10 Things for food historians to think about. 5 and 6
I will be replying to Adam’s interesting points, but until I get around to that, another couple of points in this series on parallels between cuisine and language.
5. Trace the Expansion and Contraction of Cuisines
Linguists have analyzed when and how languages expand. Only rarely is it by the natural growth of the original group that speaks the language (the Pacific Island case). More often it is by military or spiritual conquest. Take the spread of Spanish and Portuguese throughout the world and their transformation into different varieties, Barranquenho, a Portuguese variety on the Portugal-Spain border, Portuguese- and Spanish-based creoles, Andean Spanish, and so on.[i] Clearly this expansion was closely connected with the expansion of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So too the English language spread with the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Clearly cuisine spread with the Portuguese, Spanish and British Empires. In the case of the British Empire, it was most successful in the settlement colonies, less so in the African tropics, and even less so in India with its own vigorous culinary traditions.
Or consider the imposition of written Aramaic in the Assyrian and Persian empires in Antiquity. Is it possible that this, by making inaccessible the written recipes of the high cuisine of Ancient Mesopotamia, led to their demise? And what happens when rapid political changes causes rapid changes in language? In Algeria, three generations of the same family may speak Berber, French and Arabic respectively. Are there culinary equivalents? Is it possible to make any generalizations about the expansion and contraction of cuisines?
6. Investigate the Death and Birth of Cuisines
Languages die out. Sometimes the causes are war or famine; sometimes, as is happening now and doubtless happened in the past, the speakers of smaller languages decline in numbers until the language is no longer viable.
Languages also change gradually over time until they are transformed into something different. The general reckoning among linguists seems to be that in about a thousand years a given language changes so much that its earlier manifestation is incomprehensible to modern speakers, the history of English being an example familiar to most of us here, though ancient Latin and Greek would do as well. Do cuisines change so much as to be unrecognizable in the same way? It would appear so. The Greek and Roman cuisines of the ancient world had successors but these are so different that they warrant being called different languages.
Some words in languages appear to be more resistant to change than others, such as words for the more striking parts of the body (finger), the lower numerals, close relatives (mother, father), basic natural features (sun, moon), and basic necessities (bread).[ii] Are there elements in cuisine that are similarly resistant? Does bread in the cuisines of Europe play this role or rice in the cuisines of much of Asia. Can we go beyond the basic staple? Is the flavor profile, for example, very stable?
Then there is the question of language and cuisine creation. Languages are created by fission from their parent languages (the Romance languages from Latin, for example) or by fusion with different languages (perhaps Hinglish in India today). Which of the cuisines that we now see were created in which way? It seems plausible to assume that, say, Spanish cuisine of the sixteenth century was created by splitting off from earlier Roman Cuisine, though even that is not so simple because there was probably some fusion with Celtic and Germanic cuisines as well.
Can totally new cuisines be created and gain currency even though efforts to create new languages (Esperanto being perhaps the most famous) rarely attract many supporters and have not displaced natural languages? But could it be claimed that the new European cuisine of the sixteenth century, particularly as it developed in France, was a new creation that survived.
[i] J. Clancy Clements, The Linguistic Legacy of Spanish and Portuguese: Colonial Expansion and Language Change (New York and Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2009).
[ii] David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 40.
can cuisines die out? i suppose so, when one considers changing lifestyles and roles, ease of availability of imported food items and globalisation – which leads to another question: are we heading towards one global (globalised?) cuisine (the parallel in language being english of course)???
As Adam says, in the succeeding comment, cuisines die out all the time. This is nothing new but has been going on since ancient times. Sometimes it is simply a slow transformation that makes an earlier cuisine unrecognisable, sometimes it is conquest (think the Ottomans), sometimes it is change in religious belief. But the world is littered with dead cuisines–Sumerian; Han Chinese; the cuisine of the Raj. I could go on and on. this warrants a special post.
Also some important languages are lost, like Etruscan. In terms of Cuisine, there are many examples, with one of the most important for Mediterranean cultures being Roman cuisine. One large recipe collection of disputed dating, and scatted if abundant references in non-fiction and fiction writing of various dates and locations. It would be like if all we knew about the history of English cuisine was a partial copy of Mrs Beeton, a copy of “Brideshead Revisted” and some copies of the menu at “The Fat Duck”.
In terms of the ancient Occident and the near East, we know very little about Roman, ancient Greek and Persian cuisine. Can these cuisines be reconstructed in any meaningful way from what remains, in the same way that languages have been?
As always, thanks Adam. The comments on the sources for Roman Cuisine hit the nail on the head. See my quick response to Maria. I’ll be posting more on this.
i actually had the ottomans in mind when i was reading this; they make an interesting case because, in the case of the greek and turkish languages, the cuisines are very similar, but the languages are extremely different