THE LANGUAGE OF FOOD: A LINGUIST READS THE MENU PDF, EPUB, EBOOK

Dan Jurafsky | 256 pages | 20 Nov 2015 | WW Norton & Co | 9780393351620 | English | New York, United States The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu

But we also found that expensive menus were shorter and more implicit. High-status restaurants want their customers to presuppose that food will be fresh, crisp and delicious. The surfeit of adjectives on middle-priced menus is thus a kind of overcompensation, a sign of status anxiety, and only the cheapest restaurants, in which the tastiness of the food might be in question, must overly protest the toothsomeness of their treats. We are surrounded by the language of food, words that offer a window into our psyche, our finances and our society. Dan Jurafsky is professor of linguistics and computer science at Stanford University. Accessibility help Skip to navigation Skip to content Skip to footer Cookies on FT Sites We use cookies opens in new window for a number of reasons, such as keeping FT Sites reliable and secure, personalising content and ads, providing social media features and to analyse how our Sites are used. Manage cookies. Dan Jurafsky August 22, Reuse this content opens in new window. Promoted Content. Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. Uhh, what? In layman's terms, an expensive restaurant will likely have a shorter menu, while a middle-of-the-road eatery will have a longer menu packed with descriptive words like "fresh," "rich," and "crisp. The cheaper the restaurant, the more customize-able the words. Finally, says Jurafsky, a lower-end eatery is more likely to include selling points such as offering dishes "your way," rather than serving plates as the chef creates them. With more renowned chefs, we'd suppose, they'd like to think that their way is your way. Find more great food content on Delish :. Search for the perfect recipe from our homepage Find out the latest food news Get a recipe book to save your favorite dishes Sign up for our free newsletters Check us out on Facebook , Pinterest , and Twitter. Kitchen Tips and Tools. United States. Type keyword s to search. What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu? You don't have to be a foodie to find "The Language of Food" a high enjoyable and compelling read" Boston Globe "entertaining and revealing throughout" The Economist "Fascinating. You'll never think of ketchup, French fries, fish and chips, or toast in the same way" -Deborah Tannen, author of the 1 bestseller You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation "Dan Jurafsky has taken on the subject with scholarship, wit, and charm, making The Language of Food a very engaging book. The linguistics of menus — Remains of the Day

Mentions of tradition occurred more than twice as often on inexpensive chips. Our linear regression showed that every time a family or an American locale is mentioned, the price per ounce of the chips drops 10 cents. The inexpensive chips thus represent a model of authenticity rooted in family traditions and family-run companies, and set in regional locations throughout America. For the upper class, by contrast, being authentic means being natural, using quality natural ingredients and avoiding artificial ingredients, preservatives, and so on. Words like artificial or fake are used solely in the expensive chip advertising. Even though most of the inexpensive chips also contain no preservatives, this fact is only mentioned in expensive chip advertising. Of course we all want to be special, and live an authentic life, whether we draw our metaphors from nature or from tradition. These models of natural versus traditional authenticity are part of our national dialogue, two of the many ways of framing that make up our ongoing conversation about who we are. The red state and blue state models of our nation are deeply inscribed in our collective discussion-- written on the back of every bag of potato chips. Hot days are rare in San Francisco, so random strangers have been smiling at each other on Mission Street and the lines are extra-long on the sidewalks in front of the ice creameries. You may not be aware of the close relationships among these summer phenomena. Ice cream was invented by modifying a technology originally discovered for fireworks. And the way ice creams flavors are named turns out to have a surprising relationship with the evolutionary origin of the human smile. Prices are not Depression-era at the latest upscale creameries, though, where you'd be lucky to walk away with a pint of ice cream for less than seven dollars. At Smitten , in Hayes Valley, for example, they'll make your ice cream fresh when you order it, freezing it with liquid nitrogen. At other places the selling point is the the unusual flavors or their interesting names. At Humphry Slocombe you can get foie gras, pink grapfefruit tarragon, or strawberry black olive. Bi-Rite Creamery will happily sell you honey lavender, balsamic strawberry, and salted caramel. Mitchell 's specializes in Filipino and other tropical flavors, including halo halo, lucuma, ube purple yam , and avocado. And Mr. Miscellaneous seems to keep running out of their latest hip flavor, orange blossom. Well, actually, it turns out that orange blossom is not a newfangled flavor. Orange blossom is, in fact, the original ice cream flavor, appearing in the earliest recipes by the mid 's, the period when ice cream was invented. By about , a later edition of La Varenne's cookbook suggests using fresh orange flowers: You must take sweet cream, and put thererto handfuls of powdered sugar, and take petals of Orange Flowers and mince them small, and put them in your Cream, and if you have no fresh Orange Flowers you must take candied, with a drop of good Orange Flower water And by other ice cream flavors were developed as well, including pumpkin, chocolate, and lemon, as well as a plethora of early sorbets: sour cherry, cardamom, coriander-lemon, and strawberry. Where did these flavors come from? The use of orange flower should give you a clue: the historical roots of ice cream and sorbet, like many of our modern foods, lie in the Muslim world. These chilled but not frozen drinks have been popular throughoutt the Ottoman, Arab, and Persian worlds continuously since the Middle Ages. By the 16th century Italian and French travelers had brought back words of these Turkish sherbets. In one of the earliest mentions of the word in Europe, the French naturalist Pierre Belon in described sherbets in Istanbul made of figs, plums, apricots, and raisins. Thirsty passers-by would buy a glass of syrup from wandering sellers or stands, mixed with water and chilled with ice. But by sherbets were still unavailable in Europe; here's an excerpt from a letter an Italian traveler sent home in from Constantinople, from Elizabeth David's lovely book "Harvest of the Cold Months" : scerbet , a certain composition which they make These sherbets were the source of the fruit ices that we now call sorbets. But the Ottoman drinks and the modern Middle Eastern ones as well were not frozen; they were cooled with ice or snow just like modern lemonade. People had been putting ice and snow into drinks to cool them for over years, but freezing sweetened fruit juice or cream requires a much lower temperature than just ice can achieve. So where did the idea and the technology for freezing arise? Obviously liquid nitrogen, the darling freezing technology of modernist cuisine , was not available in the 16th century. The insight came from fireworks. In the 9th century, during the Tang dynasty, the Chinese first realized that saltpeter potassium nitrate could be mixed with sulpher and coal to create the explosive mixture we now call gunpowder. Gunpowder was quickly adopted by the Muslim world, where potassium nitrate was called Chinese snow in Arabic and Chinese salt in Persian. Dissolving salts like potassium nitrate KNO 3 in water breaks the bonds between the ions, drawing heat from the surrounding water. This endothermic reaction, the basis of the modern cold pack shown to the right, can drop the temperature of the water enough to freeze pure water, although not low enough to freeze fruit ices or ice cream. By the early 16th century this discovery was widely used in Muslim India to chill water for drinking. At this time most of what is today northern and central India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, as well as parts of Afghanistan, was ruled by the Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. The Mughals were originally Turkic speakers from central Asia, and the royal line that conquered Delhi traced their descent from Genghis Khan Mughal was the Persian word for Mongol , but had adopted the Persian language and culture. By the time of Akbar, the Persian-speaking court at Agra was a center for the arts, architecture and literature. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata were translated from Sanskrit to Persian during this period, and Akbar's keen interest in painting and architecture led to the development of styles of art that mixed Persian, Hindu, and European forms. Like many places where scientific and culinary innovation and mixing flourished Moorish Spain, early Norman Sicily , Akbar's reign was a beacon of relative religious tolerance, in which the tax on non-Muslims was eliminated and other religions were allowed self-government. Agra and his later court in Lahore were steamy hot, and drinks were cooled by spinning a long-necked flask in saltpeter-water. Very quickly this idea of using saltpeter to cool water was adopted in Italy. Blas Villafranca, a Spanish physician working in Rome published the idea in , saying that this saltpeter bath had become the common method of cooling wine in Rome. On the left is his picture of the method, showing a bulbous flask clearly adapted from the Indian flasks above; the shape makes it easy to speed up the cooling by turning the bottle in the cold bath. In the next step in ice cream technology was taken by the Neapolitan Giambattista Della Porta. In the 2nd edition of his "Magia Naturalis" he experimented with adding saltpeter to snow rather than to water. The result successfully froze watered wine. Della Porta's combination was a happy accident; it was not saltpeter's endothermic reaction with water that caused cooling when mixed with ice, but a completely different chemical property. Adding a solute anything will do lowers the freezing point of water, by interfering with the crystal structure of the ice. Adding salt or potassium chloride slowly draws water out from its chrysal mixture, and since the freezing point is lowered, turns into a salty slush. The phase shift from solid to liquid takes energy another endothermic reaction , resulting in an even colder freezing brine that reaches degrees C, easily cold enough to freeze ice cream or fruit ices. Sometime between and , the Neapolitans combined the liquid Ottoman sherbets with the newly invented saltpeter-and-ice freezing method, resulting in a new food: frozen sherbets or frozen sorbets. The idea of freezing other liquids like milks and custards soon followed. We don't have any of these early Italian recipes, the way we have early English and French recipes, but evidence for the Italian innovation comes from contemporary French ice cream makers who discussed learning their recipes from Italy. Soon afterwards the Italians also figured out that common salt worked better than saltpeter for freezing salt is a smaller molecule than saltpeter; the smaller the molecule, the more ions from each gram of solute interferes with freezing ; by the English chemist Robert Boyle said that ice and common salt was the method "much employ'd" in Italy to chill drinks and fruit. By the s European languages had settled on names for the new invention, with the Ottoman sherbet now redefined as a frozen fruit ice rather than just a fruit syrup, and the words for ice cream mostly based on words meaning "ice" or "frozen" Eis, glace, gelato , etc. As for the names of the flavors, mostly they are just the names of the ingredients "chocolate", "strawberry", "orange blossom", and so on. We commonly assume that such flavor names are purely descriptive, and that factors like the sounds of the names should have no bearing on how the ice cream tastes. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet : What's in a name? Juliet was roughly correct; the sounds or "phones" that make up a word don't generally tell you what the word means. By BC Plato in the Cratylus and the Chinese linguist Xunzi of the Chinese Warring States period had figured out that the relationship between sound and meaning is usually arbitrary. A moment's thought makes it clear why this must be true: different languages have totally different sounds for the same concept, and languages only have around fifty or so phones, and obviously have a lot more ideas to express than fifty. But it turns out that research over the last century has shown that Shakespeare was wrong; sometimes the sounds of a name do influence how people perceive ice cream. The phenomenon of sounds carrying meaning is called "sound symbolism". Sound symbolism has been most deeply studied with vowels, and in particular the difference between two classes of vowels, front vowels and back vowels , which are named depending on the position of the tongue. The picture to the left shows a very schematic cutaway of the head, showing the lips and teeth on the left, and the tongue high up toward the front of the mouth. The picture to the right shows a very schematic tongue position for these vowels; lower in general, and more toward the back of the throat. A number of studies over the last years or so have shown that front vowels in many languages tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words that refer to big, fat, heavy things. It's not always true, but it's a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little , teeny or itsy-bitsy all front vowels versus humongous or gargantuan back vowels. Or the i vowel in Spanish chico front vowel meaning small versus gordo back vowel meaning fat. Or French petit front vowel versus grand back vowel. In one marketing study , for example, Richard Klink created pairs of made-up product brand names that were identical except for having front vowels or back vowels: nidax front vowel verus nodax back vowel , or detal front vowel versus dutal back vowel. For a number of hypothetical products, he asked people which seemed bigger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, with questions like: Which brand of laptop seems bigger; Detal or Dutal? Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi? Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen? Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab? In each case, the participants in the study tended to choose the product named by back vowels dutal , nodax as the larger, heavier, thicker, darker product. Similar studies have been conducted in various other languages. The fact that consumers think of brand names with back vowels as heavy, thick, richer products suggests that they might prefer to name ice cream with back vowels, since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be heavy and rich. Indeed, it turns out that people seem to at least mildly prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels. In a study in the Journal of Consumer Research Eric Yorkston and Geeta Menon had participants read a press release describing a new ice cream about to be released. Half the participants read a version where the ice cream was called "Frish" front vowel and the other half read a version where it was called "Frosh" back vowel , but the press release was otherwise identical. Asked their opinions of this still hypothetical ice cream, the "Frosh" people rated it as smoother, creamier, and richer than the "Frish" people, and were more likely to say they would buy it. The participants were even more influenced by the vowels if they were simultanously distracted by performing some other task, suggesting that their response to the vowels was automatic, at a non-conscious level. If people subconsciously think of ice cream names with back vowels as richer and creamier, it suggests that actual ice cream brands or flavors might also use back vowels. My hypothesis was that we would see more back vowels in names of actual ice cream brands or flavors. Furthermore, if front vowels indeed indicate thin, small, light , we should expect more front vowels in foods that supposed to be thin and light, like crackers. To test the hypothesis I downloaded two lists of food names from the web. The second was a list of cracker brands from a dieting website. The result, shown in the table to the right, is that ice creams names indeed have more back vowels and cracker names have more front vowels. But most of the front vowels in ice cream flavors tend to be the names of small thin ingredients in the ice cream: th i n m i nt , ch i p , p ea nut br i ttle. So what's going on? Why are front vowels associated with small, thin, light things, and back vowels with big, solid, heavy things? The most widely accepted theory, called the Frequency Code , suggests that low frequencies low pitch and high frequencies high pitch are associated with particular meanings. The frequency code was developed by linguist John Ohala my old phonetics professor! Morton noticed that mammals and birds tend to use low-frequency deeper sounds when they are aggressive or hostile, but use higher-freqeuncy higher-pitched sounds when frightened, appeasing, or friendly. Since larger animals naturally make deeper sounds the roar of lions and smaller animals naturally make high-pitched sounds the tweet of birds , Morton's idea is that animals try to appear larger when they are competing or aggressive, but try to appear smaller and less threatening when they are trying to be friendly or appeasing. Morton and Ohala thus suggest that humans instinctively associate the pitch of sounds with size. All vowels are composed of different frequency resonances. When the tongue is high and in the front of the mouth, it creates a small cavity in front of the tongue. Small cavities cause higher-pitched resonances the smaller the space for vibration, the shorter the wavelength, hence the higher the frequency. One particular resonance called the second formant is much higher for front vowels and lower for back vowels. Thus the frequency code suggests that front vowels are associated with small, thin, things, and back vowels with big heavy things because front vowels have higher pitched resonances, and we instinctively associate higher pitch with smaller things. This link of high pitch with deference or friendliness may also explain the origin of the smile, which is similarly associated with appeasing or friendly behavior. The way we make a smile is by retracting the corners of the mouth. Animals like monkeys also retract the corners of their mouths to express submission Ohala's figure a on the right , and use the opposite facial expression, which Ohala calls the "o-face" in which the corners of the mouth are drawn forward with the lips possibly protruding figure b on the right , to indicate aggression. In fact, the similarity in mouth position between smiling and the vowel i explains why we say "cheese" when we take pictures; i is the smiling vowel. Ohala's theory is thus that smiling evolved when mammals were in competitive situations, as a way to make the voice sound more high-pitched, so as it make the smiler appear smaller and less aggressive, and hence friendlier. Of course even if Ohala is right about the ancient evolutionary origin of the smile, smiling in humans has evolved into a means of expressing many shades of enjoyment and other emotional meanings, just as back vowels have become part of a rich and beautiful system for expressing complex meanings by combining sounds into words. Something similarly beautiful was created as saltpeter and snow, sherbet and salt, were passed along and extended from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Mughals to the Neapolitans, to create the sweet lusciousness of ice cream. And it's a nice thought that saltpeter, applied originally to war, became the key hundreds of years later to inventing something that makes us all smile on a hot summer day. Ice cream, anyone? The wild garlic is blooming, the top of Bernal Hill is covered in fennel, and everyone is celebrating spring. The stores are full of marshmallow peeps for Easter, Janet's family just swept her grandparents' grave for the Qingming Festival, the Persian New Year Festival, Nowruz , just passed, and my family is getting ready for Passover, which means it's time for coconut macaroons, shown above. Used by permission The city is also full of another, trendier, macaroon right now: the Parisian macaron. As even the Wall Street Journal is pointing out , Parisian macaroons are everywhere, from fancy patisseries to Trader Joes, and San Francisco, never a place to miss out on a trend, even has macaron delivery. Of course, fads, whether modern or historical, are not confined just to desserts. In fashion, there was a trend amoung rich young hipsters in 18th century England to wear outlandish hair styles very tall powdered wigs with tiny caps on top and affected clothing shown below. They were called Macaronis , likely because on their travels in Italy they acquired a taste for pasta maccheroni is a generic word for pasta in Italian. The song Yankee Doodle , written around this time to poke fun at the tattered colonial troops, mocks a disheveled "Yankee" soldier whose attempt to look sharp was to "stick a feather in his hat and call it macaroni". But I digress. What are the antecedents of the macaron trend? Were coconut macaroons the original? Or did they derive instead from the Parisian macaron? It turns out that both are new fads, invented around by modifying the original almond cookie called macaroon in English or macaron in French. From the Larousse Gastronomique : Macaroon : A small, round biscuit cookie , crunchy outside and soft inside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites. Macaroons are sometimes flavoured with coffee, chocolate, nuts, or fruit and then joined together in pairs. The original macaroons or macarons , then, are almond meringue cookies; exactly what are called amaretti or ricciarelli in Italian or amarguillos in Spanish, and shown on the right. The Parisian macaron is a sandwich cookie that joins two macarons with a filling, while the coconut macaroon replaces the ground almonds with shredded coconut. But it turns out that all of these: macarons, macaroni, coconut macaroons, and perhaps even the Macarena , have the same origin, rooted in the great meetings of the Islamic and Christian culinary traditions in the Middle Ages. One tradition is the rich repertoire of sweets that originated in Zoroastrian Persia. Publication Date: September 15, Why do we eat toast for breakfast, and then toast to good health at dinner? What does the turkey we eat on Thanksgiving have to do with the country on the eastern Mediterranean? Can you figure out how much your dinner will cost by counting the words on the menu? A model of rigor and readability… weave[s] together the journey food makes through culture with the journey its name makes through language. Kitchen Tips and Tools. United States. Type keyword s to search. Today's Top Stories. Order Delish Ultimate Cocktails. This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. More From Food Trends. Let the Food Face Tributes Begin NPR Cookie Consent and Choices

Large-scale reading of this sort is beyond the abilities of even the most indecisive restaurant-goer, and so we used techniques from computational linguistics, writing software to count automatically the number of words, their complexity and the number of times certain words occurred, such as specific pronouns or particular nouns or adjectives. These terrible reviews are not complaints about bad food or atmosphere but rather a coping mechanism for dealing with minor trauma caused by face-to-face interactions. Money also matters. When a review of an expensive restaurant was positive, writers tended to use metaphors of sex and sensual pleasure. Why the difference? The cupcake made me do it! In fact, women are more likely than men to use these drug metaphors, suggesting that they are especially likely to feel the pressure to conform by eating healthy or low-calorie food. In another study, my student Josh Freedman and I looked at the advertising text on the back of packets of crisps. As with reviews, we found that the more expensive the crisp, the fancier the language. Menu language is equally instructive. In a study for my forthcoming book, we computationally analysed thousands of US menus and found we could predict prices just from the words on the menu. Jurafsky and the Carnegie Mellon team found that four-star reviews tended to use a narrower range of vague positive words, while one-star reviews had a more varied vocabulary. One-star reviews also had higher incidence of past tense, pronouns especially plural pronouns and other subtle markers that linguists have previously found in chat room discussions about the death of Princess Diana and blog posts written in the months after the Sept. In short, Mr. Jurafsky said, authors of one-star reviews unconsciously use language much as people do in the wake of collective trauma. Another finding: Reviews of expensive restaurants are more likely to use sexual metaphors, while the food at cheaper restaurants tends to be compared to drugs. In his book, Mr. Jurafsky loves a good riches-to-rags-to-riches culinary tale. How can we not use it? Food Deciphering the Menu. Home Page World Coronavirus U. The length and content of a menu reflects its price point. Another argument: the price point of a given restaurant is conversely proportional to its menu length and use of adjectives. Uhh, what? In layman's terms, an expensive restaurant will likely have a shorter menu, while a middle-of-the-road eatery will have a longer menu packed with descriptive words like "fresh," "rich," and "crisp. The cheaper the restaurant, the more customize-able the words. Finally, says Jurafsky, a lower-end eatery is more likely to include selling points such as offering dishes "your way," rather than serving plates as the chef creates them. With more renowned chefs, we'd suppose, they'd like to think that their way is your way. Find more great food content on Delish :. Search for the perfect recipe from our homepage Find out the latest food news Get a recipe book to save your favorite dishes Sign up for our free newsletters Check us out on Facebook , Pinterest , and Twitter. Kitchen Tips and Tools.

‘The Language of Food’ by Dan Jurafsky - The Boston Globe

Sometime between and , the Neapolitans combined the liquid Ottoman sherbets with the newly invented saltpeter-and-ice freezing method, resulting in a new food: frozen sherbets or frozen sorbets. The idea of freezing other liquids like milks and custards soon followed. We don't have any of these early Italian recipes, the way we have early English and French recipes, but evidence for the Italian innovation comes from contemporary French ice cream makers who discussed learning their recipes from Italy. Soon afterwards the Italians also figured out that common salt worked better than saltpeter for freezing salt is a smaller molecule than saltpeter; the smaller the molecule, the more ions from each gram of solute interferes with freezing ; by the English chemist Robert Boyle said that ice and common salt was the method "much employ'd" in Italy to chill drinks and fruit. By the s European languages had settled on names for the new invention, with the Ottoman sherbet now redefined as a frozen fruit ice rather than just a fruit syrup, and the words for ice cream mostly based on words meaning "ice" or "frozen" Eis, glace, gelato , etc. As for the names of the flavors, mostly they are just the names of the ingredients "chocolate", "strawberry", "orange blossom", and so on. We commonly assume that such flavor names are purely descriptive, and that factors like the sounds of the names should have no bearing on how the ice cream tastes. To paraphrase Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet : What's in a name? Juliet was roughly correct; the sounds or "phones" that make up a word don't generally tell you what the word means. By BC Plato in the Cratylus and the Chinese linguist Xunzi of the Chinese Warring States period had figured out that the relationship between sound and meaning is usually arbitrary. A moment's thought makes it clear why this must be true: different languages have totally different sounds for the same concept, and languages only have around fifty or so phones, and obviously have a lot more ideas to express than fifty. But it turns out that research over the last century has shown that Shakespeare was wrong; sometimes the sounds of a name do influence how people perceive ice cream. The phenomenon of sounds carrying meaning is called "sound symbolism". Sound symbolism has been most deeply studied with vowels, and in particular the difference between two classes of vowels, front vowels and back vowels , which are named depending on the position of the tongue. The picture to the left shows a very schematic cutaway of the head, showing the lips and teeth on the left, and the tongue high up toward the front of the mouth. The picture to the right shows a very schematic tongue position for these vowels; lower in general, and more toward the back of the throat. A number of studies over the last years or so have shown that front vowels in many languages tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words that refer to big, fat, heavy things. It's not always true, but it's a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like little , teeny or itsy-bitsy all front vowels versus humongous or gargantuan back vowels. Or the i vowel in Spanish chico front vowel meaning small versus gordo back vowel meaning fat. Or French petit front vowel versus grand back vowel. In one marketing study , for example, Richard Klink created pairs of made-up product brand names that were identical except for having front vowels or back vowels: nidax front vowel verus nodax back vowel , or detal front vowel versus dutal back vowel. For a number of hypothetical products, he asked people which seemed bigger or smaller, or heavier or lighter, with questions like: Which brand of laptop seems bigger; Detal or Dutal? Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi? Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen? Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab? In each case, the participants in the study tended to choose the product named by back vowels dutal , nodax as the larger, heavier, thicker, darker product. Similar studies have been conducted in various other languages. The fact that consumers think of brand names with back vowels as heavy, thick, richer products suggests that they might prefer to name ice cream with back vowels, since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be heavy and rich. Indeed, it turns out that people seem to at least mildly prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels. In a study in the Journal of Consumer Research Eric Yorkston and Geeta Menon had participants read a press release describing a new ice cream about to be released. Half the participants read a version where the ice cream was called "Frish" front vowel and the other half read a version where it was called "Frosh" back vowel , but the press release was otherwise identical. Asked their opinions of this still hypothetical ice cream, the "Frosh" people rated it as smoother, creamier, and richer than the "Frish" people, and were more likely to say they would buy it. The participants were even more influenced by the vowels if they were simultanously distracted by performing some other task, suggesting that their response to the vowels was automatic, at a non-conscious level. If people subconsciously think of ice cream names with back vowels as richer and creamier, it suggests that actual ice cream brands or flavors might also use back vowels. My hypothesis was that we would see more back vowels in names of actual ice cream brands or flavors. Furthermore, if front vowels indeed indicate thin, small, light , we should expect more front vowels in foods that supposed to be thin and light, like crackers. To test the hypothesis I downloaded two lists of food names from the web. The second was a list of cracker brands from a dieting website. The result, shown in the table to the right, is that ice creams names indeed have more back vowels and cracker names have more front vowels. But most of the front vowels in ice cream flavors tend to be the names of small thin ingredients in the ice cream: th i n m i nt , ch i p , p ea nut br i ttle. So what's going on? Why are front vowels associated with small, thin, light things, and back vowels with big, solid, heavy things? The most widely accepted theory, called the Frequency Code , suggests that low frequencies low pitch and high frequencies high pitch are associated with particular meanings. The frequency code was developed by linguist John Ohala my old phonetics professor! Morton noticed that mammals and birds tend to use low- frequency deeper sounds when they are aggressive or hostile, but use higher-freqeuncy higher-pitched sounds when frightened, appeasing, or friendly. Since larger animals naturally make deeper sounds the roar of lions and smaller animals naturally make high-pitched sounds the tweet of birds , Morton's idea is that animals try to appear larger when they are competing or aggressive, but try to appear smaller and less threatening when they are trying to be friendly or appeasing. Morton and Ohala thus suggest that humans instinctively associate the pitch of sounds with size. All vowels are composed of different frequency resonances. When the tongue is high and in the front of the mouth, it creates a small cavity in front of the tongue. Small cavities cause higher-pitched resonances the smaller the space for vibration, the shorter the wavelength, hence the higher the frequency. One particular resonance called the second formant is much higher for front vowels and lower for back vowels. Thus the frequency code suggests that front vowels are associated with small, thin, things, and back vowels with big heavy things because front vowels have higher pitched resonances, and we instinctively associate higher pitch with smaller things. This link of high pitch with deference or friendliness may also explain the origin of the smile, which is similarly associated with appeasing or friendly behavior. The way we make a smile is by retracting the corners of the mouth. Animals like monkeys also retract the corners of their mouths to express submission Ohala's figure a on the right , and use the opposite facial expression, which Ohala calls the "o-face" in which the corners of the mouth are drawn forward with the lips possibly protruding figure b on the right , to indicate aggression. In fact, the similarity in mouth position between smiling and the vowel i explains why we say "cheese" when we take pictures; i is the smiling vowel. Ohala's theory is thus that smiling evolved when mammals were in competitive situations, as a way to make the voice sound more high-pitched, so as it make the smiler appear smaller and less aggressive, and hence friendlier. Of course even if Ohala is right about the ancient evolutionary origin of the smile, smiling in humans has evolved into a means of expressing many shades of enjoyment and other emotional meanings, just as back vowels have become part of a rich and beautiful system for expressing complex meanings by combining sounds into words. Something similarly beautiful was created as saltpeter and snow, sherbet and salt, were passed along and extended from the Chinese to the Arabs to the Mughals to the Neapolitans, to create the sweet lusciousness of ice cream. And it's a nice thought that saltpeter, applied originally to war, became the key hundreds of years later to inventing something that makes us all smile on a hot summer day. Ice cream, anyone? The wild garlic is blooming, the top of Bernal Hill is covered in fennel, and everyone is celebrating spring. The stores are full of marshmallow peeps for Easter, Janet's family just swept her grandparents' grave for the Qingming Festival, the Persian New Year Festival, Nowruz , just passed, and my family is getting ready for Passover, which means it's time for coconut macaroons, shown above. Used by permission The city is also full of another, trendier, macaroon right now: the Parisian macaron. As even the Wall Street Journal is pointing out , Parisian macaroons are everywhere, from fancy patisseries to Trader Joes, and San Francisco, never a place to miss out on a trend, even has macaron delivery. Of course, fads, whether modern or historical, are not confined just to desserts. In fashion, there was a trend amoung rich young hipsters in 18th century England to wear outlandish hair styles very tall powdered wigs with tiny caps on top and affected clothing shown below. They were called Macaronis , likely because on their travels in Italy they acquired a taste for pasta maccheroni is a generic word for pasta in Italian. The song Yankee Doodle , written around this time to poke fun at the tattered colonial troops, mocks a disheveled "Yankee" soldier whose attempt to look sharp was to "stick a feather in his hat and call it macaroni". But I digress. What are the antecedents of the macaron trend? Were coconut macaroons the original? Or did they derive instead from the Parisian macaron? It turns out that both are new fads, invented around by modifying the original almond cookie called macaroon in English or macaron in French. From the Larousse Gastronomique : Macaroon : A small, round biscuit cookie , crunchy outside and soft inside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites. Macaroons are sometimes flavoured with coffee, chocolate, nuts, or fruit and then joined together in pairs. The original macaroons or macarons , then, are almond meringue cookies; exactly what are called amaretti or ricciarelli in Italian or amarguillos in Spanish, and shown on the right. The Parisian macaron is a sandwich cookie that joins two macarons with a filling, while the coconut macaroon replaces the ground almonds with shredded coconut. But it turns out that all of these: macarons, macaroni, coconut macaroons, and perhaps even the Macarena , have the same origin, rooted in the great meetings of the Islamic and Christian culinary traditions in the Middle Ages. One tradition is the rich repertoire of sweets that originated in Zoroastrian Persia. Take a third of a pound of sugar, dissolve it with half an ounce of rose-water on a quiet fire, then take it up. When it has cooled off, throw the pounded sugar and almonds on it and knead them with it Dough products were also eaten in the Greek and Roman worlds. These two food traditions came together on the island of Sicily. The Romans had planted durum wheat, and made Sicily a breadbasked of their Empire. The Byzantine period brought the Greek language and Orthodoxy. The Arabs landed in and made Palermo the second largest city in the world, introducing paper to Europe, and bringing sugar cane, pistachios, lemons, rice, and oranges. By the Normans had conquered Sicily and England , and for a brief period the rule of Roger I and Roger II of Sicily was an experiment in mutual tolerance, at least compared to the rest of Europe; Greek, Arabic, and Latin were all official languages, government officials were drawn from all three cultures and Muslims and Jews were governed by their own laws. Above and right is the Cathedral of Monreale, showing its beautiful combination of Norman, Byzantine and Arab styles. Sicily is also where modern durum wheat pasta was developed. By , Muhammad al-Idrisi, the Moroccan-born geographer of king Roger II, describes Sicily as an important center of pasta itriyya , exported throughout the Mediterranean world, to both Muslim and Christian countries. The myth that Marco Polo introduced pasta to Italy from China was invented in the 's in the Minnesota Macaroni Journal ; By the time Polo returned from China in , pasta had been a major export commodity for well over a century. By pasta had branched out of Sicily. Even in France, Jewish documents, like the The Siddur Rashi , attributed to the 11th French scholar Rashi, use the word vermiseles , derived via old French vermeseil from Italian vermicelli , to describe dough boiled as pasta or fried in fritters. Within a hundred years or so the Yiddish word vermiseles has morphed to germizelli or vremzel , and finally to the modern form of the word, chremsel , which still describes a dough fritter, by now a sweet matso-meal pancake shown above from Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisted that is eaten at Passover. Alas, we just don't know where it comes from. Arabic is likely; Italian food scholar Anna Martellotti suggests that it comes from the pistachio marzipan muqarrada mentioned above and Clifford Wright suggests a different Arabic etymology from a Tunisian word. Others including the OED suggest it may come from the Greek makaria funeral gruel, or perhaps from the Italian dialect word maccare , meaning 'to crush'. But none of these etymologies are universally accepted, and we may never know. What most scholars seem to agree on is that the ancestor of macaroon or macaroni was a word used in various languages French, Catalan, and to some extent English and Italian for two distinct foods, both made of a paste with rose water and egg whites and sweet spices: one a kind of marzipan almond paste with rose water, egg whites, and sugar and the other a kind of gnocchi flour paste with rose water, egg whites, no sugar. Boccaccio in his Decameron around talks about macaroni as a kind of hand-cut dumpling or gnocchi eaten with butter and cheese. Pasta came very quickly with the Normans from Sicily to England, and the first extant recipe for macaroni turns out to appear in the first cookbook in English, Forme of Cury , shown above and below: Makerouns. Take chese and grate it and butter imelte, cast bynethen and aboven as losyns. Take cheese and grate it, and melted butter, and arrange below and above like lasagne. Then take an iron rod as long as your palm or longer, and as thin as string, and place it on top of each stick, and then roll with both hands over a table; then remove the iron rod and the macaroni will be perforated in the middle These recipes are quickly translated, and by this recipe appears in French, in Lyons, under the name macarons en potaige. But pasta never caught on in England and France, and by a few hundred years later seems to have disappeared. Only in the 18th century did eating macaroni became first an exotic habit of British dandys, and then eventually a more widely popular food in both England and America. Simultaneously with the expansion of pasta out of Sicily and around Europe in the late Middle Ages, various dishes based on almond paste also started to appear. The most popular almond paste dish in Europe was marzipan , made of almond paste, sugar, rose water, and sometimes egg whites. The word marzipan first appeared in Italian, in , as marzapane , and in English in as marchpane. Food historians generally believe that the name comes from the Arabic and Persian word mauthaban , which described the boxes or jars that this kind of candy was imported in, and indeed the earliest uses of the word marzipan seems to refer to a pastry casing with a marzipan filling. Here's a recipe without egg whites for the filling from Martino's s Art of Cooking : Marzipan. Peel the almonds well and crush When you crush them, wet them with a bit of rose water so that they do not purge their oil. Marzipan very early became a food eaten for celebrations at Christmas and Easter, and was often produced by convents, including the convent of San Clemente in Toledo, Spain, and the convent of the Martorana in Palermo, Sicily, shown at right. Then somewhere perhaps between and a version of baked marzipan that is much lighter, with more eggwhites, began to appear in France, Italy and possibly Spain. This new baked marzipan generally had only 3 or 4 ingredients: almonds, sugar, egg whites, and sometimes rose water or orange blossom water. In France, the word macaron is used for this food as well as for the pasta. In Italy, where the word maccherone by now only means pasta, these new lighter marzipan cookies had various names. We can't be absolutely certain whether this new lighter, baked version of marzipan had been created in Sicily or elsewhere in Italy and then spread to France, Spain and Turkey, or whether it was France or Spain was the original source. Alternatively, the idea of making a puffy baked marzipan might have developed in different regions independently, a possibility that is consistent with the widely different macaroon traditions that exist in different regions of both Italy and France. In Italy, there are different traditions for dry amaretti like amaretti di Saronno , above , soft amaretti amaretti morbidi which have a higher quantity of water and may contain honey, and others like the dry bruti ma buoni ugly but good , which are rough lumps with pieces of hazelnuts or almonds, or the soft ricciarelli above which are traditionally oval-shaped and have orange peel or zest and sometimes honey. In France, the Larousse Gastronomique mentions both crisp macarons croquants and soft macaroons macarons moelleux , and diverse recipes from many regions, including Amiens, Melun, Montmorillion, Nancy, and Niorts. In Cormery, for example, batter is piped into a circle right resulting in a donut shape after baking below. Convents and monasteries like Cormery Abbey were instrumental in the preservation and transmission of recipes for sweets like macaroons. The Larousse Gastronomique tells us that by the eighteenth century macaroons were a specialty of a number of convents and their recipes were quickly commercialized; in Nancy two sisters left the convent of the Holy Sacrament and started Maison des Soeurs Macarons , while in Saint-Emilion, Cindy Meyers' lovely article in Gastronomica tells us , the Fabrique de Macarons Blanchez bakery sells macarons according to the "Authentic Macaron Recipe of the Old Nuns of Saint-Emilion". The macaron doesn't appear in print, however, until , in Rabelais, in passing. Shortly thereafter, the first English language recipe in defines the English word "macaroon" as derived from the French "macaron" which are "compounded of Sugar, Almonds, Rosewater, and Muske, pounded together and baked with a gentle fire". The Washington macaroon, with its rose water and muske, is a medieval recipe redolent of its Arab sources. Even as this recipe was being written, however, modern French cuisine began to evolve out of its medieval antecedents, replacing imported medieval spices with local herbs. The chef who was most important in guiding this transition was La Varenne, and the first completely modern recipe for macaroons comes from his famous cookbook, The French Cook , in which he eliminates the orange water and rose water from the earlier recipes: Macaroon. Get a pound of shelled almonds, set them to soak in some cool water and wash them until the water is clear; drain them. Grind them in a mortar moistening them with three egg whites instead of orange blossom water, and adding in four ounces of powdered sugar. Make your paste which on paper you cut in the shape of a macaroon, then cook it, but be careful not to give it too hot a fire. When cooked, take it out of the oven and put it away in a warm, dry place. For the next few centuries, from to , the word macaroon meant this recipe of La Varenne's, defined above by the modern Larousse Gastronomique as a "small, round cookie, crunchy outside and soft inside, made with ground almonds, sugar and egg whites. The French innnovation was related to the fact that macaroons and amaretti were often sold in pairs with the flat sides together. The second innovation happened in America only a few years before Desfontaines added ganache to his macarons, and was linked to the new fad for coconut. When I found this book, I was very interested. I was hoping to learn more about the names and evolution of different foods, but I was left unfulfilled. Perhaps if I had a larger appetite for food, this book would have piqued my interest more. Very interesting. I had to write a review on this title in an English class in college and write a lengthy review over it for my professor. He writes about the origin of many very common food items from Ketchup - Catsup depending on where you're from - to fish and chips and so many more. He focuses on nearly forgotten histories that predate our common understanding of some of the words and foods we use and eat every day. For anyone wanting some history or an interesting read on food, this would be a good place to start. You come away having unexpectedly learned so much about food history, and it all makes so much sense. I recommend it to anyone with an interest in food that needs something other than a cookbook to look at. This book is extremely informative, and at times, it's just downright fun. In a recent study at Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University my colleagues and I examined , restaurant reviews on the web of 6, restaurants, across seven US cities. Large-scale reading of this sort is beyond the abilities of even the most indecisive restaurant-goer, and so we used techniques from computational linguistics, writing software to count automatically the number of words, their complexity and the number of times certain words occurred, such as specific pronouns or particular nouns or adjectives. These terrible reviews are not complaints about bad food or atmosphere but rather a coping mechanism for dealing with minor trauma caused by face-to-face interactions. Money also matters. When a review of an expensive restaurant was positive, writers tended to use metaphors of sex and sensual pleasure. Why the difference? The cupcake made me do it! In fact, women are more likely than men to use these drug metaphors, suggesting that they are especially likely to feel the pressure to conform by eating healthy or low-calorie food. In another study, my student Josh Freedman and I looked at the advertising text on the back of packets of crisps. As with reviews, we found that the more expensive the crisp, the fancier the language. Menu language is equally instructive. https://files8.webydo.com/9590498/UploadedFiles/F9EF938A-9457-02B7-17C1-E948831B103B.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9590257/UploadedFiles/2E863A95-1E83-F0F5-72E2-207EDB4B89A8.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9586331/UploadedFiles/843E95C8-6575-08E7-E975-5043E3B74435.pdf https://uploads.strikinglycdn.com/files/f20bb8c3-a06e-4e96-9c5a-2757ef723eea/briefwechsel-zwischen-jacob-grimm-und-friedrich-david- graeter-aus-den-jahren-1810-1813-762.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9587760/UploadedFiles/F774C052-8FE3-B8BA-447B-63E5691BE60C.pdf https://static.s123-cdn-static.com/uploads/4639337/normal_602060da7288e.pdf https://files8.webydo.com/9590154/UploadedFiles/B109453B-792A-A000-18F2-BFA066FA9CF5.pdf