The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (35 page)

While Chinese meals don’t have the concept of a final sweet course
, they do have structure of a different sort: constraints on the ingredients and their combination. A Cantonese meal, for example, consists of starch (rice, noodles, porridge) and nonstarch portions (the vegetables, meat, tofu, and so on). These can be mixed together in one dish (to form chow mein, chow fen, fried rice, and so on) or a meal can use plain white rice with the nonstarch served as separate dishes that each eater serves over their own portion of rice. Describing this in English requires the awkward word “nonstarch”; Cantonese has a word for this,
sung
. The word for “grocery shopping” in Cantonese is
mai sung
: “buying sung” (since the starch is a staple that would already be in the house). Thus a typical Cantonese meal consists of a starch plus a
sung
, or, to write a different kind of grammar rule, we might say:

meal = starch + sung

The grammar of cuisine does more than define the structure of a meal. Each cuisine also has implicit rules about the flavors that make up individual dishes. I like to think of dishes as words, and particular ingredients or flavor elements as the sounds (the “phones”) that make up a word or dish.

Sounds differ from language to language, but they are also surprisingly similar. For example, every language seems to have a sound that’s something like English
t
or English
p
. Why should this be? The late
linguist Ken Stevens (in his
Quantal Theory of Speech
) explained that humans all have the same tongue and mouth physiology, and sounds like
t
result from certain configurations of the tongue (and lips, and vocal cords) that are easy for speakers to make reliably and also result in sounds that are easy for listeners to distinguish reliably.

Nonetheless, each language pronounces the universal
t
or
p
in a slightly different way. English
t
is different from Italian
t
or Cantonese
t
, French
p
is different from Spanish
p
. That’s the main cause of our accents in foreign languages: we become expert at saying a
t
in the English way and it’s hard to unlearn that and make a Japanese or a French
t
.

Similarly, based on a different aspect of the very same human tongues, the ability to perceive flavor elements like sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami are universal. But each cuisine may express these universal flavor elements using ingredients that add their own culturally specific flavors.

Each cuisine, for example, seems to have its own flavor element for sweet. My favorite is Malaysian
gula melaka
, a coconut palm sugar with a lightly smoky, caramelized taste. It’s easy to find palm sugar here, but not good gula melaka, so I have to bring it back the rare times I’m there, or rely on
generous visitors from Asia
.

By contrast, the sweet taste of American food comes from refined white cane sugar or corn syrup, or, in special cases, maple syrup. In the
gold rush days
,
San Franciscans instead used molasses for everything
,
pouring it on their food like ketchup. British and Commonwealth desserts often use golden syrup, Mexican cuisine raw piloncillo sugar, and Thai cuisine palmyra palm sugar.

The flavor elements for sour tend to be rice vinegars in China, tamarind in Southeast Asia, lemon juice or grain vinegar in the United States, sour orange or key lime in Central America, and wine vinegars in France (hence the name
vin-aigre
[sour wine]). Yiddish food is soured by crystals of citric acid called sour salt. This is what gives the sweet-and-sour flavor to my mom’s cabbage stuffed with rice, beef, and tomatoes (a dish I love but that my father refers to as “beef in shrouds”). Other universal flavor elements include salt or umami (from sea salt, salted olives, capers, soy sauce, fish sauce, fermented shrimp paste, anchovies, and so on).

Not all flavor elements are universal. Combining different specific combinations of flavors is definitive of a cuisine, an idea that the late food scholar
Elisabeth Rozin called the “flavor principle.”
She pointed out that a dish made with soy sauce, rice wine, and ginger tastes Chinese; the same ingredients flavored with sour orange, garlic, and achiote tastes Yucatecan. Add instead onion, chicken fat, and white pepper (or for baking, butter, cream cheese, and sour cream) and you’ve got my mother and grandmother’s Yiddish recipes.

Recent work has used computational techniques on online databases of recipes to test cross-cuisine generalizations of Rozin’s flavor principle at the molecular level.
Y. Y. Ahn at Indiana University and his colleagues
examined 60,000 online recipes to test the “food pairing hypothesis,” a recent theory proposing that tasty recipes are more likely to combine ingredients that share flavor compounds. For example tomatoes and mozzarella share the compound 4-methylpentanoic acid. Ahn and his colleagues found an interesting difference between North American and Western European recipes, which do indeed tend to pair ingredients that share flavor compounds, and East Asian recipes, which combine ingredients (like beef, ginger, cayenne, pork, and
onions) that don’t have overlapping compounds. The difference suggests that preference for similar or different compounds may be part of what makes up a cuisine.

Interestingly, the East Asian lack of dessert seems to have played an important role in their results. They found that the North American ingredients with the most shared compounds are dessert ingredients like milk, butter, cocoa, vanilla, eggs, cream cheese, strawberries, and peanut butter. Thus it’s possible that the difference in food pairing tendencies between East Asia and North America is caused by the fact that North America has dessert.

One last aspect of the grammar of cuisine has to do with cooking techniques rather than flavors. In Chinese cuisine, for example, ingredients need to be cooked before eating; a raw dish like a green salad just violates the structure of the cuisine. We might say that salad is “ungrammatical” in Chinese. Although salad is naturally now available in foreign restaurants (called
sa leut
in Cantonese), traditionally it would have been as bizarre in China to see someone munch on raw carrots or celery or bell peppers as it seems to most Americans to eat duck brains.

In early China
cooking was associated with the concept of being civilized; neighboring cultures who ate their food raw were considered less civilized than those who cooked their food. The anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss
suggested that this opposition between the raw and cooked is probably universal across cultures: that cooking is everywhere associated with civilization and with socializing and controlling nature.

But health is probably the most significant cause of the Chinese taboo on raw food, as suggested by the fact that even water is never consumed raw; it is always boiled before drinking. Drinking boiled water (and tea, with its antiseptic properties) presumably helped protect China from some of the water-transmitted epidemics suffered by the West. Americans and Europeans traditionally drank water raw, and partly as a consequence suffered epidemics of diseases like cholera until the nineteenth century when municipal water supplies began to be treated.

The Chinese cultural constraint against raw water runs very deep. Despite the fact that the municipal water in modern Hong Kong or Taipei is treated and perfectly safe and drinkable, people like my friend Fia who grew up in those very sophisticated cities still boil all their water, even keeping pitchers of preboiled water in the fridge.

The implicit cultural norms that make us think that desserts should be sweet, or that knishes should taste like chicken fat instead of butter, run just as deep. The discomfort of Fia in Taipei at the thought of drinking raw water, the shock of MFK Fisher’s friends at salad occurring at the wrong place in a meal, the disgust at frog fallopian tubes or raw carrots come from the fact that a cuisine is a richly structured cultural object, with its component flavor elements and its set of combinatory grammatical principles, learned early and deeply.

I suspect that it is the grammar of cuisine that underlies the recent fad for pork in dessert. Bacon ice cream violates an implicit rule of American cuisine, the rule that says desserts should be sweet and not meaty and savory. We delight in bacon ice cream not because this is necessarily the most delicious way to serve bacon but, at least in part, because it breaks the rules, it’s fun, it’s rebellious, it’s even . . . ungrammatical!

In fact, rebelling against these norms is one way that innovation happens. This is most evident with modernist cuisine (“molecular gastronomy” or “deconstructivist” cooking), which often uses ungrammatical dishes (popcorn soup, toffee of white chocolate and duck liver, caramelized tomato with hot raspberry jelly) as a creative tool. But consider as well the global borrowings that became our day-to-day foods like ketchup or ice cream or macaroons,
borrowings
that begin as an exotic import for the rich, and slowly became nativized. We haven’t yet explained what drives this nativization, what causes the specific changes in each of these foods as they adapt to their new cuisine. The grammar of cuisine is the explanation: exotic imported luxury foods became everyday dishes by changing to fit the implicit structures of
cuisine. As medieval spices lost their centrality in the flavor principles of the food of Western Europe, macaroons and marmalades lost their medieval rosewater and musk. As tomatoes with sugar became one of Americas flavor principles (think ketchup, tomato soup, pasta sauce), the sweet-and-sour tomatoey version of a former fish sauce rocketed in popularity. Meanwhile in China, the grammar (remember starch+sung) led the dominant use of tomatoes to be, not ketchup or pasta sauce, but a stir-fry dish of to
matoes and eggs. The importance in European cuisine of milk and cream led to Eastern sharbats becoming Western ice creams and American sherbets. Because of the Lenten fasts central to the religion, culture, and diet of medieval Christianity, sweet-and-sour meat sikb
j became fish and chips. Finally, as dessert became an integral part of our cuisine, newly imported ingredients led to new desserts like the macaroons, coconut cake, and ambrosia from newly imported coconut, or the pecan pie from native American foods like pecans. The grammar of cuisine even explains why fortune cookies, originally a small Japanese temple snack, grew into a standard dessert in American Chinese restaurants, filling the dessert gap in that cuisine for American eaters.

Dessert is more than just a sensual pleasure (even one that causes us to give higher restaurant review scores). It’s a reflection of the implicit cultural structures, the language of food hidden in plain sight, that underlie every bite we take.