Tisane, Orzo, Horchata, and Orgeat: Part of the Tangled History of Agua Fresca

Tisane. The generic name for French herbal teas that might put you to sleep or cure an ill or just taste delicious.

Orzo. An Italian dried pasta, the size and shape of a cereal grain.

Horchata. A cool, milky-looking drink made of rice, chufa, (or perhaps melon seeds, coconut, or condensed milk).

Orgeat. An almond-flavored syrup.

So what’s the common thread? It’s the origin of all these diverse goodies in barley. Who knows barley now? Perhaps a few horse owners who feed it to their animals. Perhaps beer drinkers, though more and more beer is not barley based.

But way, way back in the past barley, a tough grain that withstood drought, and cold winters, and poor soils, was Eurasias’s favorite grain. Pernickety little wheat didn’t stand a chance beside it. Tisane, orzo, horchata, and orgeat are all barley’s ghosts, to use a great phrase of Ray Sokolov.

How is this?

Well tisane comes from the Greek ptisana for barley water. By the Middle Ages it was being flavored with figs or liquorice in Europe and eventually transmuted into the French name for all hot herbal drinks.

And orzo is one of the many words that derive from hordeum, the Greek word for barley. The pasta was named after barley.

And orgeat (or orzata in Italian or ozyat in archaic English), all names that came into these languages from the Latin hordeum again, were all originally barley drinks, then they were flavored with almond, then the barley dropped out. Now orgeat has transmuted into a trendy syrup about as far removed from workaday barley as can be imagined.

And horchata. Same Latin origin. Again the ingredients shift. And soon I will post on how horchata came to mean a milky-looking drink.

How do I know?

Well, truth in advertizing makes me admit that none of this is my research. The pioneering work was done by the English historian of food, C. Anne Wilson in her book Food and Drink in Britain (Barnes and Noble, 1974).  And it was ably followed up by Ray Sokolov in an article called “Barley’s Ghost” that appeared in the American magazine Natural History. I’m not giving the link because it is gated and that’s frustrating for those who don’t have access to the data base. If you don’t know Ray’s many books on food, look out for them. they’re a delight.

Barley’s Ghosts

So, a once-mighty grain, food of Plato and Aristotle, the Emperors of Persia and the Pharaohs of Egypt is now just a ghost. Its ghostly remains are suggestive and titillating as befits ghosts, and delicious too, something not normally associated with ghosts. But they are just shadowy remains.

And I ponder two things.

1. When looking at the history of food, never take it for granted that the same or a similar name means the same dish. It may point to links, as in this story, but not to identity.

2. When looking at the history of food never assume that the simple food of today is the food of the past. Barley vanished. It did not stay as peasant food. Its ghost wandered into the world of luxury foods. Hmm.

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