Food, Glorious Food

Food, Glorious Food

    One of the nice things of being on the road is simply sampling the variety of foods and beers and whatever else might hit your fancy.  Often the items are too limited in scope or production to make it out of their local area, or perhaps have grown but are now restricted by other states' laws from being introduced elsewhere.  No matter, one is always please to hear one of the locals (if you can gain their trust) tell you of a special small diner or a dish known only in this town.  Why this could be famous, you're almost heard to utter, and indeed some things have gone on to fame and fortune.  And much of this is due to a vast history of cultural and immigrant tastes arriving from distant shores at different times.  Banh mi from Vietnam, Barberton chicken from Serbia, runzas or bierocks from Volga (river) Germany, and of course, boiled peanuts which are found throughout Hawaii but are credited to have come from the Deep South (my brother and I used to love the salt-watery drip of the juice from the oversized nuts, their shells now soft as cotton and squishing open with just a slight squeeze; in the South, some plop one of the watery nuts into a cherry soda such as Dr. Pepper).  And then there's barbecue or barbeque or simply BBQ.

    In their book, The Lexicon of Real American Food, Jane and Michael Stern (now both 68 and divorced, but still appearing on public radio's The Splendid Table and their site on road food) attempt to dissect just where many of our foods and names came from ("our" meaning the uniquely American menu, although they are quick to point out that "uniquely American" is merely the result of so many cultural and ethnic dishes blending from afar and luckily arriving on our shores over the centuries).  And it's quite an eye-opener.  Take their section on barbecue, which is generally done with "beef in Texas and the Southwest, pork throughout the South, and mutton in western Kentucky."  From there, it branches even further, some areas wanting no sauce, others such as the Carolinas wanting mustard or vinegar & pepper sauces, and still other wanting only the thicker tomato-based sauces...and none of their barbecue chapters deals wih barbecued ribs!  But here's what I found interesting (since you likely know that I don't eat any of the stuff...meat stuff, that is), the origins of the entire process.

    From their book: The word itself most likely originally was Spanish, from the barbacoa grills seventeenth-century explorers encountered in the Caribbean.  That word is believed to have come from the Arawak Indian word for a wood frame erected over a fire used to cook or dry meat: barbicu.  The Spaniards took the term to mean any sort of above-the-ground rack, referring to the sleeping platforms they used to avoid snakebite as borbecus.  But there are also more colorful tales to explain the source of the word, among them: --BBQ began as shorthand to describe Southern beer parlors with pool tables that had neon signs advertising Bar, Beer, and Ques...--French explorers described the Caribbean natives' technique of cooking whole hogs as "beard to tail," which in French is barbe a queue...--The Texas cattle rancher Barnaby Quinn was well-known for serving his neighbors meals of cattle cooked over fire pits.  Quinn's brand was a straight line above his initials: the Bar B Q brand.
 
    Almost in the same week of reading that book, I happened to hear a lecture from a series by Dr. John McWhorter. Featured on a set from The Great Courses, this particular series is described in this manner on their introduction: How did different languages come to be?  Why isn't there just a single language?  How does a language change, and when it does, is that change indicative of decay or growth?  How does a language become extinct?  Dr. John McWhorter, one of America's leading linguists and a frequent commentator on network television and National Public Radio, addresses these and other questions as he takes you on an in-depth, 36-lecture tour of the development of human language, showing how a single tongue spoken 150,000 years ago has evolved into the estimated 6,000 languages used around the world today...In Lectures 8–13, you explore language families, starting with Indo-European, comprising languages from India to Ireland including English.  Other language families discussed are Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, Bantu, and Native American.  You also look at the heated debate over the first language. But what was interesting about this particular lecture (as a disclaimer, I haven't listened to the entire series of 36 lectures) was that he postulates that rather than our languages originating from the accepted Indo-European side, more and more scholars are believing that our mother "original" language may have been Algonquian, the Algonquin now down to just about 7,500 remaining Native Americans nestled in Quebec and other parts of Canada.   And while he puzzles over such a word as "aqua" (which continues to remain in many languages, virtually unchanged), he explains that most of our words undergo major changes every 1500 years, the original word almost vanishing in favor of its new (although very gradual) change.

    Hmm, difficult to explain, especially since I am not a linguist nor have I done the extensive research that Professor McWhorter has done.  But the similarities were striking.  Walk through almost any larger city and you will find the nests of various cultures.  Perhaps a large Filipino culture or a Chinatown or a little Italy or a Hispanic outdoor market.  Whether in Asia or Europe or South America, the sections of town can be found and with them, genuine old-world recipes still struggling to remain.  One street I remember in Amsterdam had a series of restaurants all crowded together in just one block...Ugandan and Ukranian, Afghan and Thai, German and Chinese.  It was a glorious sight, each restaurant so compact that I could only see eight or so tables in each.  Had I had a few weeks there, I could have visited a myriad of countries without walking more than a block.

    Just as with the possibly fading roots of our mother tongue, so is it with our foods.  Tex-Mex has invaded our tongues as surely as Budweiser's "whassup," and perhaps that is not such a bad thing.  My friend recently visited a new local place called Sumo Burrito, which makes burrito-sized sushi rolls.  You choose the fillings from shrimp to kim chee, and are soon handed a gigantic nori-rolled Japanese burrito.   It is all evolving, and yet, traces of the old remain...the best of both worlds.  And now is a great time to take advantage of both worlds, a taste of the old and a taste of the new.  Rather like that street in Amsterdam, rather like life...and all discovered on the road (or perhaps, right in your backyard).