer this new walnut ketchup, and
the household book
kept by Jane’s friend Martha Lloyd while she lived with Jane’s family in Chawton tells us they made it by pounding green walnuts with salt and then boiling the mash with vinegar, cloves, mace, ginger, nutmeg, pepper, horseradish, and shallots.

It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that people first began to add tomato to ketchups, probably first in Britain. This early recipe from 1817 still has the anchovies that betray its fish sauce ancestry:

Tomata Catsup

Gather a gallon of fine, red, and full ripe tomatas; mash them with one pound of salt; let them rest for three days, press off the juice, and to each quart add a quarter of a pound of anchovies, two ounces of shallots, and an ounce of ground black pepper; boil up together for half an hour, strain through a sieve, and put to it the following spices; a quarter of an ounce of mace, the same of allspice and ginger, half an ounce of nutmeg, a drachm of coriander seed, and half a drachm of cochineal; pound all together; let them simmer gently for twenty minutes, and strain through a bag: when cold, bottle it, adding to each bottle a wineglass of brandy. It will keep for seven years.

By the mid-1850s, tastes changed and anchovies seem to disappear from the recipes. After the Civil War, manufacturers in America responded to the greatly increased demand by increasing ketchup production, tailoring their recipes to American consumers who began to prefer their ketchup a bit sweeter and thicker than the British. By
around 1910 manufacturers like Heinz found that
adding even more sugar and also lots of vinegar
helped produce a ketchup that preserved better, leading to our modern sweet-and-sour formula. The spelling was another common difference between Britain and America; while both spellings were used in both countries,
ketchup
was more common in Britain and
catsup
in America, until about 30 years ago, when
ketchup
took over here as well. (
Heinz originally chose the spelling “ketchup”
to distinguish the product from competitors’ “catsup,” but when Heinz began to dominate the market other manufacturers switched to Heinz’s spelling.)

The Chinese origins of our national sauce aren’t just a fun bit of culinary trivia—ketchup’s history offers us new insights into global economic history. If you subscribe to a traditional Western model of Asian economics, China turned inward in 1450 during the Ming dynasty and became isolated and economically irrelevant, leading to stagnation and a low standard of living until the West finally dragged Asia into the world economy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

But the vast production and trade of ke-tchup (not to mention arrack and less delicious goods like textiles and porcelain) well into the eighteenth century tell a different tale. The late economist Andre G. Frank and scholars like Kenneth Pomerantz and Robert C. Allen have shown that while the Chinese government did ban private sea trade, these
bans were repeatedly rescinded
, and in any case were simply ignored by Hokkien sailors, who continued to sail and trade illegally on a massive scale. Charles Lockyer, for example, complains throughout his memoir about intense competition from the Chinese, describing, in every country he visited, harbors crowded with Chinese ships packed with goods, trading voluminously from China along every coast and island east to Indonesia and west as far as Burma.

Fujianese pirates also played a huge role in this trade. Chinese officials repeatedly complained that the entire city of Amoy was given over to pirates. The private navy of the Fujianese warlord Zheng
Chenggong was the largest navy in Asia, conquering Taiwan from the Dutch East Indies Company in 1662 and trading enormous quantities of silk and porcelain to the west for Spanish silver.

In fact, by the time British sailors brought ketchup back to England in the late seventeenth century, China was the richest nation in the world by any measure—including standard of living, life span, and per capita income—and produced the bulk of the whole world’s GNP. China’s control of intra-Asia trade together with its superior manufacturing technology (in textiles, clothing, ceramics, and distillation) meant that
China dominated the world economy until the Industrial Revolution
.

These facts explain why the Portuguese, British, and Dutch were so eager to get to Asia: most of the world’s trade took place only there. But Europe had no manufacturing base that was comparable to Asia’s until 1800. All Europe had to offer in exchange for Asia’s considerable luxury goods were gold and silver from the new colonial mines that had been established in Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico. The mines, discovered in the sixteenth century and worked by Andean and African slaves, produced the silver for vast floods of Spanish silver
reals
of eight. Silver was the only thing the Chinese government would accept, and Spanish silver pieces of eight became the first international currency, the dollar of its time, explaining why Edmund Scott had jars of them buried under his warehouse in Java in 1604.

It wasn’t just the larcenous Chinese tavern-keeper next door who had designs on those silver reals. The Manila galleons carrying silver from Acapulco to Manila were under constant attack from pirates. These included the Fujianese pirate Zheng Chenggong mentioned above (the warlord also known as Koxinga) whose vast pirate armada let him conquer Taiwan from the Dutch and almost invade the Philippines. English and Dutch pirates were after them as well, including Sir Francis Drake, who captured tons of silver from the Spanish treasure
ships and coastal cities of Peru and Chile before landing in 1579 just north of San Francisco at Drake’s Bay and claiming “New Albion” for England. In the other direction, the great Spanish treasure fleet carrying silver reals as well as silk and porcelain from Veracruz to Spain was targeted by the
original
pirates of the Caribbean, represented in my childhood by Stevenson’s Long John Silver whose parrot Cap’n Flint would screech out “Pieces of Eight! Pieces of Eight! Pieces of Eight!” until he was out of breath.

The silver real was de facto currency for the British colonies as well, circulated widely even in the United States well into the nineteenth century. (In the 1960s when I was reading
Treasure Island
, a quarter was still called “two bits,” a usage that dates back to small silver coins that were worth one-eighth of a Spanish real.)

Europeans sent vast numbers of these silver reals of eight back to Asia to buy high-quality Asian-manufactured silk, cotton, porcelain, arrack, soy, and prestigious ketchup. As Charles Mann argues in his book
1493
, it was thus the Chinese desire for silver, and Europe’s desire for Asian exports, that drove Europe’s intense phase of exploration and colonization in the New World. The encounter between Western appetites and Eastern products created our modern “world-spanning interconnected civilizations,” to borrow Mann’s phrase.

The story of ketchup—from the fermented fish sauces of China and Southeast Asia to the sushi of Japan to our modern sweet tomato chutney—is, after all, a story of globalization and of centuries of economic domination by a world superpower. But the superpower isn’t America, and the century isn’t ours. Think of those little plastic ketchup packets under the seat of your car as a reminder of China’s domination of the global world economy for most of the last millennium.

Five

A Toast to Toast

S
AN
F
RANCISCO HAS
always been a pretty good town for drinking to someone’s health. I already introduced the Pisco punch, made from Pisco brandy, lemon juice, and pineapple syrup that people toasted with after the gold rush. These days on sunny afternoons I’m fond of clinking glasses with a
michelada
, a Mexican summer beer cocktail with fresh lime juice, hot sauce, and—if you're lucky—a dusting of the chili lime powder called “salsa en polvo” (salsa powder):

Michelada

1¼ ounces fresh squeezed key lime juice

½ teaspoon hot sauce

½ teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

½ teaspoon chamoy (fruity chili sauce)

½ teaspoon Maggi

1 Negro Modela (or a Pacifico if it’s very hot outside)

ice cubes to fill a tall glass

Mexican chili lime powder (like Tajín) (optional; for the glass rim)

Rub a lime around the rim of a tall chilled glass and then dip the rim in chili lime powder. In a small jar or shaker, mix the rest of the ingredients, add to the glass with ice, and top with beer.

Unusual cocktails mixed with fresh herbs and fruits and a mix of alcohols are quite the rage all across the country recently. The Chamomile High Club at Maven in the Lower Haight mixes hop-forward India Pale Ale with bourbon and flavors of lemon, chamomile, and apricot. (Hops are a preservative, and the extra hops of India Pale Ale originally helped it stand up to the long journey to India in the stifling hot cargo holds.) Or you can have all the flavors from one bottle with Fernet Branca
,
the Italian bitters that every bar serves here, flavored with chamomile, elderflower, galangal, aloe, myrrh, and other herbs.

At weddings, champagne is more traditional. But at our friend Marta’s wedding—she’s originally from Croatia—Janet and I happily toasted the bride and groom with
rakia
instead.
Rakia is the generic name
for the fruit-based brandies of southeast Europe: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia. While rakia may be made from apricots, cherries, or grapes, the most common type of rakia is plum, called
šljivovica
or
slivovitz
, made by fermenting plum fruit into a kind of plum cider and then distilling off the liquor. You toast with rakia by saying, “živjeli!” (To life!); phrases meaning “health” or “life” are employed for toasting in many European languages: French
santé
, Irish
slainte
, Polish
na zdrowie,
Spanish
salud
, Hungarian
egészségedre.

Toasting to the bride and groom, the parents, the grandparents, and so on can add up to a lot of drinking. Even more so for the bride and groom, if they walk around and toast at each table, a Chinese tradition that is now more widely prevalent in San Francisco. At a big wedding with 30 tables of guests, the groom wouldn’t get halfway around the room before becoming what my Uncle Herbie would call
shikker
, Yiddish for “drunk,” with the result of, well, not much of a wedding night. When Janet and I got married, my brother-in-law John, a man who is serious about his whisky, took me aside and suggested I might want to quietly fill my glass with tea or cider instead of whisky for all the toasts, a piece of family wisdom that got me through the evening.

I assume we weren’t the first couple to adopt this strategy. Which raises the question: Why do we toast people’s health with alcohol? What does a drink have to do with honoring someone or wishing them health? And why is it called a
toast
?

As we’ll see, the histories of the words
toast
,
cider
, and even that Yiddish word
shikker
are all related, the name
rakia
has a relevant story too, and furthermore, delicious herb-infused drinks of mixed liquors were invented, not in the last century, but at the very dawn of human civilization.