Culinary Terminology

Culinary Terminology has been discussed to such good effect in Kettner’s Book of the Table by Dallas (1877) that it is his words which are here offered.

In one point, however, accuracy is well within our reach … we can be accurate in language. In the whole range of literature and science, there is nothing to be found comparable to the inaccuracy and corruption of culinary language. It is something astounding. It seems as if all the ignorances in the world had conspired together to darken speech and to stupefy cooks…. At the present moment the vocabulary of dinner is a mass of confusion and ridiculous mistakes, which is every day becoming worse and worse through the ignorant importation of French names (originally themselves bad enough) into English bills of fare. It comes of abominable pretension…. I have seen a fillet-steak served with tomatos entered as ‘Filet de Boeuf à l’Orientale,’ under a notion that tomatos came originally from the East and not from the West, and that the people of the East are given to beef. This is not merely pretension: it is perfidy. You order the Oriental fillet expecting one thing, and you get something quite different….

Bad as it is, however, it is not on the perfidy or the pretension of wrong names that it is most necessary to insist. The great wrong about them is that they are a bar to all chance of science and of progress in cookery. An idea has got abroad and has been much fostered by French authorities, that cookery as practised by the great artists is perfect, and that there is nothing more to be done except to ring the changes on what these artists have achieved. It is probable enough that we shall not get many more new foods or combinations of savour; but it is quite certain that with the progress of science we ought to attain our results by simpler and shorter processes, with aim more precise and with success more assured. But nothing at all is possible until we first of all understand each other by agreeing upon terms about which there shall be no mistake. It is for this reason that … [I dwell] so much upon the mere grammar and vocabulary of the kitchen. Till we have settled our definitions there is no use in talking. And therefore, while in … composing receipts … I have done my utmost to simplify processes, to discard mere subtleties and variations, and to cut down useless expenses and tedious labour, I have gone first and foremost on the principle that the greatest waste of all in the kitchen is the waste of words. It is a simple fact … that the language of the kitchen is a language ‘not understanded of the people.’ There are scores upon scores of its terms in daily use which are little understood and not at all fixed; and there is not upon the face of this earth an occupation which is carried on with so much of unintelligible jargon and chattering of apes as that of preparing food …. We sorely want Cadmus among the cooks. All the world remembers that he taught the Greeks their alphabet. It is well-nigh forgotten that he was cook to the king of Sidon. I cannot help thinking that cooks would do well to combine with their cookery, like Cadmus, a little attention to the alphabet.