De Factoid the Eighth: Hindi an’ a Jones...

In De Factoid the Seventh, one mentioned in passing the origins of the ‘vindaloo’ curry in name, if not in location. The vindaloo is one of many examples of food birthed as a product of empire: a child of conquest and (if you will) a happy mixed marriage. But the British love affair with the curry is not a new one, and the courtship is mapped across several continents.

‘Curry’, as a word comes (as one would reasonably expect) from India – from the Tamil word kari and/or the Canarese word karil, from the southern districts of the country/ Sri Lanka (which may both be linked to the name of the traditional Indian cooking pot, the karahi – also spelt karai – in which the dish was made) and crops up in Europe and England with thanks to traders as early as the 17th century (though we know from De Factoid the Third that trade had been going on much earlier, when the chilli-pepper – amongst other less spicy things like Christianity – was introduced to India from South-America by Spanish and Portuguese traders a hundred years or so earlier). Dutch and Portuguese explorers wrote favourably of ‘carriel’ (from the Portuguese corruption of the Canarese word meaning ‘curry’), suggesting that Europeans were naturally inclined toward the spicy dish. Europe did already have a special idea of ‘spice’, with the word finding its origins in Latin, speciēs (initially in the sense of ‘visible appearance’, ‘specific kind’ from whence we get words like spectacles, special, specialist, specific and species) and the related late-Greek word eîdos, ‘merchandise’, ‘wares’: the singular of which idéā also meant ‘look’, ‘form’ or ‘kind’ (and entered Latin as idea: giving us the words idea, ideology, ideal), which later also comes to mean ‘goods’ and more specifically ‘groceries’ as is apparent in modern French for ‘grocer’ (when pronouncing the ‘c’ with an ‘s’ sound): épicier. ‘Grocer’ and ‘spicer’ are fundamentally the same word and both link back to the idea of trade, and buying up what one sees. Grocer as a word comes from the medieval Latin grossarius/ grossus (from where get gross and GDP – ‘gross domestic product’ i.e. the value of all goods and services produced in a country in one year). The grocer wasn’t just a man selling veggies, he was selling (and buying) everything in gross quantities: he was the medieval equivalent of the wholesaler. The Worshipful Company of Grocers (established 1180AD) is listed second in the Livery Companies (i.e. medieval trade-regulators) of the City of London, who traded in spices, gold, and other luxury goods from Byzantium (modern day Istanbul) and the Mediterranean. Also called the Guild of Pepperers through their very profitable trade in peppercorns, which was (until the introduction of the chilli) the primary method of spicing food (and hence why we call the latter and its less-spicy relations chilli peppers, despite being completely unrelated to the genus that yields Piper nigrum, ‘black pepper’). That Latin word, piper (from Sanskrit, pippali - the 'long pepper') spawned similar words across the continent with Old English, piper; German, pfeffar; Italin, pepe and Old French, peivre (modern French, poivre) and proved such good business generally that pepper corns were often used as payment of rental agreements (from where we get the legal phrase ‘peppercorn rent’: though now in relation to a small payment based on size, rather than worth), and to well-seasoned soldiers (who could also have their salary in salt – as discussed in De Factoid the Second). Perhaps it gave them some pep on the battlefield (a shortened Americanism of ‘pepper’ in the sense of ‘spicing things up’) or in the after-life if things didn't go to plan (black peppercorns were found lodged in the nostrils of the Egyptian King, Ramesses II: part of the mummification process performed shortly after his death in 1213 B.C. – i.e. 'Before Christ'). The majority of peppercorns in Europe came, by land, from India until sea-routes were established by the early trading empires of Portugal and the Netherlands. Trying to open up a sea-route westward to the country, Christopher Columbus unwittingly discovered the east coast of what is now the United States. Believing to have landed at his appropriate destination, he called the natives ‘Indians’. Chilli, as a word, comes from the Aztec name for the plant (of the same spelling), and gets imported into Spanish during their trade with (and later conquest of) South America. A similar process occurs with the later British East India Company: a shift from couriers (in the sense of ‘a servant/running messenger’ from Latin currere, ‘run’: hence the ‘current’ of a river) of Indian goods to conquerors and grocers by force – with the curry being but one of the things brought back home.

The other meaning of ‘curry’ i.e. ‘to rub down with a comb’, ‘arrange’, ‘equip’ comes from the Old French verb conraier – ‘to prepare’, ‘to put in order’. To ‘curry a horse’ (a phrase which today usually only turns up in horror stories about back-door eateries in The Sun) carries (another word also coming from the French) the meaning – now usually only inside the horsey-set – of the rubbing down and dressing of horses: hence curry-combing. This is linked (by a slightly odd-route) to the phrase, to curry favour.

The phrase does not mean ‘to arrange favour’ as one might expect and is actually the result of mishearing the French medieval phrase ‘curryfavell’ (translating roughly as a ‘flatterer’) from the story Roman de Fauvel or ‘The Romance of Fauvel’. In the story, Fauvel is a donkey who deceives and corrupts the greedy leaders of the church and state and, as with the curry-combing of a horse, so too is Fauvel the donkey ‘curried’ as the rich and powerful humiliate themselves. The name Fauvel (or Favvel) is formed from ‘fau-vel’ (in English ‘veiled lie’), which in turn is made (in a very clever fashion) from the initial letters of a French version of the seven deadly sins: flaterie (flattery/pride), avarice (greed/gluttony), vilanie (wrath), variété (inconstancy), envie (envy), and lacheté (cowardice). The method is called an acrostic (from the Greek meaning ‘row or line of verse’) and is from where we get the word across.

When curry itself was brought back across the waters to England it yielded some interesting results. The once popular breakfast dish kedgeree (consisting of flaked smoked-haddock, boiled rice, eggs and butter) is as much an Englishman’s botched attempt at a curry as any: deriving from an Indian dish called khichdi in Hindi – once popular with the Mughals (whom the British deposed from the Indian seats of power, if not a seat at breakfast). Curry has had other royal connections – one was served at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II (Coronation Chicken), which in turn was based on ‘Jubilee Chicken’: the dish of cold chicken, mayonnaise and curry powder created for the silver jubilee of King George V in 1935. The preserve ‘piccalilli’ seems to be another fair attempt at an English curry sauce and ‘devilled’ (i.e. spiced) eggs, kidneys etc. are another product of the influence of Indian food (and a fair indication of the Victorian temperament toward the ‘heathen’ – i.e. non-Christian – country). Heathen, interestingly, contains the word ‘heath’ (as in a hill) and refers to the barbarian practice of performing their rituals on hills outside the city proper (though it’s now tourists, not pagans, that gather at Heathrow). You may well encounter several other Indian words on your way to Heathrow airport so long, that is, as you’ve remembered to pack your shampoo, pyjamas and bangles; a cummerbund (a posh girdle-type belt for men); a pair of jodhpurs (riding trousers) for playing polo; a bandanna; a cot for the little one; your cashmere wooly jumper and any other general loot. And that’s just a few words from Hindi! Other Hindi words might crop-up if all is pukka (meaning ‘cooked’, ‘ripe’ and used in Southern England in a positive sense of ‘well’: think Jamie Oliver) or if you travel to a jungle, stay in a bungalow, or cross a border guarded by a sentry. You can thank the Urdu language if you get yourself a cushy job (from khushi, ‘soft’); if you act like a thug (from the Thagi: a collective of criminals who were fabled to have dressed as wandering priests and murder travellers) you may fall from favour you may be labelled a pariah (from Persian through the Tamil language). To name but a few! It is apparent that things to eat weren’t the only exports from India back to Blighty.

Blighty as a word comes (though the Army) from the Hindi, bilāyatī/ vilāyatī meaning ‘foreigner’. A similar naming trend occurred much earlier in the history of English when the Saxon tribes landed on the English east coast. The word for ‘foreigner’ in Anglo-Saxon is wealh and was used generally to refer to any native inhabitant (the Celtic Britons) who needed to be hacked through to make some living room. The largest concentration of these foreigners was named appropriately with the plural of the Anglo-Saxon wealh word – wealas: modern-day Wales (as well as the elements of Cornwall, and the wal- of the walnut, ‘foreign nut’). Welsh is an older language than English, as are Scots/Irish Gaelic, Cornish, Manx and Breton (in northern France): all the residues of Celtic languages pushed back to the north, south and west coasts by the invading Saxons. Another Indian word for ‘foreigner’ (ferengi) turns up more readily in Star Trek.

Trek is one of a few Afrikaans (South-African Dutch-English) words to work its way into mainstream English. Others that spring to mind are kommando (independence soldiers who fought against the British and from whence we get commando) and the quite-loaded word apartheid (literally ‘apart-ness’). Animal names such as meerkat (literally ‘lake cat’), springbok (a small deer/ tasty cocktail shooter); wildebeest (from Cape-Dutch: an Afrikaans forerunner) and aardvark (‘ant-eater’ to any Americans reading) are Dutch-English South-African imports to the language. The drink advocaat is another Anglo-Dutch word, originating with Dutch speakers in South-America and translating roughly as ‘egg-nog’. One says ‘roughly’ as egg-nog is not a direct translation, as advocaat was originally made, not with eggs, but with avocadoes (hence the name): only being replaced with eggs when avocadoes were discovered to be few in number back in the Netherlands. ‘Nog’ may well come from the name for the English wooden cup used for drinking the concoction (and used later to refer to ‘wooden’ heads), called a noggin. Other names for the English focus more on appearance and appetite. An Englishman in Australia might be called a Pomm or a Pohm, though which one is tricky to determine. The Englishman-as-Pomm may refer either to pomegranate (the red fruit) rhyming through Aussie-accent with immigrant or (which is more likely/amusing) refer to the colour into which the average Englishman turns in the sun (and lines up nicely with our Afrikaans nickname, rooinek – ‘red neck’). Pohm is more likely still as an acronym for (i.e. initials of) Property Of Her Majesty – reflecting that fact that Aussie, for all its charm now, used to be a British prison. Another food related name is found in limey: referring to Royal/ Merchant Navy sailors eating limes to ward off the vitamin deficiency scurvy (think stereotypical pirate “ye scurvy dog!”) and the title awarded to us by the French for our meat-eating tendencies: rosbif (‘roast-beef’) – which we return to the frogs, in kind.

De Factoid the Ninth: coming soon.

De Factoid the Third: Owt in the Frying Pan

The Great British Fry-Up: more important to truck drivers than petrol and eaten everywhere from greasy spoon cafes to Buckingham Palace. A cacophony of animal and vegetable, fried until even the tomato is unhealthy enough to destroy a hangover in a blast of slaverous, satisfied consumption.

Five of the six great food groups (greasy, gooey, meaty, salty and stodge) are all catered for in this dish of dishes; with the sixth – sugary – usually found in the drink you wash it down with. But the British eater – looked down upon by Euro-hippies from their grease-free plinths – is not as alone as he might think, and joins a long line of worthy forerunners when he proudly (if shakily) raises that first forkful. Pliny the Elder suggested deep fried canary for a Roman recovering from last night’s centurion; and ancient Greeks were known to go for fried sheep’s lungs and owl eggs (the antecedent of the Breakfast McMuffin?) after oozes of ouzo. Though one might enjoy a fry-up quite happily without the buzz of yester-nights sins as a side dish, to those yet to sample the dish I’d wholeheartedly recommend you appreciate it at least once while sat – plate on knee – firmly (if somewhat infirmly) in the ‘sin bin’.

But just how ‘English’ is the Full English? To answer that one must look at the components of the dish tracing, as ever, their origins and histories:

Bacon – there are an estimated two-billion pigs alive in the world today, and 15% of that (the bellies) can be turned into bacon. Native to Europe and Asia (rather pleasantly grouped as Eurasia), the pig is estimated to have been domesticated between 5,000-7,000 years ago (I imagine the tribes were probably too busy eating and trying to invent HP Sauce to record the event for two-thousand years) and has formed a staple part of the omnivorous diet ever since; with breeds of pigs bred particularly for bacon, notably the Yorkshire and Tamworth. The word itself seems to come from a common stock (bacon in Old French, through to bacho / bakkon in Common and Old High German) referring to the ‘back’ or underside of the animal (Old English bæc – ‘hinder surface’). It has been suggest that Middle-English bacoun once referred to all cuts from the animal, though this to me makes little sense looking at the etymologies unless one considers the phrase ‘bringing home the bacon’; coming from the 12th century tradition (still active in Dunmow, England) of awarding a ‘flitch’ of pork (poss. from Norse origins for ‘side’) to any couple whom can satisfy a Judge and Jury of six maidens and six bachelors that in “twelvemonth and a day” they have “not wisht themselves unmarried again”. Other cuts such as ham also show a similar pattern across northern European languages suggesting this meaty morsel has always made the cut in the northern countries’ ideas of good food. HAM radio and ham-acting come from the original metaphor of being ham-handed – clumsy and close-fisted like a ham joint. The religious practice forbidding the consumption of pork is usually related to the un-cleanliness of the animal. The Italian word for pig – suino, further suggests that the northern countries were first to take the bacon (think ‘swine’ in English, or that fantastically stereotypical German ‘pig-dog’ insult: swine-hund!). However much the continentals may ‘ham up’ their culinary achievements, that’s one point closer for us to the Full-English.

Black Pudding – Whilst the north can joyfully claim bacon as their own, the same alas (and surprisingly alas!), cannot be said for Black Pudding. To those not in the know, black pudding is a blend of onions, pork fat, oatmeal, seasonings and pig’s blood, boiled or fried in a length of pig’s intestine / sausage skin (Ok, I admit that sometimes ignorance is bliss). But hold off your retching, for just as the fry-up itself has noble classical antecedents, so too does this dish.

Homer’s Iliad noted a soup of blood and onions that Agamemnon, leader of the Ancient Greek armies, fed to his men before they sacked Troy. This soldier super-soup was taken up with gusto by the Romans who – with their usual engineering skill – adapted the dish to be cooked in a skin and spread across the Empire. Anywhere the Romans were, black-pudding and its cousins followed. Think Morcilla in Spain; Bludwurst/Blutwurst (blood-sausage) in Germany; Boudins Noirs (and its many variants) in France before its shipping to the Creole states in America; Bloedworst in Belgium; and Blóðmör, a staple in Iceland (shipped over by the Vikings). The town of Bury in Greater Manchester, England – famed world-wide for its black-puddings – helps to unravel the spread of the dish, as it was not just that Romans had to be there for black pudding to follow, but that they had to be fighting. We may enjoy it now as a good bit of fried food, but as the Iliad entry shows, black-pudding was proper fighting-food. All those fancy foreign names for the pud’ are flag posts for the numerous tribes the Romans had to chop through on a daily basis. Further evidence comes in the form of a Roman Urn containing a number of small bronze coins dated between AD 253-282 found north of what is now the town centre of the black-pudding capital of England. Bury then, from the Anglo-Saxon burh/burg (from where we get borough) meaning ‘fort’ or an encampment was a Roman re-fueling station in every sense and strongpoint against northern scrappers. That the pud’ is a dish recognized in England as ‘northern’ may well suggest which end of the country caused the invaders the most trouble. Other battles involving the pud’ still rage in the north in Ramsbottom (outside Manchester), where hundreds compete annually in the World Black Pudding Throwing Championships. The contest is said to date back to a battle during the War of the Roses (1455–1487) when opponents resorted to throwing puds when they ran out of weapons. Contestants now hurl them at a 20ft-high stack of Yorkshire puddings. Whoever knocks the most Yorkshire puds off the stack is declared the winner. (Seems like a waste to me…) Woe-betide if internal injury is suffered however: in 2002 an article in the British Medical Journal warned that its methods of testing for colorectal cancer were useless in Bury due to the abundance of blood regularly featuring in healthy stool samples. A quite literal interpretation of 'happy as a pig in shit'.

Sausage - The sausage seems to be the logical outcome of the butchering process, collecting all off-cuts of meat, fat and gristle into a skin to be cooked or preserved and eaten later (cf. Big Macs / TV-dinners). Homer, this time in his Odyssey (Book 20), notes a ‘paunch full of blood and fat’ cooking on a fire and Epicharmus (550-460 BC) wrote a comedy titled The Sausage, but the sausage seems to be uniformly present in every society with animals worth eating. Emperor Nero aligned the sausage with the Roman (and possibly pre-Roman) festival Lupercalia in honour of the she-wolf which suckled the brothers Romulus (of ‘Rome’ fame) and Remus, which fell on what is now Valentine’s Day (it seems Nero would probably have liked ‘Carry-On’ films). The festival was outlawed by the Catholic Church, making eating sausages a sin (though nothing seems to have been said about suckling a she-wolf?) which, combined with the story of Jesus sending demons from possessed men into pigs (Matthew 8:28-34 and elsewhere), made for a pretty raw deal for pork-butchers. The idea of preserving meats may have given the sausage its name (if not its reputation), with the Old French saussiche coming from the Latin word salsus, meaning 'salted' which I discussed in the last entry. Walking-sausages (or ‘pigs’) are collectively grouped under the genus Sus within the Suidae family. Whether sus-age and sausage are linked linguistically I cannot yet determine.

Egg – possibly the best of the dish for curing a hangover thanks to its high glutathione content (which breaks down toxins), the egg (specifically the chicken egg) has a much longer lineage than most breakfast foods, with recent biological and archaeological research suggesting that the humble clucker shares a gene or two with Tyrannosaurs Rex. Most likely descended from Red Junglefowl (Gallus gallus), it seems the first human egg-eaters may have been Indians. They wouldn’t have been served as spicy as they might today though: the chilli-pepper was introduced to India from South-America by Spanish and Portuguese traders in the fifteenth century. It’s probably (or at least hopeful) that Shakespeare and Elizabethan England cooked its eggs in hot fat, or the stabbing insult from Macbeth; “What, you egg? Young fry of treachery!” wouldn’t be nearly as funny...

Mushrooms – whilst a key component in the breakfast there is very little to say. Origins are impossible to trace, mushrooms are a spores-based fungus and spread wherever the wind is strong enough, including onto the plate of the more-than-occasionally-windy British-breakfast consumer.

Baked Beans – the most famous brand of which to grace the Full-English plate – Heinz – was founded by a German in Pennsylvania, America in 1869. The company’s first products were horseradish, pickles and tomato-ketchup. The beans themselves weren’t produced until after the the ketchup became popular, but have been so popular since that they have spawned their own subtle variation on the name: not beans, but beanz, recalling the popular slogan Beanz Meanz Heinz. The French may lay claim to the invention of the baked bean, though which end of the country is disputed. Cassoulet, a regional bean stew from the South of France was thought to be one possible source, though Normandy claims a similar recipe. The baked-bean as we know it is more likely the product of several cutlers: European, Native American, African, Mexican, Cajun, Creole (etc!) colliding in the Americas. The tin can, the iconic storage device for the baked bean was invented by an Englishman, Peter Durand, in 1810.

Hash Brown – a patty-style chuck of diced potato, fried until lovely. Possibly an adaption of the Scandinavian dish Rösti, the current form cannot have existed before 1563 for the simple fact that we didn’t know the potato existed. I say 1563 as John Hawkins brought the potato back to England twenty years before its re-introduction by Sir Walter Raleigh. The ‘hash’ element comes from the French hacher/hachis referring usually to diced meats from an early Roman root (and also I imaging, the roots of the term ‘hash’ as a diced drug product, though hashish may have Arabic origins linked, interestingly, to the word assassin - 'Hash-eater').

Fried Bread – quite possibly the logical result of frying everything else, fried bread may well be of English origin, though has a particularly strong following in Ireland, and the antecedents of 'French Toast' may also place a claim.

Tomato – like the chilli pepper and the potato; the tomato is of South American origin and only began to grace our plates after its introduction in 1570. The tomato was originally believed to be poisonous and eaten in small amount, in the French fashion, as an aphrodisiac. Mrs. Heinz would be pleased...

So there we are, a somewhat rambling, though hopefully interesting consideration of the Full-English breakfast. And I can, after all of those doubts, still call it just that. The Romans may claim the word 'fry' as theirs (from frigere), though Sanskrit bhrjyati suggest other competition, but as a country founded and moulded by successive waves of meat-eating Saxons, Vikings and Normans; with an Empire that spanned the globe and with trade networks reaching every corner of the world, the thought of bringing together so many cultures and so much history into one dish, savouring the collection, and frying the lot is, to me, quintessentially English.

De Factoid the Fourth - coming soon

De Factoid the Second: Tracing the Sauce

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De Factoid the First: Who Moo?

Taking the words from the title above (and the first of many a thinly disguised word pun) I'll start with an appropriate one for the words and food theme: 'ruminating'.

If one takes the French rumin- or better yet Latin (because ultimately we don't want to give Monsieur Grenouille any credit for this interesting little factoid), we get throat or gullet, which is part way there. As ruminant animals (like cows) do, to 'ruminate' is to 'chew something over' (we can also see this in the metaphor 'to chew the cud' - cud from Old English cwidu: 'what is chewed'). The first compartment of a cow's stomach (cows only have one, not multiple stomachs - but the stomach does have four compartments) is the rumen, so to ruminate over something implies the same process as a cow bringing up grass for a second chew! Food for thought, eh?

Cattle, generally, are interesting. Not in a more-than-a-pet-and-less-than-a-lover kind of way (bona et catalla, anyone?), but in that they have been a fair constant across human existence and civilisation: which can be seen in language and will no doubt crop up again in future writings. The word 'cattle' itself is worth a lot for this discussion, and has only fairly recently referred specifically to walking-stakes-to-be. 'Cattle', and its Anglo-Norman (i.e. post-1066 Old-English/French language cocktail) precursor chattel has about it the meaning, not of ruminates but 'wealth' generally (as does a cognate in a few other languages including Anglo-Saxon) and links to that increasingly important word 'capital'. 'Capital' itself is from the latin caput meaning 'head' (think 'baseball/skullcap', the capital - top - on a stone column, capital cities and the phrase: per capita, 'per head'). Chattel as a word comes more to represent property and more specifically moveable property in Anglo-Norman, the most common of which was the moo-vable, cow. Carlos Linnaeus - a Swedish bloke from the 1700's aka Mr. Binomial Nomenclature (he liked to name things) - gave European (and African) cattle the general label, Bos taurus - which became Bos primigenius taurus a bit later on. The other two main groups are Bos primigenius indicus (the zebu) and Bos primigenius primigenius (the Aurochs- extinct 1627). In the former of the three names you'll probably already have spotted the 'Taurus' of star-sign fame. The other greek bit, 'Bos' (the 'cow' bit) crops up in the Balkans with the 'Istanbul Strait', or Bosphorus / Bosporus in what was called 'Rumelia' (translating to 'land of the romans' though I can't help but see that cowish rum-, again) by the Turkish. Understanding the other Greek bit of Bosphorus roughly to mean 'a water crossing', one finds in the name another place where wealth per capita is measured predominantly by the ability to ruminate: Oxford!

De Factoid the Second: Tracing the Sauce - coming soon