FoodStuff: the language of food
John Lethlean
Have you seen the cartoon of Apostrophe Man, the one where he descends – all tight blue leotard, underpants on the outside, cape flowing with an ’ symbol on his chest – to a hapless restaurateur on his knees busy writing up the day’s “Special’s” board?
“I’ll have that chalk thank you,” says Apostrophe Man. It’s a kind of “in” joke with broad application.
It was sent me by a restaurant public relations specialist, demonstrating both a refined sense of humour (a rare thing for his/her industry) and an understanding that those funny little commas above the line do not automatically precede the letter “s”. To that point, I had come to assume anyone associated with restaurants believed otherwise.
Language is a powerful tool, but it’s not really the domain of your average chef, or restaurateur (often one and the same) in the same way sewing may not come easy to the man who handles elephants at the zoo and cooking commercially and creatively almost certainly is beyond the vast majority of journalists.
Yet language – words, punctuation, grammar, all that stuff we were lucky enough to have been taught in school – is a tool employed on a daily basis by those in the restaurant industry. It’s a tool handled clumsily. For every (ex-restaurateur) Gay Bilson, whose book Plenty: Digressions on Food won The Age Book of the Year Award in 2005 against candidates across the literary spectrum, there are a thousand more out there who play fast and very loose with punctuation, typography and words when it comes to the major document they create – the marketing tools of their restaurants – the menu.
Commas (like, apostrophes) are, inserted completely randomly. Capital letters appear out of nowhere. Spelling? Don’t get me started.
If all the chefs and restaurateurs interbred for the next thousand years (don’t laugh it’s already happening) we’d get menu items like this:
Brest of sichwan twice-cooked Duck with confit shitake mushoom’s a carpaccio, of bok choi and cassoulette of black bean Tarte Tatin on a Jus of star Anus
It’s gotten to the point that I really sit up and take notice when somebody at the word processor actually makes an effort to get things right on a menu. I’ve come to assume that if a menu is grammatically correct, the spelling accurate and the meaning clear, the food and service must be crap.
But language is a tool for the creative, and a lot of chefs are very creative people. The rest want to convey the impression they are creative too, and so words get bandied around like promises in a pub, and all the better if they make you sound Continental when you roll them off your tongue.
Among the chief offenders currently:
Carpaccio: a name once given to a plate of raw beef thinly sliced because its colour (red) reminded its creator of the painter Carpaccio, who used a similar red with abandon. Now, anything thinly sliced is “a carpaccio.” Thinly slice a hunk of tinned dog food and you can give Rover a carpaccio of Pal.
Confit: originally a process of first preserving in salt, and then later slow cooking in fat at very low temperature – as in confit duck – this has been picked up to refer to just about anything that has been cooked in anything for a long time at low temperature. If you get a potato chip that’s been cooked in inadequately hot oil, well that’s confit of potato baton, okay.
Cassoulet: anything with beans in it really. Forget that it is originally a most complex, time-honoured combination of varying meats and smallgoods (varying according to which part of France you visit).
Seen a few menu howlers lately? Share them on the VisitVineyards.com forums. Please omit restaurant names or other identifying information or we regret that for legal reasons your posting may be removed - and keep it nice, folks! (Refer to our terms and conditions of use).
From a collection of John’s food writing 2005-2008.
Follow John Lethlean and Necia Wilden on Twitter as they eat and drink their way around Australia
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