As I try getting back into the swing of writing out bloggish crap, I’ve been pulling pieces from a bulging folder of past screeds. This one is actually from this century! It’s about culinary etymology, but the big point of it is this: try to really know what you’re saying before you say it. To that end the little tirade below fits both the child rearing and dinner eating aspects of this site.
Food Etymologies –
Something else which really rakes my bum is food people pontificating on the real origins of anything. Many familiar things came into existence long before they became common across a culture so when it comes to precise origins the specifics are murky at best; yet so many dickheads are compelled to prattle about food histories as though they were present for everything since the first guy to get tossed in a fire.
Now I do like a thing or two about food history. It’s neat to know the native land of certain animals or plants or to see how things have really gotten around on this planet. Scandinavians are gaga over tropical ginger, cardamom and cinnamon. What would North Providence, Rhode Island be had cooks in Italy never figured out that those ornamental, nightshade-like plants from South America had edible fruit? Just another town full of car dealerships and guys in the cement business but no tomato sauce for the spaghetti.
Chowder- Being a naturalized New Englander (family is from RI and resettled there when I was ten) chowder is a subject I am either A) deeply connected to; or B) get so bombarded with every fucking summer that I can no longer tell the difference. But as soon as it’s safe to eat outside each year the static about chowder picks up. In the papers and rags it’s often a hot topic among transplant food writer who’ll expound on the proper recipes or the best joints to get a bowl from. And we have our Chowder fests all over when everybody else gets a little stupid over soup.
In 2005, I read an article by the Boston Globe’s chow biddies. It included a ‘history’ of the word ‘chowder’. And why not try to explain a word that encompasses three fundamentally different clam soups and has been attached to other soups/stews with a milky character? Well, as with most etymologies food writers start looking then shoot right past the answer or stop just short of it.
What the kitches at the Globe Magazine figured out was that the word chowder came from England as an anglicized variant of the French chaudière – “From the French word “chaudiere” – the caldron used in the 18th century…to make chowder”. So that makes sense because chaudières are indeed something one could utilize when making a chowder. Except that any soup or stew could be made in one. You could also make coffee or oatmeal in a chaudière. The Globe’s girls failed to see what was right in front of their crossed eyes, a type of failure that always bugs me about Francophiliacs and other culinary freaks. The root of the term chaudière is “chaud”. It’s not arcane or otherwise rare in French cuisine speak. Knowing what it means is something you’d readily expect from people who masturbate to Auguste Escoffier or Julia Child. It means “hot”.
The “ière” is equivalent to “er” in English so chaudière would translate as a “hotter”. Well, I mean “heater”. Though “boiler” is also a proper reading of the term. And they are all ways of saying what the ‘original’ chaudière for chowder really was: a pot. Not a pot unique to the making of clam soup. Just a fucking pot. Somewhere in time chowder became a name that stuck. What it doesn’t do is explain anything about the differences among Manhattan, Rhode Island* (*We do have our own! It’s a clear version – no tomato, no roux, no milk. The only thing purer would be a clam in a cup of hot water), and New England clam chowders. But it doesn’t need to. The problem to me is the experts pulling a little history out of their asses and proclaiming the issue settled. The bottom line is that “chowder” is barely more specific than “soup”. As a matter of fact, I’ve just decided to refer to all soups, from this moment on, as chowders.
Pâté – Firstly, we are now discussing dog food. Don’t care how much you like it, how much I really dig it, or how deeply entrenched it is in the traditions of fine French cuisine: Pâté de foie gras or de anything is just seasoned pet food. Think I’m just joshing you a bit? I’ve taken canned cat food – something by Nutro with venison in it – punched up the salt and seasoning, reshaped it and….served it at a party! For people! Granted, the party involved lots of drinking and drugs. But the “pâté” was gone before the night really got under way and it got me some compliments.
Now that what you just read has convinced you that I am an incorrigible dick you might want to consider what goes into a pâté. In one of the most basic recipes there are four principal ingredients: eggs, heavy cream, liver and pork fat. Don’t know how many of you are stand alone liver fans but most , people are rarely enthusiastic about pork fat. These are throw away foods – giblets and chunks of grease – and yet the ground up paste of kitchen scraps is something to savor. Pâté, however, wasn’t invented as a luxury dish; like so many things it was a way of taking any edible parts of animals and stretching it in a way that kept you from going hungry. Restaurants quickly caught on that, like soup, making pâté was a good way to reduce garbage collection fees while selling an appetizer whose price was nearly all profit. But I am not trying to turn people off from pâté. I love it – it’s a cheap stunner for a gathering when done right. And equating it with pet food isn’t simply a case of my crank nature; holding very pedestrian food stuff in such high regard just because of a French pedigree is pretty stupid. But that’s good ol’ American knee jerking for you – we assume that anyone with an English accent must be a genius and if we don’t like French food then we, or someone else will, attribute it to an uneducated palate. But always remember this: your tongue needs neither a CIA degree nor a trailer park upbringing to warm up to a can of Mighty Dog. Just add some salt.
So the etymological story I haven’t gotten around to yet goes like this. At a very nice Provencal styled restaurant operated by some pretty decent people I once endured the chef getting his panties bunched over a dish a waiter had referred to as pâté. What the server had referred to looked a whole lot like any pâté I’d ever seen, but during the lecture everyone got showed how wrong he and I had been. You see, the ground block of liver and fat paste was actually a terrine. A pâté, for the rest of you idiots as well, is like said terrine except that it is wrapped in a pastry crust. How the chef explained it was this: pâté comes from the French word for pastry (pâtisserie, I assume). Thus without a crust you can’t have a pâté.
So the reasoning is more or less fine. It’s just that his facts were all wrong. Pâté is not derived from patisserie, but the two words share a root term: pâte. Looks almost the same, n’est pas? That because it is the feminine form of the word and it essentially means anything in the very womanly state of being ground up and somewhat soft. In brief, pâte means “paste” and thus pâte dentifrice (toothpaste), pâte a bois (wood putty), or plain old pâte which is also the most common French word for “dough” – the raw material of pastry, that is, patisserie!
Using such info to slightly correct the chef (sensitive little people as they are) might not work at all – as he’ll note the word for dough and say that pâté is derived from dough (rather than patisserie), or pâte, and therefore one needs to have been wrapped in dough before we could call it anything other than a terrine. But that won’t work because the masculine pâté is able to stand all on its own in meaning. It could be a naked square of pulverized liver on a plate. It could be a city block. It also refers to a cake of ground up and cooked meat (Hey Now!). It also means “pie”: Pâté Genoise (Shepard’s Pie, which also covers ground meat and pasty spuds) or even pâté de sable, “mud pie”. Which brings us around to a very funny connection – terrine, apart from the earthenware root and the fact that even a pâté is cooked in a terrine, also has this meaning: PIE PLATE! Fucking A! How con-fucking-fusing can this get?
Really it doesn’t have to be confusing at all. As it turns out in French, terrine is a fine term for anything cooked in one and pâté is a valid term whether or not the liver paste has a doughy little crust on it. When it does, however, it earns its own very special title: pâté en croute. Or terrine en crou…ohhh, fucking skip it.
The ultimate problem with disseminating incorrect information is having one of your acolytes reiterate your sermons to people who will know you’re wrong. The risk of having a good French restaurant in a big city is that actual French people will show up for dinner. Put your Worst-Case-Scenario Cap on and picture this: French businessman tells his server as the first course plates are cleared, “Mercí, the pâté was quite delicious” to which the waitress replies, “The pâté? Ohhhhh, you meant the terrine- it didn’t have any pastry” That could only lead to Françoise sneering, which hard enough to endure when it isn’t warranted…
The dogma, one which overrides all else herein is this: Know what the fuck you’re talking about before you talk about it. Never be satisfied with the moment you think you have reached an answer. Think about it from a few different angles at least before passing it on. Being wrong is one thing but spreading stupidity is a crime against humanity.
