Gender and Occupation: Reconciling Culinary Work with Self through Rhetoric

The Food Network has glamorized the culinary world. Would-be chefs are flooding cooking schools with more veracity than amateur actors are descending on L.A., lured by the possibility of becoming the next Gordon Ramsay or Anthony Bourdain. In the U.S., the number of cooking programs rose by 42% between 1997 and 2002 in response to rising applications (Berta). But just as there are a limited number of people in Hollywood making millions of dollars per film, so too are spots for celebrity and executive chefs few and far between. Yet Iron Chef America continues to portray chefs as Olympic athletes. Nigella Lawson is cast as no less than a “domestic goddess,” and Jaime Oliver is shown stopping the plague of obesity one cafeteria menu at a time. Professional cooking should thus, as portrayed by The Food Network, involve art, fame, wealth, philanthropy and world travel served up alongside the thirty-minute meals. The array of opportunities must surely line up as neatly as the mise en place prepared by one of Martha’s mignons, right? Despite the fact that all of these are indeed facets of the profession, very few cooks actually experience this larger sense of purpose or satisfaction in the day-to-day grind.
Apart from the long hours and low pay endured by the average line cook, much of the discontent stems from the fact that occupation is so closely linked to identity. In effect, the culinary industry allows neither male nor female cooks to feel fully satisfied in their positions, because professional cooking grates against traditional gender roles. For men, while cooking allows for the exposition of physical prowess, it does not allow for the capital power and authority generally sought by men. For women, while cooking has traditionally been a form of achieving moral authority through caregiving and the maintenance of order in the domestic realm, professional cooking does not allow women to achieve the female model of “delicacy” or to adequately maintain a moral, model “personhood” (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 48).
Through a review of occupational rhetoric in the culinary industry, it is apparent that cooks use language to manipulate their standing in society and to reconcile work with gender identity. In the culinary industry, men craft a testosterone-driven subculture as a means of displaying the physical demands of the industry and to distinguish themselves from the average home cook. At the same time, men compare their jobs with traditionally professional, power-possessing careers. Women, as the minority figures in the industry, are obliged to operate within this framework, and the style of speech and personas they adopt reflect the desire to succeed in a male domain coupled with the need to preserve aspects of their womanhood. In the culinary world, both men and women are torn between the desire to present themselves and their work as unique and the desire to be accepted into the gender and occupational mainstream.


Occupational Rhetoric in the Kitchen


When two people are getting to know each other, one of the first questions that will inevitably be broached is, “What do you do for a living?” Occupation is inherently linked to identity in that a person’s work is one of the things by which he is judged. A named occupation is like a tag, for an occupation is a bundle of physical and cultural tasks that vary in the cumulative prestige, authority, status and stigma they impart (Fine, 90-91). Together they place a person within a social system, shaping who he or she is and how he or she will be seen by others. In this vein, occupational rhetorics are used to define the work of the individual and his or her social standing. As Hughes asserted, “[T]he people who practice an occupation attempt to revise the occupation and that of the people in it. In so doing, they also attempt to revise their own conception of themselves and their work” (Hughes, 338-339). By using language to justify their occupations, people vicariously shape how the world perceives them.
The culinary world is a rich place to explore the potential of occupational rhetoric because of the variety of professions it intersects. Sociologist Gary Alan Fine undertook such a study in 1993 in which he spent over 200 hours interviewing cooks in four “second-tier ‘provincial’” restaurants in the Twin Cities area. His primary focus was on the plurality of occupational identities and rhetoric. He chose kitchens as the setting for his study because cooking is “linked to production, service and management” (Fine, 93), an observation that parallels gastronome Jean Paul Aron’s belief that “The chef is not an employee in the common meaning of the word, but a practitioner, an artist, and a fabricator” (Aron, 89).
Fine ultimately determines that cooks adopt the rhetorics of professionals, artists, businessmen and manual laborers as part of their rhetorical strategies. This rhetorical breakdown certainly parallels the multiple facets of cooking, which are outlined by food historian Michael Symons:
[C]ooking quickly becomes so complex that its study, too, is broken down into self-important bits—nutritionist know the chemical properties of foods, architects the layout of kitchens, electrical engineers the laws of conduction, market researchers the weakness of shoppers, and so on, seemingly indefinitely. But these snap together again once all kinds of human activities are viewed as radiating out from cooking. Cooking is the point where production is directed, where social relationships are formed and maintained, and where the arts and sciences emanate. It is the starting-place of trades, the target of the marketplace, the object of philosophy. (Symon, 120-121)
Culinary work blends different skill sets and is highly diverse in the level of specialized knowledge it requires and the prestige it imparts. It involves manual labor, upon which is layered a need for business sense, people skills, knowledge of basic chemistry and mechanics, and sometimes a certain level of artistry.
The plurality of tasks is reflected in the language that cooks use to describe their work through analogies and metaphors that call on other professions. Not only are these comparisons used to articulate work; they are also used to express the self. I argue that the appropriation of other rhetorics is a sign of insecurity about the unadorned image that being a cook projects. Eighty percent of the cooks Fine interviewed were men, which begs the question, to what extent is this need for justification in the culinary world confounded by gender? Are female cooks as insecure about their professions as male cooks, and if so, does this insecurity manifest itself in a different way? Occupations are linked to identity, so to what degree is one’s identity as a man or woman linked to one’s occupation? In what ways does cooking allow a person to fulfill or surpass traditional gender roles?

Gender Ideals and the Need to Justify Cooking


Looking again to the Food Network, celebrity chefs and their audiences are gender coded. Female celebrity chefs such as Nigella Lawson, Martha Stewart, Rachel Ray and Lydia Bastianich are oriented toward women at home. Gordon Ramsay’s shows are based primarily on professional cooking, Anthony Bourdain is the erudite macho man of the food world, and while women can compete in Top Chef, a woman has never won . At home, daily cooking tasks are tended to by women, but men dominate the professional realm to the point that one could say that men have turned restaurant kitchens into an inhospitable environment for the “traditional” woman.
In order to understand why the realm of professional cooking is so problematic, let us turn to the division of labor that gender constructivism has set up. The existence of a division of labor is universal. While the way in which this division manifests itself differs between societies, in general activities that are guarded closely as being in men’s domain involve greater societal and public power. A woman, on the other hand, often holds more power in domestic and nonpublic domains (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 38).
Accepting Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that the woman is cast as the “the other,” it is logical that a task such as cooking, which at its core is motivated by the will to attend to the needs of others, is deemed more functional for women (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 38). Women are generally assigned roles of catering to people’s everyday needs, which manifests itself principally in child rearing and in the maintenance of the home. When women first entered the public sphere, it is no surprise that they found employment in the service sector, and the hospitality industry seems a natural for the feminine domain (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 39). But men have usurped the culinary industry. Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet argue that even a “nurturant” activity such as cooking acquires prestige just by way of its association with men, but I would assert that while yes, men have taken over the restaurant world, most of them do not experience the feeling of prestige. This dissatisfaction has its origins in the different ways men and women have come to define their personal worth.
There are two types of masculinity as defined by Robert Connel: physical and technical. Physical prowess is associated with the working class and technical (scientific and political prowess) with the upper-middle class, though to a certain extent physical power is also important in the upper-middle class. Conversely, women are expected to be small and delicate (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 48). Men are rewarded for their accomplishments and women for their personhoods, or “looks, personalities, [and] moral qualities.” A man’s personal worth is based primarily on “the accumulation of goods, status and power in the marketplace. A woman’s personal worth comes from domestic realm, her moral authority and otherwise “symbolic capital.” Even when a woman has acquired a respectable position in the public sphere, it is expected that she will remain “nicer” than a man in an equivalent position and will maintain personal relationships (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 124).
Gender is an achievement. We stylize ourselves to fulfill or break from gender patterns. But most restaurants are run like dictatorships, and any cook besides the chef de cuisine or his lackey sous chefs will normally be limited in the degree with which he or she has control over his or her work and feeling of self-determination. As a cook in even the most reputable restaurant, the sixty- to eighty- hour workweeks, the repetition of tasks, the uniform, the lack of health benefits, the minimum wage salary and the often unpredictable schedule take their toll. Despite the huge amount of effort and skill their job requires, cooks experience little feelings of authority in or outside the workplace, as they work for a usually unappreciative chef all day, can meet friends, family and lovers in the wee hours and on the occasional day off, and struggle to make rent at the end of the week. It is, to a certain extent, dehumanizing professionally and personally. In terms of how this way of life takes its toll on cooks and their fulfillment of gender roles, I have observed empirically, in my reading of Fine’s study and in my literary analysis of Anthony Bourdain’s Hell’s Kitchen and Hannah McCouch’s Girl Cook the following: male cooks overemphasize the physical prowess and militaristic hierarchy in their work in order to compensate for the lack of technical prowess and capital authority afforded to them by their occupations. Simultaneously, they try to raise their work to the status of socially sanctioned professions through metaphor. Female cooks, in their effort to work within the model established by the power-holding men, must negotiate between an adoption of the language, toughness and swagger of the masculine subculture, and a maintenance of the power that comes from cultivating a more traditional female personhood.

The “Professional Cook”: Justification through Metaphor and Simile


Fine writes that “A self-image of professionalism occurs when specialized knowledge and allegiance is critical to the doing of work.” Whether cooking is a true profession is, in and of itself, a question. Technically, an occupation is only a profession when it is characterized by “(1) systematic theory, (2) professional authority, (3) community sanction, (4) a well-developed ethical code, and (5) a professional culture” (Fine, 96). On the whole, cooking does not meet all of these requirements, but in the mid-1970s, the Department of labor, under pressure from the American Culinary Federation, changed the census category of chef from “domestic” to “professional.” Still, in reality cooks reside in the limbo of “quasi-professionalism” (Fine, 96). The adoption of professional rhetoric and metaphor allows cooks to gain credit and control in a status-oriented world.
The main function of a metaphor is to “provide a partial understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson, 154). Using George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s subjectivity-oriented metaphoric theory as opposed to the objectivist comparison theory, metaphors allow people to create similarities that they derive from personal experience. Metaphors are based on correlations we perceive empirically, and it is the existence of these correlations and the crystallization in metaphor that allow us to construct similarities (Lakoff and Johnson, 147-155). For example, let us take the metaphor used by one cook interviewed by Fine: “Cooking is chemistry.” Cooking and chemistry both involve physical and chemical reactions. Both an experiment and a recipe are subject to variables. Both have established methods to insure the proper product. The similarities and differences are isolated, but the metaphor allows us to find coherence in an overall structural similarity.
Cooks often draw metaphors between themselves and more visible occupations both to explain the complexity of their work and the variety of skills they employ on a daily basis, and also to compare themselves to work that already possesses the prestige of “community sanctioned” professionalism. The emphasis on specialized skills relates to cooks’ need to separate themselves from the universally achievable status of “home cook”, as is exemplified in the following interviews taken by Fine:
The chef is the carpenter, plumber, electrician, handyman, psychologist, psychiatrist.

We have to have basic cooking talents. We have to have creative cooking talents. You have to be a personnel director as far as hiring and firing people. You have to be a purchasing agent. You have to be a butcher… You almost have t be a psychologist… To be able to deal with problems, and not, if someone has a problem, tell them to shut up and go home or I don’t want to hear about it…. It’s almost like having your own family here. You’re almost like being a father… There’s a lot of responsibility.
These comments exemplify the valorization of cooking through the breadth of knowledge it requires. While some of these metaphors reference professions (such as “psychologist” and “psychiatrist”) most of the trades to which cooking has been compared have even less status than cooking. Collectively, however, they impart a certain level of respectability. Physical prowess and consequently, physical labor are ennobling, and as earlier discussed, particularly valued by men. Most male cooks admit to liking to work with their hands, in the feeling of competence they derive from this. They are grounded in the necessity of their work (Fine, 108).
However, just as the labor of rhetoric can create a positive image, so too can it can be used in negative contexts by cooks. When complaining about work, the toil can be described as being backbreaking, hot, sweaty, exhausting and mechanical. Not only is the work tiring, the assembly line-like nature of many establishments inhibits the use of the mind and consequently a cook’s self-esteem (Fine, 109). Part of being a manual laborer implies that you are merely a cog in a larger process, and that, consequently, there are others supervising you and exercising decision-making authority over you.
The cooks in Fine’s study could be said to transcend this lack of authority through analogy. Similar to metaphor, analogizing can act as a way of justifying one’s identity. By comparing the types of actions they perform with those of “consensually defined” professions, cooks can align their work with an elite status, as exemplified by the following interviews (Fine, 97).
If you take a doctor or lawyer, they go through years of training. And a chef goes through years of training. It’s years of discipline in doing certain things. Like with a doctor or lawyer, they always find out something new everyday. Laws and medical things. It’s the same thing with a cook. Every day it’s something new.

Law and medicine are practice professions. Cooking would be, too. What you’re actually doing is using an accepted method everyday and doing something… but you’re also practicing doing that at the same time. You’re trying new things.
Here, the system that is being identified as similar between cooking and universally affirmed professions is that of the prerequisite for specialized skills and experience. “Professional” cooking is different from home cooking in that it is based on knowledge that can only be acquired in school or in the field. It requires “discipline” and the fact that every day there is something new suggests that it also requires the kind of skills that extends beyond being able to read a recipe. As with medicine, it requires the astute interpretation of a situation based on prepossessed knowledge. As with law, it requires the creative combination of preset rules. This kind of specialized skill and knowledge procures its own kind of authority.
Professional cooking is different from home cooking and professional cooks are keen to emphasize the disparity between the “wannabe” Martha Stewarts and green-eared CIA students of the world and the cooks logging eighty-some hours a week in a 100˚ kitchen. Indeed, it would outrage any cook to read the example sited by Symons from the 1823, 6th Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “[Cooking is] sufficiently familiar to every housekeeper; and, its luxurious refinements too copiously detailed in manuals and directories [to require elaboration], were it even a topic that at all deserved consideration in a work of this nature” (Symons, x). While professional cooking is still linked to hospitality, it is also bound by hierarchical, temporaral and material constraints that can only be navigated by a seasoned cook.

Cooking up a Subculture: Pirates and Profanity


The testosterone-driven “subculture” of the culinary world has been publicized most prolifically by Anthony Bourdain. His bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential, whose subtitle is “Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly,” portrays kitchens as a scraped together military unit of delinquents, madmen and bon vivants, that is, of all the people too full of fire and spit to be bound by an office job. Bourdain uses the word ‘subculture’ in both his preface and “Note from the Chef”:
I want to tell you about the dark recesses of the restaurant underbelly—a subculture whose centuries-old, militaristic hierarchy and ethos of ‘rum, buggery and lash’ make for a mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos. (Bourdain, 4)

I’m asked a lot what the best part about cooking for a living is. And it’s this: to be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one’s hands—using all one’s senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (though oral sex has to be a close second). (Bourdain, xvi)
The most sociologically significant word Bourdain uses here is “secret society,” for the nature of a secret society relates very closely to the idea that inequality is based on privileged knowledge. The secret is a boundary mechanism that separates members by their social patterns or groups. Its maintenance is motivated not by the secret itself, but rather, by the “rights, obligations, and privileges generated by the fact of secrecy” (Murphy, 193). Thus, male cooks can be said to gain a feeling of authority via a separation from the rest of society.
Bourdain says he can “speak the language of this culture,” and that, in effect, he has the passwords to this secret society (Bourdain, 4). In addition to implying the possession of privileged knowledge, the way Bourdain describes cooks conjures images of traditional masculinity and physical prowess. Bourdain portrays cooks as a motley crew of Don Juans, pirates, soldiers, and criminals.
Who the hell, exactly, are these guys, the boys and girls in the trenches? You might get the impression from the specifics of my less than stellar career that all line cooks are wacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees, a thuggish assortment of drunks, sneak thieves, sluts and psychopaths. The business attracts… ‘fringe elements,’ people for whom something in their lives had gone terribly wrong. (62)

In the kitchen, they were like gods. They dressed like pirates: chef’s coats with the arms slashed off, blue jeans, ragged and faded headbands, gore-covered aprons, gold hoop earrings, wrist cuffs, turquoise necklaces and chokers, rings of scrimshaw and ivory, tattoos—all the decorative detritus of the long-past Summer of Love. They had style and swagger, and they seemed afraid of nothing. (21)
The portrayal of a certain cooking team as a band of pirates implies that they have their own set of self-serving rules that pit them against society. By becoming “pirates,” these “fringe elements” are turning their marginalization into a profitable enterprise. Just as they turn detritus into jewelry, another man’s trash into gold, the institutionalization of their delinquency gives them a sense of power. Bourdain’s descriptions are also marked by his aforementioned “mix of unwavering order and nerve-shattering chaos.” The mixture of order and chaos echoes the military saying, “War is hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror,” and indeed the cooks are described as being “in the trenches.” These militaristic references not only connect them to other subcultures of society, they also evoke images of masculinity.
This said, the culinary subculture is not always hospitable for the traditional woman. When I interned as a cook in Paris, I was the only woman working in the Taillevent kitchen among twenty men. In order to be respected as a cook and given any sort of interesting responsibility, I went in with the expectation that I needed to work harder, better, and more efficiently than anyone else in the kitchen. While diligence afforded me this respect and opportunity, what was more difficult to manage was the extent to which I should embrace the masculine subculture. The fact that I stopped wearing a stitch of makeup after the first week on a hot station lowered how well I was treated, but if I wore tight jeans to work I was cat-called. I was supposed to giggle at the sous chef’s misogynistic jokes and let the grill guy spank me when I cleaned the grease hood, but I was chastised when my “feminine” sensibilities were bothered when burly Nicolas beat up 100 pound Makuto. Women are usually held to the standard that no matter what their position, they must maintain their “niceness” and cultivate a moral “personhood.” So how does a woman fit in with a band of pirates and keep her nose powdered at the same time? In addition to out-cooking her male counterparts, a female cook needs to learn how to be “one of the guys” without completely sacrificing her womanhood. This is a delicate balance, one that I will explore linguistically.
One of the ways cooks characterize the culinary subculture is through language and rhetoric. Burger slingers have their slice-of-Americana-diner lingo. Chefs have their French-named techniques. In addition, profanity is cultivated in the kitchen as part of the subversive, masculine subculture. Naturally, one of the primary ways in which female cooks link themselves to this subculture and separate themselves from the female norm is through the use of profanity. Ever since I began working full time in kitchens, I have, to the chagrin of my parents, developed a “potty-mouth.” In certain situations, especially in those when I want to identify myself as being tough, inflammatory, funny, confident or “not your average girl,” I pepper my sentences with the word "fuck” with more vigor than I season a steak au poivre. Even the opening line of McCouch’s Girl Cook is, “I’ve been tossing mesclun greens in the garde-manger at Tacoma for the past nine months, and I’m about to lose my shit” (McCouch, 3). Just as a group of teenage girls will dress a certain way to define themselves as a group or a female gang adopts a certain walk to exude its strength and solidarity, language is also part of the stylistic toolbox (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 307).
While taboo language has come into greater use with young women in recent years, many people find foul language unladylike. And herein lies the crux. While for men, swearing implies a kind of threatening anger (and authority over that language and emotion), for females, swearing is often cast as a loss of control. Less seriously, dirty language plays an important role in certain social contexts, acting as a bonding element (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 187). The kitchen is one of these contexts. The use of profanity exemplifies how in order to be accepted in the male culinary world women must adopt certain styles, even though these elements may not in harmony with the traditional model of womanhood they are expected, both in and outside the kitchen, to maintain.

Haute Cuisine: Can Art Transcend Issues of Identity?

A kind of occupational rhetoric explored by Fine and not yet examined in this review is that of art. Fine wrote that “Among cooks, artistic rhetoric is often a concomitant of the presence of an appreciative audience and occurs when there is a demand for novelty (creativity)” (Fine, 113). When a cook is asked his or her advice, is given a choice or is asked to create something, he or she feels in touch with the artistic capacity of cooking. Tasks that involve creativity engage cooks in a way that gives them authority over their product and their craft. Such an opportunity demonstrates respect for the intellect, palate and experience of the cook.
Cooks involved in haute cuisine, even if they themselves do not have a high status in the kitchen, often feel like they are engaged in an artistic process. When a person can take pride in his work to the point that he considers it art, perhaps he or she can derive a sense of worth not from the occupation, but from the craft itself. It is true that the value of art, like occupation, is socially determined. It must be won. But in the end a cook has more control over the daily preparation and perfection of his craft than he does over the universal opinion of cooking.
Haute cuisine is, in many ways, a return to the original purpose of cooking: to nurture and share pleasure with others. In esteemed kitchens, the cuisine is elevated to art. Perhaps it is only in this upper culinary echelon that the collective sense of purpose makes the kitchen an enjoyable and prideful place for both male and female workers. Here the aesthetic choices afforded by an appreciative audience give both parties the feeling of power, agency and control that allow them to hone their craft and their identities.























Works Cited

Aron, Jean-Paul. The Art of Eating in France. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Berta, Dina. “Culinary School is in: Economy Boosts Enrollment to Record Levels.” BNET Business Network. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_12_36/ai_84237817.

Bourdain, Anthony. Kitchen Confidential. New York: Harper Perennial. 2007.

Eckert, Penelope and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Language and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Fine, Gary Alan. “Justifying Work: Occupational Rhetorics as Resources in Restaurant Kitchens.” Academic Science Quarterly. Vol. 41, No. 1, March 1996, pp. 90-115.

Hughes, Everett. The Sociological Eye. Boston: Little, Brown, 1971.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.

McCouch, Hannah. Girl Cook. New York: Villard, 2004.

Murphy, William P. “Secret Knowledge as Property and Power in Kpelle Society: Elders versus Youth.” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute. Vol. 50, No. 2, 1980. pp. 193-207.

Symon, Michael. A History of Cooks and Cooking. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

The History and Etymology of Sugar

The History of Sugar: A Sweet Diffusion

Sugar was first cultivated in India in the 3rd century B.C.E. and eventually spread to Europe by way of Persia circa 600 C.E. In the western world, Italy was the first to capitalize on sugar production, to the extent that between 700 and 1600 C.E., Venice was known as the sugar capital. Because of its rarity, however, sugar was only available to the rich and royal. When Christopher Columbus brought sugar to the Americas in 1493, production exploded in what came to be known as the “sugar colonies” or “sugar islands”. In the 1800s sugar brought forth the “triangle trade” in which sugar, tobacco, slaves and other goods were exchanged between Africa, the West Indies and Europe. The growing popularity of bitter drinks such as tea, coffee and chocolate created this demand for sugar. When the cultivation of sugar began in South America— where the climate was ideal— the crop boom drove down prices. Sugar was now available to everyone. In contrast to its old reputation, sugar can be found in abundance in cheap unhealthy foods such as soda and candy bars today.

The Etymology of Sugar: From Grit to the Gritty

The word for “sugar” is phonologically similar in almost all Indo-European languages and can be traced back to the Sanskrit “shakara,” which meant “ground or candied sugar” and originally “pebble and grit.” The English word “sugar” is phonologically most similar to the modern French “sucre” which evolved over time from the Old French “chucre”, “sukere”, “zuchre”, “çuquere” and “çucre” in turn. The ‘g’ that makes the English “sugar” unique is attributed to the middle Latin “zugurum”, the Anglo-French “segerstein” and the Norman French “segrestein”. On its way to its current employment of the letter “u,” it morphed between spellings such as “suigur,” “sewger,” “sewkere” and “suggur”. It can be seen in a form similar to the present-day in 1334 BCE in Abingdon Rolls, where it is written “The myreth is swete to the soule, no sugre is sweitre.”
Its first definition is “A sweet crystalline substance, white, when pure, obtained from a great variety of plant juices, but chiefly from those of the sugarcane and sugar-beet, and forming an important article of human food.”
The word “sugar” is often paired with words indicating its color (brown sugar); its stage of boiling, purification or crystallization (raw sugar); its use (table sugar), or its plant of origin (palm sugar, maple sugar). As a noun it can also refer to the plant from which the “sweet, crystalline” substance arises, especially sugar cane.
“Sugar” can also be used in the figurative sense, as in “Shirley’s all sugar” to imply the temperamental sweetness of a person. The colloquialism, “He is neither sugar nor salt” implies an impermeability to the elements, especially to rainy weather. This saying may transfer to a person’s emotional wear-all as well. Finally, “sugar” appears in slang in three grittier senses. Sugar can be money, a narcotic drug (especially heroine) or when used in “sugar daddy,” it connotes an older wealthier man who offers moneys or gifts for companionship or sexual favors.
The word “sugar” is part of a chemist’s lexicon. Its archaic usage probably harked back to its original Sanskrit meaning “pebble, grit,” that is, the textural properties of sugar. It could be used to refer to any elements or compounds that resembled sugar in texture or taste (as in sugar lead… I certainly hope they did not taste the lead, though maybe that is why the sense of this word is also dead and buried…) Today, “sugar” is a common reference to any member of the saccherose or glucose families.
“Sugar” can be used in combination with other words to mean those things are pertaining to, made from or derived of sugar. Some interesting word pairings—that perhaps stand on their own in other parts of the OED— are “sugar mouse” (simply, a sugar lump in the shape of a mouse), “sugar nippers” (to nip pieces from loaves of sugar), a “sugar trough” (where maple syrup collects) and “sugar weather” (a Canadian saying for spring weather). Animals that eat sweet things have the word sugar in their names (such as the Australian honey-eating “sugar squirrel”), as do certain fruits and vegetables that are exceptionally sweet.
Finally, “sugar” can be used as a transitive verb. One can sugar something by mixing, covering, sprinkling or sweetening it with sugar. The verb “to sugar” can be used in a figurative context as well, as a form of flattery, as in “to sugar someone up.” When used in trade, to sugar something means to doctor it, as one would do by cutting cornstarch into cocaine and then selling it as 100% pure. And any oarsman would know that if his fellow was shirking while pretending to row hard, he could excuse him of “sugaring.”

Food and its Conceptual Metaphors

In language, people seem to be prone to many of the same processes and evaluations as food. Adjectives most commonly used for foods are easily understood when applied to humans

Personality as Flavor

He's been bitter ever since she left.

Ellen is all sugar.

I don't know, I think she's a bit too spicy for me.

There's a sour spinster haunting my attic.

Mrs. Ferment's children are rotten brats.

He has an unsavory character.

Olivier is the sweetest guy I've ever met.

He has a biting sense of humor.

Flavors are a fitting metaphorical concept for personalities in that they connote nuance and involve the preferences of the speaker in their selection. Just as everyone evaluates tastes differently, so too do people judge other people and their characters.

The Body as Food

She's a peach.

He's got a lot of meat on his bones.

I could just eat him up.

Look at the melons on that beauty queen.

She's a tall drink-of-water blonde.

They devoured each other in the bedroom.

Oh, that model is just-arm candy.

My teacher is an old prune.

Stanford students are the cream of the crop.

That waitress is a real dish.

That bugle boy is ripe for the picking.

In these metaphorical concepts we see how our perception of the body and the language we use to describe it reinforce each other and our evaluation of the body as a commodity. The body can be consumed. It can be an accessory. It can be broken down into parts. We can rank bodies in terms of their appeal, whether or not their in their prime. We can desire another body, veritably "hunger after it."

Interrogation as Cooking

Sebastian was grilled by the district attorney.

Finals really burnt me out.

Let's put the heat on this subject.

After spending hours on the Sunday crossward, Elise was fried.

He stewed over the problem before answering.

Liza mulled over the possibilities.

There are two parts to this conceptual metaphor. In one, people are the food, or objects of the interrogator, who is the cook. This implies that the interrogator has the power in the relationship and controls the destiny of the person answering. Perhaps this metaphor also comes from the physical overheating and sweating that comes from anxiety. In the other, the answers are being processed and prepared as food by the responder. The person answering has more control and has the time to carefully deliberate his answers.

I consider myself to have a spicy persona, I'd like to think I'm a tart in the 19th-century sense, and personally, I think the worst way to be interrogated would be by sous vide. 

The Semantics of Tea

Peet's Pumphrey's Blend is an extraordinary mix of black, green and jasmine scented teas. This unusual combination gives a complex, brisk cup with a fresh, flowery aroma. Pumphrey's Blend was created especially for a relaxing afternoon tea. It is also a popular tea for serving iced.

While Assam teas form the backbone of many of the world's popular blends, an exceptional cup of pure Assam is a rare find. This high-grade tea has a distinctly malty fragrance, the distinguishing characteristic of teas from the Assam region. It makes a sturdy, pungent, yet slightly sweet cup of lingering depth.

The preceding descriptions come from tins of Peet's Tea, a branch of Peet's Coffee and Tea, originated in Berkeley and has since catered to Bay Area clientele, especially those considered with locality, authenticity, small businesses and gastronomic ethics. It is, therefore, unsurprising that Peet's product design comfortably incorporates wine vocabulary into its descriptions of its teas. Many of the words fit quite nicely into Adrienne Lehrer's extended viticultural lexicon, and some of them also convey the even greater breadth of the realm in which the semantics of taste operate.

As evaluative words we have complex, extraordinary, unusual, exceptional, rare and high-grade. These generally allude to quality and virtues of the tea, especially to its being unique and above average. The word complex suggests that there multiple flavors dancing upon the palette, providing more than a one-note taste sensation. In the "taste-feel" category, we have pungent, which suggests an assertiveness (as in, the pungent odor of camembert). For "strength" we have sturdy, which suggests a resilience. Perhaps the see can stand up to milk or sugar or lemon, or could be drunk alongside a savory food. For "age" fresh implies youth and clarity. Perhaps the leaves have not been oxidized as long, or perhaps the freshness is derived from the uncrushed leaves of green tea that are a part of the blens. For the "interaction of balance, acidity and sweetness" we have sweet, a familiar enough taste adjective, but one which here would not imply a saccharin sweetness, but rather, a lack of bitterness. The "nose" is described as flowery, as in reminiscent of flower, and the "body" as having a lingering depth, which to me, relates to its complexity and it sturdiness. Finally, the teas' "resemblance" to known objects or olfactory sensations include their being malty and flowery.

The quality of the tea is also promoted through descriptions of its versatility, its composition and its origins.  Serving suggestions place it in a social context, transforming what could be a just hot caffeinated beverage into a cultural commodity: created especially for a relaxing afternoon tea... A popular tea for serving iced. I have never seen serving suggestions on a wine bottle (that would probably be insulting to most consumers), but it works for the tea label because tea is very much something related to ritual and to time (the time of day, the length of steeping etc.) These labels do imitate wine connoisseurs' obsession with le terroir, that is the origin of the raw materials of the beverage, a concern exemplified by Peet's noting the tea's distinguishing characteristic of teas from the Assam region. 

 

Snacké vs. Planché

There is what I perceive to be a new word in French cuisine: snacké. It usually appears in a menu or recipe title as an adjective describing the way a meat or fish has been cooked, such as "Filet de bouef snacké et son condiment cranberry, herbed olives" or "Filet de thon "snacké" au poivre, haricots coco de Paimpol au basilic, jus réduit." It appears gramatically in the place where we would see the words "steamed", "grilled" or "roasted"; it is describing a process of cooking. I have no direct translations of "snacker" or its adjectives "snacké", but I will attempt to piece together its meaning from experience, hearsay and suggested synonyms.

In one recipe, "poêler dans une poêle anti-adhésive" appeared paranthetically after the reader was imperatively directed to "snacker" the beef. The suggests to me that snacker means "to panfry in a non-stick pan," and also suggests to me that it is a word not yet familiar to the general public. Why not just say "poêlé" or even a la plancha, a Spanish term embraced by the Frenching meaning grilled (but not necessarily over an open flame inthe French use of the word)? One reader of the recipe responded to the use of the word by saying, " 'snacké', du verbe sacker? je snacke, nous snackons, etc??? Pourquoi pas "planché" de plancha? alors qu'il s'agit de saisir sur une plaque de cuisson. Merci d'écrire Français." In effect, this Frenchman is questioning the validity of this word, especially in that it is taking the liberty to turn a noun into a verb and then an adjective.

Finally, I have eaten "St. Jacques snackés" and they were cooked to the extent of being what I would consider, "seared," that is lightly browned or crisped but not fully cooked. I associate searing with things like scallops, tuna, and filet mignon, things that are especially tasty when not overcooked. I don't think you would "snacké" a chicken breast. The direct translation of "to sear" in my dictionary is "dessécher." I then looked up "dessécher," which didn't give me "sear," but rather, "to dry or harden." That doesn't sound very appetizing, but in English, "sear" does. Maybe the French are trying to fill a gap in their culinary vocabulary, creating a word that also references not just the cooking vessel and the amount of heat, but also the length of cooking, lending a temporal dimension. Using the English word "snack" is perhaps apropos, as it implies a quick bite something.

I will discuss this further with some of my fellow cuisinéres, but for now I will define snacké as follows: cooked quickly in a frying pan on high heat with or without a small amount of fat so as to brown the exterior but not cook through. syn: seared.

The Caesar Salad as a Prototype: Variations on a Theme

In Jean Aitchison's Words in the Mind she writes "To me a retriever or a German shepherd is a very doggy dog while a Pekinese is a less doggy dog. Notice that this kind of judgment has nothing to do with how well you like the thing; you can like a purple red better than a true red but still recognize that the color you like is not a true red." The prototype is distinct from its variations in our minds, even if we prefer the variation.

How do these preferences and recognitions apply to food? Let us take a Caesar salad. A basic Caesar consists of romaine lettuce, a creamy anchovy-garlic dressing, parmesan and croutons. I have eaten quite a few Caesar salads in my life for the following reasons: 1) If I want something healthy or light but am at a diner, theme park, airport kind of place, I can usually find a Caesar. 2) It's harder than most salads to mess up, especially considering that Romaine is hearty lettuce that stands up to a longer storage better than most. 3) I love its saltiness, the cool crunchiness of the romaine and the assertiveness of the garlic and anchovy. 

Growing up in California, I've seen my share of Mexican or more aptly, Tex-Mex, revamps, which means basically that the croutons and any meat added to it have a vague Spice Islands "chili powder" flavor, and everything has a slightly orangey hue. In tight travel situations, I've picked at salads that only used the bitter, leathery dark green exterior leaves, have had waxy, pre-grated, fraudulent parm, disturbingly sweet dressing and those spineless, chalky, onion-powdery, Pepperidge Farm-esque croutons.

In Paris I ate my only Caesar at the "Louisiana," where cherry tomatoes and avocados also made it into the bowl. I like these additions, probably because, hell, who doesn't like those two vegetable tucked into their salads? (mmmmmm... I'm having an avocado moment...) At Boulette's Larder, some Caesary salads I made included a salad of julienned puntarella and dandelion greens with an anchovy-garlic dressing, reggiano and breadcrumbs. I also made a salad with baby romaine, watermelon radish, lemon confit, breadcrumbs and an anchovy-garlic vinaigrette. Both of these made me think of the spirit of the Caesar, but would probably get little play in a Labovian experiment. I thought they were delicious.

A trend in haute cuisine is the refinement of the prototype. Two chefs who exhibit this are Gordon Ramsay and Thomas Keller. Ramsay makes tarts with digestive biscuits and currently has a British breakfast (mashers, bangers, kippers, beans etc.) on their way to a 3-mac and $50-per-plate presentation. Keller serves "Coffee and Donuts" (espresso granita and litte cinnamon sugar donuts) and "Peanut Butter and Jelly" (peanut butter truffles and concord grape pate a fruits) as mignardise. They both have Caesar salads. Keller has a cheese course of Parmagianno Reggiano: a custard of the cheese served with julienned hearts of romaine in a creamy anchovy dressing. Ramsay has a Casear with lobster and parmesan crisps studded with white truffle.

I wonder what the consistency profile would be for different Caesar salads. Does food linguistically follow the same pattern a cup would? I would propose that the authenticity of a food is highly personal, far more subjective than color or animal identification per se. Opinions and ideas about food are linked to memory, experience, senses, culture, religion, family and aesthetics. The prototype for a food will probably be the first a person has ever tasted or the best. Varying degrees of experience will determine a model prototype, and preference and a concept of truth will be one and the same.

Menu Lyracism

Brandade puffs with piperade and nicoise olives

Smoked salmon with korozott on rye

Vichyssoise with fois gras, lardons and white truffle

Tai snapper with romanesco puree, bagna cauda, puntarella and tapenade

Rabbit paprikas with savoy cabbage dumplings, spaetle and winter vegetables

Lamb chops with marcona almond romesco, papas bravas and long cooked romanos

Toasted almond panna cotta with saba and adriatic figs

Tarte au chocolate with bosc pear and poire williams caramel

These are some of the menu items I present to clients. They are the items that warrant the most questions, due to the abundance of foreign words and obscure produce varietals in their titles. Spell check doesn't like 20 of the words. Despite the fact that none of my customers-- most of whom are savvy diners-- have known what korozott or bagna cauda are, I still refuse to translate them within the context of my menu. A "Hungarian dip of chevre, farmer's cheese, cream cheese, paprika, caraway and shallot" it too long to write out, but korozott is what it is because of all these things together. I will not write cheese-paprika dip, because even my mind wanders off into plebeian locales with that one (made with velveeta... served on wonderbread... I just don't know...) In fact, it takes everything in me to not write that it is served on not just any rye bread, but on Anna's Daughter's Rye Bread. 

And bagna cauda, an Italian dipping sauce, is made of anchovies and garlic slow-cooked in extra virgin olive oil. If I wrote "anchovy-garlic sauce," I don't think most of my clients would even bring it up, due to the fact that most people in the U.S. need to be coddled and convinced into eating the little fish. But the name bagna cauda has promise, perhaps because it originates from the boot's revered gastronomy or because the translation means "hot bath" (for crudite) or because when they ask me, I get to insert my disclaimer, "But really, the anchovy is very subtle, lending just a savory quality... In truth, I don't love the taste of anchovy myself.

Part of the reason I write my menus the way I do is to show that I am knowledgeable. My clients are enlisting "an expert". The languages I employ convey my culinary palette and palate, and the fact that I use heirloom vegetable names or include the names of farmers conveys how important the quality and ethics of my ingredients are to me. Finally, I love the conversations that these menus initiate. I get so excited talking about food and sharing a little bit of what I do and love. And I love making other people more knowledgeable about what they're eating through what they initially read. I put as much time into the linguistics structure of a menu item as I do into the structure of a line of poetry.