There are a couple of good reasons for knowing the word huitlacoche. The first is social. It can be embarrassing trying to say it for the first time in front of a waiter and a tableful of diners. The second reason is pure self-defense. Huitlacoche (pronounced wheat-luh-COACH-ay, with a long "a" at the end, like "bay") is, in fact, a fungus that grows on corn. Sometimes translated as "corn smut," it ranks as a delicacy in Mexico, where cooks use it to impart a rich, mushroomy flavor to food.
How often is anyone likely to run across the word? The answer is, often enough. And if it's not huitlacoche, it will be chipotle, serrano, mojo or epazote, to name just a few of the more common culinary terms that have found their way onto American menus. And those are just the Mexican ones. Add nam pla from Thailand, edamame from Japan, chorizo from Spain, borek from Turkey and harissa from Morocco, and you have an entire UN of dining.
The vocabulary of food has exploded in recent years. Foreign travel, the globalization of cuisine and the Food Network have changed the way Americans eat, the way they think about eating and the words they use to talk about eating.
The change has been profound. Just for a moment, turn the clock back to 1970. A reasonably sophisticated US diner could wander the culinary world with a slim phrase book. Teriyaki and sukiyaki would take care of Japan. Sushi, if anyone had bothered to explain it, would have seemed like a bad joke. Pieces of raw fish on a block of rice? No way. The rich regional cuisines of Mexico were represented by a mere handful of words: tortilla, taco, tamale, enchilada, chile. And chile, to most Americans, meant chili, a dish that's not even Mexican. Spain, whose tapas tradition has seduced American chefs in recent years, barely registered on the radar screen. It was a flavor or an accent, dragged in to suggest spice and romance in '50s-style concoctions like Spanish rice. Chinese cuisine, amazingly, was reduced to egg rolls, egg foo yung, chop suey and fried rice.
Then came the revolution, sparked by a little restaurant in Berkeley, California called Chez Panisse, and with it a slew of names and words that fell strangely on the ear. Arugula? What was that, exactly? Suddenly, California-influenced menus sprouted a garden's worth of exotic terms. Iceberg lettuce, the only lettuce that most Americans knew, made way on the menu, and on store shelves, for romaine, Boston, chicory and radicchio.
France was undergoing its own upheavals, shaken to the core by the fire-breathing apostles of nouvelle cuisine, who insisted on the primacy of fresh ingredients and pure flavors. As a result, the old vocabulary of classic sauces, styles and techniques gave way to a different kind of language, in which dishes were defined, on menus, by what was in them, a practice that was adopted enthusiastically in the US. Diners used to the comfortable shorthand of meuniere, Mornay or marchand de vin now confronted a brave new vocabulary of ingredients that sent them running to the dictionary. An all-purpose word like mushroom, which had done yeoman's work on a thousand menus, was finished. Chefs wanted their customers to know that the exquisite, earthy flavors in the soup came from oyster mushrooms or porcinis or shiitakes.
As the world gets smaller, the new words keep coming. The international style known as fusion has introduced a dictionary's worth of new dining terms. A chef might prepare Louisiana crayfish Spanish-style, a la plancha, which means that it's sizzled on a steel griddle, or tease diners by referring to tender nuggets of meat as toro, the Japanese word for tuna belly, which melts in the mouth. Fast international shipping has meant that trend-conscious chefs can get their hands on exotic specimens like picorocos, enormous Chilean barnacles that look like a volcano but conceal a scalloplike creature within.
I have often thought that the easiest way to learn a language is to eat. Every menu is, after all, a list of words. And there's no better way to remember a new vocabulary word than to eat it, as a friend of mine discovered when he ordered andouillettes in France. The word has a lilting sound on the ear. It happens to be a sausage made from pork intestines, with a highly distinctive fragrance. My friend does not speak French, but that's one word that remains part of his permanent vocabulary.
If he had persevered, all of France might be at his disposal today. That, at least, is the approach of one language school, the Institut Parisien de Langue et de Civilisation Francaises, which takes the reasonable view that if you understand French food, you understand France and its history. French sauces, for example, are a historical roll call, since many of them were named in honor of aristocratic patrons or were intended to commemorate military victories. Albufera sauce, which Alain Ducasse has reinterpreted at his restaurant in New York, was created by the great chef Careme to honor Marshal Suchet, who beat the British near Lake Albufera during the Napoleonic Wars. Dishes in the style of Quercy or Rouergue or Perigord hark back to prerevolutionary France, when the map was divided by provinces rather than the present-day departments.
The same approach applies to other cultures. I am convinced that if I could truly understand umami, the Japanese term for a so-called fifth taste, I would be well on my way to understanding Japan.
Even if I can't understand umami, I can at least enjoy saying it. That's the other thing about food language. It pleases the ear and the mind. The world of dining and cooking is dominated by the sight, the smell and the taste of food. But it's also a world of words that have their own savor and tang. Was it the taste of the madeleine that sent Proust's narrator into a reverie or the name itself? Or were they somehow, for one magic instant, one and the same? Anyone who has ever ordered from a menu or read a cookbook knows the answer.
William Grimes writes the "Just Browsing" column for The New York Times. This column is adapted from Eating Your Words, to be published next month by Oxford University Press.
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