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Amuse-bouche, barbecue, umami... where do these delightful culinary words come from? Let's explore the history of these terms (and more) in this episode of Food History.
Join Justin (@juddtoday) as we break down the international history of your favorite foods, cooking styles, and ingredients. Most importantly, you'll finally learn the origin of the mysterious phrase, "a baker's dozen." You're welcome, planet Earth.
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The Unexpected Origins of 20 Culinary Terms | Mental Floss
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0:00
The phrase baker's dozen can be traced to England in the 13th century, appropriately
0:05
enough, but why is a baker's dozen 13? In medieval England, bread was a basic staple of the populace, and in the 1260s, King Henry
0:13
III enacted a law that controlled the size and cost of a loaf
0:17
One popular story to explain the baker's dozen says that bakers would add an extra
0:21
loaf to a lot of 12 in order to avoid the stiff penalties for selling underweight bread
0:26
to customers. But scrupulous food historians point out that there's little evidence for this explanation
0:31
Besides, buying 12 loaves of bread at a time would have been an awful lot for a medieval peasant
0:37
Instead, the phrase seems more likely to come from transactions with bread middlemen, known
0:41
as hucksters, who would buy bread from bakeries and then roam the streets hawking their carb-heavy wares
0:48
Since the law controlled how much the baker charged a retailer and how much the retailer
0:53
could charge the customer, there wasn't a way for the retailer to really make a profit
0:57
So a 13th loaf, sometimes called the in-bread or the vantage loaf, was thrown in as a freebie
1:04
so the retailer could make some money. It made sense for bakers to incentivize street peddlers with this free loaf
1:10
They could move a lot more product through roaming retailers than if they had to sell
1:14
all the bread themselves. Smash cut to a few centuries later, I stand at a bagel counter caught totally unaware
1:21
yet again and somehow deciding on the spot to get a whole wheat oat bagel to round out my lucky 13
1:27
Who is this hearty bagel for? Some culinary questions, alas, are destined to remain unanswered
1:34
Hi, I'm Justin Dodd. Welcome to Food History. Today I'm sharing the backstories behind some
1:38
of the words and phrases we use when cooking and eating, from umami to amuse-bouche. And yes
1:45
they're all very fun to say. When Spaniards landed in the New World, they observed indigenous people using raised, wooden
1:58
frames to cook their meat in fish. The apparatuses could be placed directly on a heat source, the way Americans grill hamburgers
2:05
and hot dogs today, or they could be propped near a fire and heated indirectly, similarly
2:10
to how barbecue pitmasters slow-cooked their meat. The word for these tools was barbacoa, according to a Spanish account recorded in 1526
2:20
This became barbecue in English, and I guess at some point we threw the literal letter Q
2:24
in there just to be chaotic, although some sources suggest the Q comes to us from the
2:29
French phrase barbe-ac-u, or beard-to-tail, a nod to a whole animal being cooked, but this
2:35
explanation is probably more folklore than fact. Umami means something like deliciousness in Japanese, but the true meaning of the word
2:43
is hard to capture in English. In the early 20th century, a Japanese chemist named Kikunai Ikeda boiled down umami to its
2:50
pure essence Literally he was enjoying a bowl of dashi a savory broth made from kelp called kombu when he realized there must be a fifth taste beyond salty sweet sour and bitter Determined to get to the root of dashi indefinable flavor he conducted some experiments
3:08
Chemically treating the seaweed used to make dashi caused small crystals to form on the
3:12
outside of it. These crystals were concentrated glutamic acid, a non-essential amino acid, and after
3:18
some tinkering when Ikeda added them to food or liquid, he was hit with that same full
3:23
savory flavor he noticed in his soup. He dubbed this fifth taste umami, which has been described
3:28
as a sort of meatiness or earthiness. It's responsible for the savory depth of flavor
3:33
in a number of beloved items, from Bloody Marys to Parmesan cheese
3:38
Umami isn't the only hard-to-translate food term used in Japan. The word zatsumi is used
3:44
to describe an undesirable flavor, usually in sake. It doesn't refer to any bad flavor
3:49
in particular, the word even translates to miscellaneous taste in English. So next time
3:54
you taste something funky and the leftovers that have been sitting in your fridge for weeks
3:58
just call it zatsumi and don't think about it too hard. The Japanese language employs some evocative culinary onomatopoeia, too
4:06
Hoku-hoku, for example, describes the experience of biting into something hot, such as a sweet potato or winter squash, with a dense texture that fills your mouth with
4:16
a starchy steaminess. Shua shua is a descriptor for carbonated beverages, and zuru zuru is the
4:22
sound you make when you slurp ramen. That's unless, of course, you want your slurping to be on the
4:27
quieter side, in which case you would use the more discreet churu churu. Pasta that's cooked al dente
4:34
still has some bite to it, some resistance you wouldn't get from a gummy overcooked noodle, hence
4:39
the Italian phrase's literal meaning to the tooth. And by the way, throwing spaghetti at a wall to
4:44
to see if it's done, it doesn't actually work. Overcooked pasta and al dente pasta can
4:49
both be sticky enough to adhere to surfaces, so the so-called trick isn't useful for timing
4:54
your tagliatelle. Do your walls and your roommates a favor and do a taste test instead
4:59
The names of some Italian pasta dishes tell you more about the dish's origin stories
5:03
than their ingredients. Pasta alla carbonara, for example, translates to something like
5:08
pasta in the manner of charcoal makers. According to legend, workers first made the dish over
5:14
campfires to fuel their long days. Consisting of eggs, cured pork, and pasta, carbonara makes
5:20
sense as a low-maintenance, high-energy, working-class lunch. But there's no way to confirm the validity
5:25
of this explanation. The name carbonara could also be a reference to the charcoal fire the dish
5:30
was prepared over rather than the people who made it, or to the generous gratings of pepper
5:36
placed on top which might have looked like coal dust. Some believe that pasta carbonara
5:41
originated with the Carbinarii, a 19th century secret society of Italian revolutionaries. Though
5:47
I challenge anyone to eat a bowl of carbonara and then see if you have the energy to pursue
5:52
the unification of Italy Believe me I tried The origins of other Italian culinary terms are easier to identify Beef or fish that prepared carpaccio style aka raw and thinly sliced is named after Italian
6:05
Renaissance painter Vittore Carpaccio. He wasn't the person who invented it, however. Venetian
6:10
restaurateur Giuseppe Cipriani first served the dish to Countess Amalia Nanni Mochenigo
6:15
after she had been instructed by her doctor to abstain from eating cooked meat. Raw meat isn't
6:21
for everyone, but the sight of it inspired romantic feelings in Cipriani. Upon noticing the red color
6:26
of the dish, he named it after Carpaccio, who used similar shades in his artwork
6:32
This wasn't the first time Cipriani took inspiration from Renaissance-era artists in
6:36
coining a culinary term. He's said to have once mixed together Prosecco and Peach into a cocktail
6:41
whose colors he'd likened to the work of Giovanni Bellini. A la is a phrase that appears a lot on French restaurant menus. It literally means
6:50
in the style of. Food that's served a la king comes in cream sauce with mushrooms and pepper
6:57
Despite its royal name, chicken a la king didn't originate within the walls of a palace. It likely
7:02
didn't even originate in Europe. Most plausible origin stories attribute the name to an American
7:07
with the last name King. According to one legend, the head chef of the Brighton Beach Hotel first
7:13
served the dish to the hotel's proprietor E. Clark King II in the early 1900s. He liked it so much
7:19
that he requested seconds, and the dish appeared on the menu as chicken a la King the next day
7:25
According to an early 20th century account, the King in question was Philadelphia chef William King
7:30
who was asked to invent a recipe for an annoying customer. When the customer asked who invented
7:35
the dish, the waiter responded, a Bill King. He works in the kitchen, to which the customer responded
7:40
Chicken a la king. Yeah, I'm not sure I'm buying it either
7:45
The phrase a la nage is French for in the swim. Chefs use it to describe food
7:50
usually seafood, that's been simmered lightly in a flavorful broth. When meat, potatoes, and onions are baked together in an oven, they're prepared a la boulanger
8:00
The name means in the style of the baker, or perhaps the baker's wife
8:05
Being on good terms with the local baker used to be the only way to make the dish
8:10
For most of French history, people in rural parts of the country didn't have access to ovens at home
8:15
So to make something a la boulanger, they had to take a dish of ingredients to their
8:20
neighborhood bakery and pick it up when it was done cooking. Basically, bakeries in 19th century
8:25
France were like Airbnbs for meat. Amuse-bouche is definitely fun to say, and if the food lives
8:32
up to its name, it should be fun to eat. The French term for small, complimentary appetizers
8:37
served at the beginning of a meal translates to entertains the mouth, though it remains unclear if
8:43
the phrase comes from France or is just an English phrase using French words. Either way, they
8:48
shouldn be confused with hors d which aren necessarily complimentary and can be shared between guests The term hors d is French for outside of work as in outside the work of the main meal either figuratively or in terms of
9:03
the literal physical placement on the edge of the table, depending on the source you consult
9:08
It's not a reference to when you see your colleagues outside of work at the company holiday
9:12
party and you eat way too many mini quiches and, well, you know how that story ends
9:17
If you want to develop some impressive knife skills, learn too brunoise
9:21
The standard brunoise cut in France gives you vegetable cubes that are just one-eighth of an inch in size
9:27
while a fine brunoise produces pieces twice as small on each side
9:32
The name for this technique comes from Brunoise, a commune located 12 miles from the center of Paris
9:37
The chefs of Brunoise popularized the methods for dicing veggies as finely as possible, and the name stuck
9:43
Speaking of chopped vegetables, mirepoix is a mixture of sautéed carrots, onions, and
9:49
celery used as the foundation for many French dishes. The name likely comes from the 18th century French aristocrat, Duke Charles-Pierre Gaston
9:56
François de Lévy, Duke de Lévy Mirepoix, who I sincerely hope his friends refer to as
10:03
simply Chuck. It's believed that the Duke's chef de cuisine named a flavor base after him, though
10:08
what that base originally consisted of is unclear. Fortunately for future generations of chefs, he didn't use mirepoix's full title when
10:17
naming the recipe. The Holy Trinity is the mirepoix of Creole and Cajun cuisine
10:22
Instead of carrots, it uses bell peppers along with onions and celery as the base for various recipes
10:28
It originated with the Acadians who emigrated to Louisiana in the 18th century
10:33
Carrots didn't grow in the region's swampy soil, but bell peppers flourished
10:37
With one simple ingredient swap, the Holy Trinity and the flavor profile of a new cuisine
10:42
was born. The biblical name, meanwhile, is a reflection of Cajun country's Catholic roots, though
10:48
it may date back only to the late 1970s. Tandoori chicken is named after the cylindrical, charcoal-fired clay oven it's cooked in
10:56
It's also one of the oldest dishes on this list. In modern-day Pakistan, archaeologists unearth 5,000-year-old clay vessels similar to tandoor's
11:05
along with charred chicken bones. This may technically be the scraps of an early chicken tandoori dinner, but it would take
11:11
thousands of years before the dish became what people know today. The details are somewhat disputed, but the most popular story goes that in the 1930s
11:19
a restaurant called Moti Mahal opened up in Peshawar, modern-day Pakistan. After the partition of India, a new version of the restaurant opened up in India, bringing
11:28
the dish to widespread popularity. In the early 1960s, First Lady Jackie Kennedy was served tandoori chicken on a flight from
11:35
Rome to New Delhi, and today you can order tandoori chicken in restaurants across the
11:40
world. The success of the dish spurred many variations, including chicken tikka masala
11:45
God, I'm hungry! If there's a great culinary term I left off this list, leave it in the comments below
11:52
And until next time, thanks for watching
#education