Words to Eat By
Five Foods and the Culinary History of the English Language
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
You may be what you eat, but you're also what you speak, and English food words tell a remarkable story about the evolution of our language and culinary history, revealing a vital collision of cultures alive and well from the time Caesar first arrived on British shores to the present day.
Words to Eat By explores the remarkable stories behind five of our most basic food words, words which reveal fascinating aspects of the evolution of the English language and our powerful associations with certain foods. Using sources that vary from Roman histories and early translations of the Bible to Julia Child's recipes and Frank Bruni's restaurant reviews, Ina Lipkowitz shows how saturated with French and Italian names the English culinary vocabulary is, "from a la carte to zabaglione." But the words for our most basic foodstuffs -- bread, meat, milk, leek, and apple -- are still rooted in Old English and Words to Eat By reveals how exceptional these words and our associations with the foods are. As Lipkowitz says, "the resulting stories will make readers reconsider their appetites, the foods they eat, and the words they use to describe what they want for dinner, whether that dinner is cooked at home or ordered from the pages of a menu."
Contagious with information, this remarkable book pulls profound insights out of simple phenomena, offering an analysis of our culinary and linguistic heritage that is as accessible as it is enlightening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this winsome, delightful, and appetizing romp through the development of our language regarding food, Lipkowitz demonstrates that we often prefer to use words to describe food that will either help us forget exactly what we are eating ("foie gras" helps diners distance themselves from the fatted liver of a goose) or seduce us into thinking that the very exotic name of the food or brand will deliver a better product than a less exotic name. Focusing on five foods apples, leeks, milk, meat, and bread she harvests with gustatory delight the crops of words for each that have grown up over the years to sow in our minds the meaning of what we eat. For example, the ancestors of modern apples likely grew in the primeval forests of Kazakhstan and were hard little sour fruits (Malus sieversii). Lipkowitz, who teaches English at MIT, traces the cultivation and growth of apples up through the present day as well as the ways that language has grown and shifted to describe the sweet, tart fruit now found in local markets or grocery stores. Lipkowitz reminds us as well that the Latin word for fruit fructus means "to have pleasure" or "to enjoy," and throughout her splendid book, she encourages us to enjoy and to take pleasure in our food, in its simplest forms and in simplest terms.
