The CC really wanted to include this article under that of The Naming of Dishes but there was a lot more to be said about this subject than just the naming portion so he decided to spin it off into its own little post.
The world has always been global.
We've had traders and merchants traveling the seas trading across countries and continents. It's not uncommon even today to find Roman coins in India when land gets dug up for some new project. The largest collection of gold artifacts in the world was discovered in Surigao in the Philippines in 1981 as part of an irrigation project. Its connections to ancient India of the 10th century is quite well established (Source: Ayala Museum.)
Along these trade routes flowed something else besides spices, grain and gold — recipes and techniques for recipes.
The most famous of these routes is undoubtedly the Silk Road over land but equally important were the three sailing routes. One across the Mediterranean from Alexandria (modern-day Egypt) hopping counter-clockwise, hugging the coast, all the way to Rome and also from Cyrene (modern-day Libya) and Carthage via Alexandria to Rome. The other was the route from the modern-day Gulf of Eden hugging the coast of the modern-day Middle East all the way down the western coast of India to Calicut (modern-day Cochin). And finally the extension of this route around the southern tip of India hugging the eastern coast of India to Burma and from there on to Thailand, Indonesia and the far East.
The most powerful of impulses that the traders appealed to was that of the "exotic". Anything remotely exotic is lapped up by any population as long as it is not too far off from their own conception. Whether these are colorful clothes or dishes or spices hardly mattered to the traders just as long as it could be sold for a profit.
Not knowing anything about a foreign culture — remember travel was hard before the last 75 years or so — local dishes with some exotic ingredient are just the ticket for a sharp businessman with a marketing strategy.
Exoticism sells. Nobody from emperors to laymen are immune.
This is not just a theory. We have evidence.
Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India in 1876 and the British went crazy over "anything Indian". There were "Indian-themed" parties and "Indian food" marketed by the East India Company. This is also the birth of the infamous curry powder — a non-existent concept in Indian cooking. This powder marketed globally is now ubiquitous in such far-flung places as France, Thailand, Singapore and Japan all thanks to the marketing of the East India Company.
In the 1950's and 1960's there was a worldwide craze of "Hawaiian". Needless to say the folks from Italy and India and Vietnam or even most of the United States for that matter had never been to Hawaii but "Hawaiian Salad" was all the craze globally. The exotic element was pineapple. Take a typical salad with a mayo-based dressing and toss in some pineapple to get the afore-mentioned dish. Needless to say this had about as much to do with Hawaiian cuisine as chalk has to do with cheese. There were "Hawaiian cakes", "Hawaiian cocktails", you name it! All with pineapple. It was all marketing, of course. (Yes! The "Mad Men" had their hands all over this. We have the ads to prove this.)
The relatively recent movement towards "authenticity" is not more than about 30-40 years old. Sure there were pioneers even in the 1930's towards an honest and detailed assessment of global cuisine but its mass adoption is a relatively recent phenomenon.
This trend towards exoticism isn't relegated to dishes. Ask yourself if you really know what entrée means. It means "appetizer" in French from the verb entrer — to enter. Same goes for hors d'oeuvres which means "first course" in French but has taken on the meaning of "appetizer" in English. (Appetizers would be des toasts — "nibbles" in French.) Clearly some things got lost just getting across the English Channel and if that's the case, you can just imagine how much got lost when recipes migrated longer distances in older times.
Every culture appropriates dishes. Whether it is the Sicilian adaptation of Arabic eggplant recipes or the Malaysian appropriation of Indian recipes (roti canai — canai probably comes from Chennai but the concept is, quite likely, from Kerala), or the Japanese versions of "spaghetti" and "ma po tofu", it's universal. You also have wholescale adaptations like the Hakka-originated "Indian-Chinese cuisine". Not to mention chop suey and the like which are American adaptations of Chinese dishes.
Italian cuisine is a particularly special case. There's the Italian-American branch but that, at least, can be understood as the reaction of new immigrants to a foreign land and its native resources. What no Italian would recognize is Japanese "spaghetti napolitan" (sic) or Filipino "spaghetti" (made with banana ketchup!) or even Indian "masala spaghetti".
It's lost in translation but why?
To truly master a cuisine, you must first internalize its grammar. And every cuisine has an unmistakable grammar. A set of rules, techniques and ingredients that work in a specific set of combinations and in a very narrow context (historically) to create a meal. Only after you know this grammar backwards and forwards can you truly break free into true creativity. Science helps.
Needless to say, mastering different grammars is insanely hard work. It's far easier for cooks to get a superficial understanding of some foreign cuisine, just use the local grammar of cooking instead of mastering a foreign one, and make something vaguely in that style. It would've been even more the norm in older times since travel and authenticity were so hard. In time, the dish gets appropriated into the local cuisine and becomes "native".
So how does one distinguish incompetence at rendering a foreign cuisine from a slapdash effort from a deliberate rethinking/reworking?
The answer lies in a similar one from the world of art.
In order to break the rules, you first have to understand and master them.
Not many people know that Picasso was a master draftsman and painter. His early paintings where he copies the classical works and even the Impressionists and out-flanks them are not well known. It's only after complete mastery of older techniques that that he broke new ground both aesthetic and technical. The same goes for Matisse.
It always pays to master different grammars. Picasso "borrowed" shamelessly from African art, and almost all painters of that era borrowed extensively from Japanese art. So it goes with any artistic endeavor.
The bias should be towards mastery of grammar and technique. The "going beyond" follows as a natural consequence.
Showing posts with label dish names. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dish names. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
Monday, July 28, 2014
The Naming of Dishes
How are dishes named? What are the mechanisms by which they get the name?
The CC is going to talk about naming but only within the context of "traditional" dishes. "Traditional" is a loaded word and chefs these days give all kinds of fanciful names (which is also traditional) but we'll keep it relatively well-known.
The classification of naming depends on the language in question but the type of structures are definitely universal in that there are similar ideas in every cuisine.
Descriptive Names
This is the easiest category and also the largest. This describes the vast majority of dishes in almost all cuisines. The titles are self-descriptive and anyone who understands the grammar of a specific cuisine could with high probability just reproduce the dish without even looking at a recipe.
Fanciful Names 1 (Metaphor)
The older the cuisine and the greater the level of Imperial involvement, the greater the chance you are going to have metaphors do the heavy lifting for the dish.
The Japanese tatsuta age (竜田揚げ) refers to the river "tatsuta" where the leaves in autumn float down all brown and beautiful presumably. The dish is diced chicken deep-fried. Presumably the brown-ness of the perfectly fried chicken is the correlative.
Chinese cuisine (especially of the Imperial derivation) is particularly adept at this level of poetic metaphor. It's extremely hard to know what the dish is even if you read Mandarin fluently. If you already don't know the answer, you are not going to figure out that "desert boat sails on greens" refers to "camel's foot with hearts of rape".
The Japanese oyako don (親子丼) refers to "parent and child in donburi (bowl)". The parent is the chicken and the child is the egg. It's a rice dish topped with chicken and eggs.
We as a species have been this for a while.
Distilled alcohol in Latin is acqua vitae ("water of life"). Then translated into Gaelic we got uisce beatha which when rendered in English became whisky. (That's how the first word is pronounced.)
Lest this sound all too poetic for words, let us observe that even the "Bloomin' Onion" falls under this category.
Fanciful Names 2 (Euphemism)
Rocky Mountain Oysters. (Prairie oysters in Canada.)
They are fried bull calf testicles with the obvious parallel to fried oysters. The euphemism makes the dish go down easy (pun intended!)
Chicken feet are "phoenix claws" in Chinese. Bottarga refers to the dried and salted ovaries of the red mullet.
And restaurants regularly feature squab because few people would eat it if it just said young pigeon which is exactly what it is.
One of the most common ways euphemism is executed is by substituting a foreign word or phrase for a concept that would be unpalatable locally. Escargots (French) instead of snails. Calamari (Italian) instead of squid. Boudin noir (French - black sausage) instead of "blood sausage", etc.
Euphemism is a large part of human food naming. It's pretty global. We find new and innovative ways to disguise certain blunt truths about our omnivorous eating habits.
Fanciful Names 3 (Alliteration)
We humans are suckers for alliteration. This is one of the figures of speech that exists in almost every language in the world.
The examples are endless — Rump Roast, Crispy Chicken, etc.
This concept goes hand in hand with the next one — that of onomatopoeia. Rendering the sound is nice but adding in the alliteration (typically via repetition) makes the name of the dish really memorable.
Fanciful Names 4 (Onomatopoeia)
The CC's favorite example is that of biángbiáng noodles from China's Shaanxi province. The kanji for "biáng" is not even standard. It refers to the slapping sound of the dough on the table when the noodles are made in the traditional way.
Another example is the Japanese shabu-shabu (swish-swish). This is Japanese hot-pot where you cook the meat and vegetables yourself in the hot boiling broth at your table. The "swish" refers to the sound that you make while swirling your food in the broth while it's cooking. (Note the importance of onomatopoeia because while shabu-shabu refers to the food just mere shabu is Japanese street slang for heroin. You don't want to confuse the two.)
Fanciful Names 5 (Parallel Association)
The dish Carpaccio specifically referred to raw beef because the paper-thin slices of raw beef resembled the pinks used by the painter Vittore Carpaccio. It only dates to about the 1950's when refrigeration made serving of raw beef possible. The origin is from Harry's Bar in Venice.
Today it refers to any thinly shaved meat or vegetable. Hence you have "tuna carpaccio" and "salmon carpaccio" and "zucchini carpaccio" even though the colors have nothing to do with it any more.
The association jumped from the color to the thinness of the shaving of the ingredient.
This sort of association is a weak form of metonymy in which the concept got so strongly linked to some aspect of the original dish that it jumped out as a generic descriptor.
Country Names
As a general rule, if the dish contains the name of its own country, it's origin is likely to be somewhere else.
This is counter-intuitive at first but logical on closer examination. You don't need to label something as "native" if it were actually native in the first place. Only if you wish to convince someone that something from the "outside" is really "inside" then you go about naming it after your own country.
Pad Thai is emphatically not Thai. The stir-fried noodle dish is unambiguously Chinese in origin even though the sauces and tastes are very much Thai. The government was heavily involved in promoting this dish as "Thai" in the 1930's and 40's.
Local Names
This is the wild card in this list. It could go either way.
Buffalo Wings probably did originate in the city of Buffalo. The Black Forest Cake is an English translation of the German Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. (Note: The German does refer to the "Black Forest" but it's also more precise that it's a cherry torte. The original dish is using a metaphor of the Forest for the black chocolate but the English treats it like a place of origin which it is not.)
Worcestershire Sauce is almost definitely not from Worcestershire. There's a bit of dubious branding (read below) going on. It's based on the ancient Roman garum (fish sauce).
Baked Alaska was invented in New York at the famous Delmonico's in 1876 to commemorate the acquisition of the territory.
And the various "chowders" floating around the East Coast originated no more locally than the CC originated in Siberia. They are all variants of ancient cooking styles even if the strong regionalization is a matter of preference and tradition.
Personalities
This list is really endless particularly in the 19th century. Flattering your patron whether it's a king, the king's courtiers, or the modern day version - movie stars is always good business even if the idea is mostly recycled.
The list can either be of the originator (Caesar Salad, Fettuccine Alfredo - see next section on "branding") or that of the some famous personality - mostly opera and movie stars (Peach Melba, Melba Toast, Turkey Tetrazzini).
The famous Auguste Escoffier, codifier of French haute cuisine was a master at this game and he learnt it from his teacher Marie-Antoine Carême. He played this game shamelessly with everyone from kings to composers to theater personalities (the movie stars of their day).
Please note modern day examples like the "Shirley Temple" and the "Baby Ruth" candy bar.
Branding
This is largely a 20th-century American thing but it would be remiss not to mention it even if just in passing.
Brands have entire units to promote their ingredients. Everything from Coca Cola to Heinz have entire research units pumping out recipes for their ingredients and have had them for at least the last 70 years. The purpose is to "support" the brand. Examples abound.
This is not limited to companies. The "Can" in Canola oil refers to Canada. It didn't sell very well as rapeseed oil ("raped oil" anyone?) but when they changed the name euphemistically to the country that was promoting it, it became popular and then generic. That's what it's called all over the world now. (Note: Canola didn't originate in Canada. The rule of countries applies. They just branded it.)
Conclusion
Do dish names matter? The CC would argue that they do.
A great dish with a memorable name will turn into a classic. Even a so-so dish with a catchy name has a great shot.
Just like rhyme and assonance gives a sort of memorability to poetry, the same set of rules lend a mystique and power to the names of dishes. It has more to do with humans and language that it has to do with cuisine but it's just as important.
The CC is going to talk about naming but only within the context of "traditional" dishes. "Traditional" is a loaded word and chefs these days give all kinds of fanciful names (which is also traditional) but we'll keep it relatively well-known.
The classification of naming depends on the language in question but the type of structures are definitely universal in that there are similar ideas in every cuisine.
Descriptive Names
This is the easiest category and also the largest. This describes the vast majority of dishes in almost all cuisines. The titles are self-descriptive and anyone who understands the grammar of a specific cuisine could with high probability just reproduce the dish without even looking at a recipe.
Fanciful Names 1 (Metaphor)
The older the cuisine and the greater the level of Imperial involvement, the greater the chance you are going to have metaphors do the heavy lifting for the dish.
The Japanese tatsuta age (竜田揚げ) refers to the river "tatsuta" where the leaves in autumn float down all brown and beautiful presumably. The dish is diced chicken deep-fried. Presumably the brown-ness of the perfectly fried chicken is the correlative.
Chinese cuisine (especially of the Imperial derivation) is particularly adept at this level of poetic metaphor. It's extremely hard to know what the dish is even if you read Mandarin fluently. If you already don't know the answer, you are not going to figure out that "desert boat sails on greens" refers to "camel's foot with hearts of rape".
The Japanese oyako don (親子丼) refers to "parent and child in donburi (bowl)". The parent is the chicken and the child is the egg. It's a rice dish topped with chicken and eggs.
We as a species have been this for a while.
Distilled alcohol in Latin is acqua vitae ("water of life"). Then translated into Gaelic we got uisce beatha which when rendered in English became whisky. (That's how the first word is pronounced.)
Lest this sound all too poetic for words, let us observe that even the "Bloomin' Onion" falls under this category.
Fanciful Names 2 (Euphemism)
Rocky Mountain Oysters. (Prairie oysters in Canada.)
They are fried bull calf testicles with the obvious parallel to fried oysters. The euphemism makes the dish go down easy (pun intended!)
Chicken feet are "phoenix claws" in Chinese. Bottarga refers to the dried and salted ovaries of the red mullet.
And restaurants regularly feature squab because few people would eat it if it just said young pigeon which is exactly what it is.
One of the most common ways euphemism is executed is by substituting a foreign word or phrase for a concept that would be unpalatable locally. Escargots (French) instead of snails. Calamari (Italian) instead of squid. Boudin noir (French - black sausage) instead of "blood sausage", etc.
Euphemism is a large part of human food naming. It's pretty global. We find new and innovative ways to disguise certain blunt truths about our omnivorous eating habits.
Fanciful Names 3 (Alliteration)
We humans are suckers for alliteration. This is one of the figures of speech that exists in almost every language in the world.
The examples are endless — Rump Roast, Crispy Chicken, etc.
This concept goes hand in hand with the next one — that of onomatopoeia. Rendering the sound is nice but adding in the alliteration (typically via repetition) makes the name of the dish really memorable.
Fanciful Names 4 (Onomatopoeia)
The CC's favorite example is that of biángbiáng noodles from China's Shaanxi province. The kanji for "biáng" is not even standard. It refers to the slapping sound of the dough on the table when the noodles are made in the traditional way.
Fanciful Names 5 (Parallel Association)
The dish Carpaccio specifically referred to raw beef because the paper-thin slices of raw beef resembled the pinks used by the painter Vittore Carpaccio. It only dates to about the 1950's when refrigeration made serving of raw beef possible. The origin is from Harry's Bar in Venice.
Today it refers to any thinly shaved meat or vegetable. Hence you have "tuna carpaccio" and "salmon carpaccio" and "zucchini carpaccio" even though the colors have nothing to do with it any more.
The association jumped from the color to the thinness of the shaving of the ingredient.
This sort of association is a weak form of metonymy in which the concept got so strongly linked to some aspect of the original dish that it jumped out as a generic descriptor.
Country Names
As a general rule, if the dish contains the name of its own country, it's origin is likely to be somewhere else.
This is counter-intuitive at first but logical on closer examination. You don't need to label something as "native" if it were actually native in the first place. Only if you wish to convince someone that something from the "outside" is really "inside" then you go about naming it after your own country.
Pad Thai is emphatically not Thai. The stir-fried noodle dish is unambiguously Chinese in origin even though the sauces and tastes are very much Thai. The government was heavily involved in promoting this dish as "Thai" in the 1930's and 40's.
Local Names
This is the wild card in this list. It could go either way.
Buffalo Wings probably did originate in the city of Buffalo. The Black Forest Cake is an English translation of the German Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte. (Note: The German does refer to the "Black Forest" but it's also more precise that it's a cherry torte. The original dish is using a metaphor of the Forest for the black chocolate but the English treats it like a place of origin which it is not.)
Worcestershire Sauce is almost definitely not from Worcestershire. There's a bit of dubious branding (read below) going on. It's based on the ancient Roman garum (fish sauce).
Baked Alaska was invented in New York at the famous Delmonico's in 1876 to commemorate the acquisition of the territory.
And the various "chowders" floating around the East Coast originated no more locally than the CC originated in Siberia. They are all variants of ancient cooking styles even if the strong regionalization is a matter of preference and tradition.
Personalities
This list is really endless particularly in the 19th century. Flattering your patron whether it's a king, the king's courtiers, or the modern day version - movie stars is always good business even if the idea is mostly recycled.
The list can either be of the originator (Caesar Salad, Fettuccine Alfredo - see next section on "branding") or that of the some famous personality - mostly opera and movie stars (Peach Melba, Melba Toast, Turkey Tetrazzini).
The famous Auguste Escoffier, codifier of French haute cuisine was a master at this game and he learnt it from his teacher Marie-Antoine Carême. He played this game shamelessly with everyone from kings to composers to theater personalities (the movie stars of their day).
Please note modern day examples like the "Shirley Temple" and the "Baby Ruth" candy bar.
Branding
This is largely a 20th-century American thing but it would be remiss not to mention it even if just in passing.
Brands have entire units to promote their ingredients. Everything from Coca Cola to Heinz have entire research units pumping out recipes for their ingredients and have had them for at least the last 70 years. The purpose is to "support" the brand. Examples abound.
This is not limited to companies. The "Can" in Canola oil refers to Canada. It didn't sell very well as rapeseed oil ("raped oil" anyone?) but when they changed the name euphemistically to the country that was promoting it, it became popular and then generic. That's what it's called all over the world now. (Note: Canola didn't originate in Canada. The rule of countries applies. They just branded it.)
Conclusion
Do dish names matter? The CC would argue that they do.
A great dish with a memorable name will turn into a classic. Even a so-so dish with a catchy name has a great shot.
Just like rhyme and assonance gives a sort of memorability to poetry, the same set of rules lend a mystique and power to the names of dishes. It has more to do with humans and language that it has to do with cuisine but it's just as important.
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