a FOOD WORD weblog

What should I call my fizzy drinks?

They have been discussing this burning issue on Alphadictionary , but if you want more structured advice, you can go to the dedicated website pop vs. soda.

What, if anything, is Instant Postum? Tuesday's food quotation

You are a damned idle dog, why don't you send me the Latin tag on the Sparrow memorial that I want for my very good story? I tell you, you will regret it if you trifle with me. I have put you into it, a very agreeable character so far, reading the Decline and Fall and eating white currants. But it is well within my means to make you read the Encyclopaedia Britannica and drink Instant Postum.

1926 Sylvia Townsend Warner, Letter to David Garnett, 1 December [ Sylvia and David: the Townsend Warner / Garnett letters (Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994) p. 31]. Note: The story, entitled 'The maze', was actually published in The Salutation in 1932. Mr Slumber remains aloof from the villagers, reading Herodotus and eating whitecurrants.

The question posed above has been miraculously answered by 'Stargzer', a regular contributor to the Alphadictionary forum:

It's a coffee substitute created by C. W. Post (of Post Cereals) in 1895. My uncle used to drink it when I was a kid. I had it once or twice, but don't remember much. I think it was vaguely coffee-flavored. As for me, I bought a used espresso maker for US$5.00 which I keep at work. A 12-ounce espresso can keep me going for the day.

Is Cheshire cheese mentioned in Domesday Book?

Many recent books and many websites say it is. It isn't, and I'd like to know how the mistake started. So far as I know, Cheshire cheese is first mentioned in 1586, as cited in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was said at that time to be the best cheese in England, and no doubt it took a long time for that reputation to be gained, but how long seems to be unknown. The twelfth century historian, William of Malmesbury, as a preface to his history of the bishopric of Chester, says that the people of Chester loved their milk and butter (see today's Latin quotation), but, sadly for the cheese websites, he doesn't mention Chester cheese; nor does any other medieval source that I have yet found.

How did Southeast Asian food plants reach West Africa?

The theory that mariners from insular south east Asia rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached tropical west Africa by sea in early medieval times was argued by the ethnomusicologist A. M. Jones in the 1960s. It is now championed in Robert Dick-Read's new book The phantom voyagers: evidence of Indonesian settlement (Winchester: Thurlton, 2005) ...

As Roland Oliver points out in his review in the Times literary supplement (9 December 2005) the theory can explain how 'the coconut, the banana plantain, the taro and other Asian yams considered by botanists to have originated in South-East Asia' reached west Africa. It could also explain a fact that puzzled European mariners when they reached Benin in the early 16th century, as I mentioned in Dangerous Tastes -- the fact that they found pepper on sale there. The pepper is, however, now said to be a different species from any of those of southern Asia. As for the other food plants, it seems at least equally likely that these were brought to the east African coast by 'Indonesian' mariners (there can be no doubt that they crossed the Indian Ocean, since they settled Madagascar). If so, the plants might have gradually spread westwards from there in cultivation.

Was alcohol first developed by Muslims? Was it always forbidden to them?

I wrote this note in response to questions on soc.humanities.classics.

Muslims used spirits medicinally. This is not to claim that all Muslims have taken this view, only that many have done and surely some do now. (Certain non-Muslim friends of mine claim to use whisky the same way.) If you use spirits as a vehicle for herbs/spices such as aniseed, gentian, mastic, etc., as in several popular Mediterranean liquors, these essences really do have digestive and other medicinal effects and are quite properly regarded as medicinal. Whether you think the benefits outweigh the possible ill-effects of the alcohol is up to you ...

Muslim chemists or alchemists certainly appear to have been the first to distil alcohol. Romans, so far as anyone knows, never achieved this. Yet there are a couple of reports in ancient sources of wine that would 'catch fire'. Wine never will, but spirits will. So did the Romans manage it after all?

When did American strawberries engulf Europe? Sunday's food quotation

1st July: Large American straw-berries are hawked about which the sellers call pine-strawberries. But these are oblong, & of a pale red; where as the true pine or Drayton strawberries are flat, & green: yet the flavour is very quick, & truly delicate. The American new sorts of strawberries prevail so much, that the old scarlet, & hautboys are laid aside, & out of use.

1791 Gilbert White (from Gilbert White's year [OUP, 1982])

What is squichanary pie?

Victoria Solt Dennis, writing in The Times [London], has the answer to this. Also 'stoughton drops'. Just click here.

Cupata, cubbaita, cumpitto: is the name of these Italian sweets originally Arabic?

Italian cupate is defined thus by Fanfani: 'Sorta di pasta dolce di forma piuttosto sciacciata, fatta con miele o zucchero e mandorle e noci per lo piu pestate, a distesa fra due ostie; usata piu particolarmente a Siena'. Similar sweets, made with almonds, walnuts, sugar and/or honey, and lying somewhere in the conceptual region between nougat and peanut brittle, are made in other parts of Italy under such names as 'cubata', 'cupada', 'copeta', 'cupeta', 'cupaita', 'cubbaita' (Sicilian) and 'cumpitto' (Calabrian).

Do these names come from Arabic 'qubbaita', as is often claimed? I haven't been able to confirm that such an Arabic word exists. Do they come from Latin (e.g.) compistare 'to pound together', as is claimed for the Calabrian word? Do they have different origins, or are they all connected? The question is Gillian Riley's.

What's the English for Feldbeifuss and Engelsüss? or, the problem with common names of plants

When I first put up my page of ancient Dacian plant names I had already got English equivalents for all but two of the plants. The remaining two had been identified by a German scholar but he had supplied only the German names, and my German dictionary gave me no help with these.

I posted a message on the subject on alphadictionary and on yourdictionary. The result was interesting. On both sites, someone kindly answered my question about these two German plant names and gave me (a) botanical Latin names and (b) English names. Thanks to M. Henri Day and to Spiff for their answers!

There was no disagreement about the botanical Latin. The two German names belong to (1) Polypodium vulgare, (2) Artemisia campestris.

From this point, I myself could have gone ahead and found equivalent English names. My two informants did the work for me, however. Henri, replying on alphadictionary, told me that (1) 'doesn't seem to possess an English common name' and (2) is twiggy mugwort. Spiff, on yourdictionary, gave me (1) polypody, (2) field sagewort. I had meanwhile looked in Oleg Polunin's /Flowers of Greece and the Balkans/ and found that Polunin calls (2) field southernwood; then I looked in W. Keble Martin's /Concise British flora in colour/ and found that Keble Martin calls (2) Breckland wormwood. Polypody is a fern, not a flowering plant, and is therefore not mentioned in these books.

So, for item (2), that's four English common names, all quite different from one another and all perfectly credible. Common names, in other words, are all too common. Which just shows how much we need unambiguous botanical names.

Does Apicius have a recipe for 'Lentils and Chestnuts'? Why would anyone do this?

Gillian Riley, who is working on the Oxford Companion to Italian Food , asked me this.

Lenticula ('lentils' or 'lentil dish') is the heading of section two in the Apicius chapter on legumes (book 5). However, the three recipes included in this section actually fail to mention any lentils. This is odd -- ingredients are sometimes omitted in the Apicius manuscripts, but you won't find many examples of the same major ingredient being omitted from three recipes in a row. Recipe 1 is for mussels (its title seems to mean 'lentil-dish with mussels'). Recipe 2 is for chestnuts (the title seems to mean 'lentil-dish from chestnuts'). Recipe 3 is for some unstated item which must be boiled, and it certainly makes good sense if this item is lentils (the title means 'lentil-dish another way'). Does this prove that recipes 1 and 2 also require lentils? Not incontrovertibly.

You could make an argument that (a) the heading Lenticula is wrong/misleading/in the wrong place (which certainly happens elsewhere in Apicius); or (b) Lenticula in this heading means a dish that is in some way reminiscent of lentils but need not contain lentils. Against these arguments, the whole chapter really is about legumes. But you can fall back on argument (c) that recipes 1 and 2 have got into the wrong chapter; possibly because they resemble, or come from the same original source as, recipe 3.

All editors and translators up to now (except Vehling) have inserted lentils in all three recipes. Perhaps they are wrong after all? Or is there a good nutritional reason for combining lentils with chestnuts?

Darcini, the Persian name for cinnamon: what does it tell us?

Susan Weingarten asked me to clarify this. On p. 39 of Dangerous Tastes I describe darcini as an Indian name for Chinese cinnamon (the older, Sanskrit name is tvac). So it is; it's used in Hindi and other modern Indian languages. But what is its origin?

It is a compound word meaning 'Chinese wood', and clearly it is a compound of typical Persian-Urdu form: if it had been formed in Sanskrit, the two elements would appear the other way round. In fact I nearly said in Dangerous Tastes that darcini was a Persian word; I didn't do so, mindful that J T Platts, in the Dictionary of Urdu, Classical Hindi and English (1884), derives it from two Sanskrit words, daru = wood + ciniya = Chinese; the latter word is not in Monier-Williams's Sanskrit dictionary, incidentally, but cognates are. I wasn't aware when writing Dangerous Tastes that R S McGregor, in the Oxford Hindi-English dictionary (1993), disagrees with Platts, saying that Hindi darcini is a cross between Persian darchin and Hindi cini. Although I don't know where McGregor gets the form darchin, I am sure he is right to trace the word to Persian. My Persian dictionary has darchini and the early Persian medical text by Harawi, dated to c. 970, has (according to the German translation) darsini. Susan Weingarten tells me it occurs, earlier still, in the Babylonian Talmud. Platts is certainly wrong, therefore. The word is really Persian, and quite early. It was borrowed from Persian both into Aramaic and into Urdu/Hindi and other Indian languages.

Thus the word darcini -- showing that in early medieval times the Persians got their cinnamon through the Chinese trade -- becomes one more scrap of evidence of the contacts between late antique Persia and southern China. The evidence I already had, and set out in Dangerous Tastes, concerned jasmine (p. 77).

Garcia de Orta (Coloquios [Goa, 1563]) gives as his explanation of the name darcini that Chinese traders, having unloaded east Asian produce in Sri Lanka, would load up cinnamon from there and take it on westwards to the Persian port of Ormuz; which is likely enough at certain periods. He is attempting to explain the uncomfortable fact, which I also have difficulty explaining, that although the best cinnamon comes from Sri Lanka, scarcely any sources before the end of the medieval period say clearly that Sri Lanka is the source of it.

Guineafowl: what varieties were known to Greeks and Romans?

First of all, Alan Davidson, in the Oxford Companion to Food, says that there are several species of guineafowl; but in Food in the Ancient World from A to Z I speak of 'two major varieties', implying a single species. Which of us is right? Both of us. There are several species in the family Numididae, and they can all be called guineafowl, but none has been domesticated except the single species Numida Meleagris (sometimes called helmeted guineafowl), of which nine subspecies are currently recognised. Go to Alan P. Peterson's Zoonomen for an up-to-date list of species and subspecies.

Greeks had only one name for guineafowl, meleagris. Having been domesticated in northeastern Africa and familiar in ancient Egypt, this variety of guineafowl was known even in late prehistoric Greece, before the arrival of the domestic hen.

Romans had several names for them. One was meleagris, borrowed from Greek. The other usual name was Numidica (avis or gallina), i.e. Numidian bird, Numidian hen, and the name suggests it became familiar to Romans from northwestern Africa, specifically the hinterland of Carthage, a long way west from the probable arrival route of the meleagris. There are other names too, such as Africana gallina , Afra volucris, i.e. African hen, African bird, but these are poetic and literary variants of Numidica, not distinct names for a different variety: Columella, the farming author, says that Africana and Numidica are the same.

However, Romans did (sometimes) distinguish meleagris from Numidica. Suetonius lists both separately when he is detailing the fancy birds sacrificed to Caligula after this unpredictable emperor had decided that he was a god. And Columella describes both: the meleagris has a sky-blue (caerulea) helmet and crest, the Africana a red-brown (rutila) helmet and crest.

So, as far as the texts can take us, Greeks knew a single variety, typically with some blue plumage, and it will have been the same already known in Pharaonic Egypt. Romans knew a second variety, typically with some red-brown plumage, introduced to Italy from northwestern Africa.

For precise references see Food in the Ancient World from A to Z (2003) pp. 169-170.

Did Cornish and Karelian pasties come together in Michigan? an IFAQ

I asked this question on 7 November 2005 in Wordwizard's discussion of pasties.

Can anyone confirm what is said in Alan Davidson's Oxford Companion to Food, that the Cornish pasty (or at least the idea of a Cornish pasty!) was taken to Michigan by Cornish miners, and that in Michigan the pasties interbred, so to speak, with a similar product familiar to Finnish immigrants? With what final result, and under what final name, Alan doesn't say ...

Next day I got two replies, which I abridge here: for the full text follow the link above. The first was from Shelley:

... I had a teacher in Michigan who was ... first generation Finnish-American. At one time a collective feast was held at school ... My Finnish teacher brought meat-filled, turnover-type delicacies which he called "pasties" ... Years later I was in Finland, and enjoyed the Karelian region treat called "piirakka" ... but am not sure if that would be the item which was crossed with a Cornish pasty in Michigan.

The second was from 'haro' (Hans Joerg Rothenberger), who added:

... pasties are pretty popular in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a.k.a. 'da UP' because of the heavy Fenno-Scandinavian accent those folks (= da Yoopers) have retained through many generations. I don't know how the science of baking pasties got there, though. Cornish miners sound reasonable in that mining plays quite a role in da UP. The Karelian piirakka can be made with rye or all-purpose flour; it is stuffed with rice, not meat, but it may have influenced the Yooperish pasty recipes. A UP pasty recipe can be found at this address ...

Erik Kowal's note closed this bit of the discussion, bringing it back to the other meaning (and the other pronunciation) of 'pasty' --

Apart from making me hungry, all this talk of Finnish-Cornish hybrid pasties has led me to another thought, namely: Is it beyond the wit of man to invent a pastry-based edible-cum-wearable accoutrement for strippers? The need is obvious.

More tench? Another dormouse? an IFAQ

With some such words as these, Caesar's niece Atia (in the new TV serial Rome) tries to persuade her soldierly guests to stay at dinner a little longer. Sadly, like nearly everyone else in this new vision of Rome in the 50s BC, they are more interested in brothels.

I can see why dormice: they come straight out of Petronius's Satyricon. And Romans really did farm dormice (the edible species Glis glis). But why tench? When I was gathering information on fish for Food in the Ancient World from A to Z (Routledge, 2003) I didn't find any earlier reference to tench than Ausonius's list of Moselle river fish, around AD 400: and Ausonius calls them 'solace of the common people', which certainly would not have included Atia. I know what he means, too: I have found tench on sale at market near here (at Lezay in France), and they are OK, but bony, and not gourmet food.

If I thought Rome was a subtle programme, I might say she is offering her unwanted guests bony tench and cold dormice (after all, these would both have been hors d'oeuvres, not desserts) to drive them away. I don't really believe that's the answer, though. What made the script-writer choose tench?

Archive of previous IFAQs