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Authors: Dan Jurafsky

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ON ANY GIVEN
Friday night there’s usually someone cooking with us at the sunny blue house on Bernal Hill; friends and family drop in to help make dinner, work our way through a new cuisine, or attempt recipes from the latest cookbook. Over the years many couples have met and eventually married while chopping garlic and ginger at our various houses and apartments, and their subsequent offspring have built gingerbread houses and stamped out cookies on the counters. The couples include Janet and yours truly; we met throwing a breakfast-for-dinner-themed cooking party and celebrate our anniversary now by cooking breakfast for dinner for everyone (having morning foods at night makes it an enjoyable violation of the grammar of cuisine).

Group cooking happens all over the world. In the Basque-speaking country of Spain where I spent sabbatical time, the private cooking clubs called
txoko
in Basque are a central part of the culture. (Basque, unrelated to any other languages of Europe, was illegal to speak during the Franco period, but like the Catalan language is undergoing a flowering among the younger generation.) The txoko (or in Spanish,
sociedad gastronómica
) was first created in the nineteenth century when members (originally only men) would get together to cook and eat at a communally organized kitchen. The clubs began in the Basque city of Donostia, San Sebastián in Spanish, but are now common throughout the Basque-speaking region. San Sebastián is set on a lovely curve of beach on the Bay of Biscay, between lush foggy green hills, and reminded me of home. Long a fishermen’s town, the city is now a
brilliant center of culinary innovation, full of Michelin-star restaurants and innovative tapas (
pintxos
in Basque).

We were in San Sebastián a few years ago during the harvest moon. At home we celebrate the Chinese harvest moon Mid-Autumn Festival the traditional way: by inviting people over to wander outside with a drink and look at the full moon (given the tiny backyards in San Francisco, “outside” means “on the roof,” which can be a bit perilous because of the wine). In San Sebastián professor Eneko Agirre instead took us walking through the old city where we stopped at each bar for a glass of cider or the dry sparkling white wine called
txakolin
and a single seafood tapa: grilled squid, boquerones in vinegar, an innovative rose made out of grilled lobster in a blanket of dry-ice fog.

The food was superb everywhere, testifying to the Basques’ long obsession with seafood. As Mark Kurlansky notes in his wonderful book
Cod
, the Basques accidentally happened upon North America while chasing cod across the Atlantic, but didn’t bother to tell anyone because they wanted to keep the continent as a large private cod-drying rack. Food is not just an obsession of a few clubs or restaurants. Even outside of the formal txoko, there are many public kitchens available in San Sebastián for rent and group cooking is a common part of the culture.

What makes group cooking special, whether in San Sebastián or San Francisco, is that the meal benefits from what everyone brings, quite literally, to the table: their favorite ingredients, their culinary techniques, their family spices. I’ll leave you with the thought that this “stone soup” metaphor is exactly what underlies the foods created by the great meetings of civilizations that also created our modern world. Ketchup, syrup, aspic, turkey, macaron, sherbet, and arrack are linguistic fossils of the high-class meals of Persian shahs, Baghdadi caliphs, Provençal princes, New York Astors, but also of Fujianese sailors, Egyptian pharmacists, Mexican nuns, Portuguese merchants, Sicilian pasta-makers, Amherst poets, and New York bakers, as each food passed along and
changed to comply with the implicit structures of the borrowing cuisine: macaroons and marmalades losing their medieval rosewater and musk, fruit sharbats becoming luscious ice cream, vinegary meat sikb
j becoming Christian fish dishes suitable for Lent. Although the foods change, the words remain behind, mementos of our deep debt to each other from our shared past, just as the word
turkey
reminds us of tiny Portugal’s obsession with naval secrets 600 years ago and
toast
and
supper
remind us of medieval pottages and toasty wassails.

How we talk about food also reflects human aspirations: our desire to live a healthy, natural, authentic life, to identify with our family and culture, and our deep strains of optimism and positivity. And it reflects our cognition: the link between vowel perception and the evolution of the human smile, the Gricean maxims that answer Katie’s question about what we implicate when we say too much, advertising “tomato” ketchup, overmentioning fresh or tasty on aspirational menus or health on junk-food packages.

In other words, the linguistic and culinary habits of our own tribe or nation are not the habits of all tribes and nations. Yet all languages and cultures share a deep commonality, the social and cognitive traits that make us human. These facets—respect for our differences, and faith in our shared humanity—are the ingredients in the recipe for compassion. That's the final lesson of the language of food.

Notes

Note: The
Oxford English Dictionary
(OED Online, September 2013, Oxford University Press) is herein referred to as
OED
.

Introduction

speed dates
: McFarland, Jurafsky, and Rawlings (2013).

an author’s covert biases
: Recasens, Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Jurafsky (2013).

how polite different people are on the web
: Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil et al. (2013).

One: How to Read a Menu

La Maison de la Casa House, Continental Cuisine
:
Trillin (1974), Chapter 1: The Travelling Man’s Burden, 13.

“continentalize your menu”
: Seaberg (1973).

Le crabmeat cocktail
: Zwicky and Zwicky (1980).

online menu collection
: See Lesy and Stoffer (2013) for a beautiful sample from the collection.

“tiny, unostentatious, literary-looking lady”
:
The New York Times
, June 3, 1906.

Astor House’s breakfast menu
: The Astor House menu is available on the New York Public Library’s website, http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/id?ps_rbk_701.

five times more than cheap restaurants
: This result is based on software I wrote to analyze all 10,000 menus, using the menu prices to distinguish expensive restaurants and then examine their linguistic strategies; we’ll introduce these methods in detail a few pages from now. For more on the social role of macaronic French, see Haley (2011), 33.

We used a very large dataset
: Jurafsky et al. (2013).

linguist Robin Lakoff pointed out
: Lakoff (2006).

first discovered by Sibawayhi
: Al-Nassir (1993), Carter (2004).

spent the rest of his life studying linguistics
: Carter (2004), 10.

linguist George Zipf suggested
: Zipf (1934).

Zwicky calls “appealing adjectives”
: Zwicky and Zwicky (1980).

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner in
Freakonomics
show
: Levitt and Dubner (2006), Levitt and Syverson (2005).

Grice pointed out
: Grice (1989). Grice actually used the word
cooperative
rather than
rational
, but that term can be confusing because he gave cooperative a technical definition, not of being “helpful,” but of participating in a particular agreed-upon communicative process.

Mark Liberman suggests
: Liberman (2004).

Jane Ziegelman tells us
: Ziegelman (2010).

Two: Entrée

“A couple of French terms”
: Davidson (1999), 281.

“We might . . . follow fashion in food”
: Braudel (1981), 189.

modern French definition
: Rey (2011), entry for
entrée.

“Cest que fault pour faire”
: Flandrin (2007), 182. Menus drawn from
Livre fort excellent de cuysine tres-utile & profitable contenant en soy la maniere dabiller toutes viandes. Avec la maniere deservir es banquets & festins. Le tout veu & corrige oultre la premiere impression par le grant Escuyer de Cuysine du Roy
(Lyon: Olivier Arnoullet, 1555).

Beef Palate with Gooseberries, etc.
: Flandrin (2007), 66–68.

“Ducks in Ragout,” etc.
: Scully (2006).

The Compleat Housewife
: Smith (1758), appendix. Figure © The British Library Board. 1037.g.9, f.415

a newly borrowed foreign word
: The
OED
entry for
entrée
gives this quote from Verral: “Roasted ham. For this
entrée
is generally provided a new Westphalia or Bayonne ham.”

It was called a
menu
:
OED
entry for
menu
.

This service à la Russe took over
: Flandrin (2007), 94–95; Colquhoun (2007), 251–56.

hors d’oeuvres began to be served earlier
: Flandrin (2007), 76, 101.

menu . . . is from 1907
: Image courtesy of the New York Public Library. Miss Frank E. Buttolph Menu Collection.

the newly built Blanco’s
: Edwords (1914).

beloved fan dancer Sally Rand
: Shteir (2004).

“insidious concoction”
: Wondrich (2007), 73.

here at the old Bank Exchange
: Toro-Lira (2010).

Alioto’s on Fisherman’s Wharf
: Miss Frank E. Buttolph Menu Collection, New York Public Library.

small 14-paged roast section
: Escoffier (1921), 257–456, 469–75.

the modern
Larousse Gastronomique
:
Larousse Gastronomique
(2001).

“
Ce mot ne signifie pas du tout
”
: Montagné and Gottschalk (1938).

sociologists call
cultural omnivorousness
:
Peterson (1992); (2005). Haley (2011) suggests that this movement began as early as the turn of the twentieth century and was led by the middle class rather than the elite.