The Independent

August 3, 1991

 

History man

 

Emily Green meetsan expert on origins of our ever expanding food vocabulary

 

 

 

JOHN AYTO is fond ofhis food; but he appears fonder yet of books devoted to the subject. Heespecially enjoys ''lurid pictures of congealed dishes'' in dated volumes ofProsper Montagne's heroic reference work, Larousse Gastronomique. Mr Ayto is alexicographer. Wandering through Berwick Street vegetable market in Soho,central London, on a recent Friday afternoon, he looks the part - a portly gentin a seersucker suit, correspondent shoes and bow tie.

 

''Linguistically,'' hesays, approaching a stall, ''the endive is a very interesting vegetable.'' Thefascination, it emerges, is ''terminological anarchy'' between the British onone side and French and Americans on the other. What Britons call endive theycall chicory, and vice versa.

 

The sight of avocados,too, can elicit a tale. The name arrived in Britain in the seventeenth century,via the Spanish, from Central America. Spaniards, he surmises, weredisconcerted by the name of the fruit in the Nahuatl language: ahuacatl,meaning testicles. His conclusion is that they changed it to a similar soundingSpanish word, avocado, meaning lawyer; a phonetic play, perhaps, on bocado,meaning titbit.

 

While generous withinformation when prompted, he is far from a relentless informer. This is arelief, and somewhat of a feat, considering Mr Ayto spent 18 months compiling adictionary of ''about 1,000'' food words, The Glutton's Glossary (Routledge,pounds 20). But then, the author of this elegant book with a somewhat vulgartitle is altogether a refined character. (The title, he confesses, is his owndoing: a stab at popular appeal.)

 

Son of an architect,born in Kingston, Surrey in 1942, he read medieval history at the University ofDurham from 1968-74. A considerable interest in food stemmed from a chanceencounter with a good bottle of wine. He spotted a stall selling cobweb-coveredbottles in an antiques fair in York and bought a half-bottle of 1962 ChateauMouton-Rothschild. Shortly thereafter, converted to good wine, he says, ''Istarted cooking to go with it.''

 

His cookery is now asinvolved as his derivations. For instance, he is quite partial to stuffingthings, say, pigeons with basmati rice and grapes, then encasing the bird incheesy puff pastry. Few cooks would do this to a pigeon, but it is only when hesays he would deconstruct, stuff and encase an artichoke in pastry that thescope of his byzantine enthusiasms fully registers. ''I like,'' he says,''surprise packets.''

 

Kitchen carry-on ofthis degree - heavy on prep, hell on the dishwasher - is more typical ofoccasional cooks than regular ones, of men than women. Mr Ayto's most practicalwork has clearly been done in the office. On graduating from Durham in 1974, hejoined Longman's dictionary department, eventually editing its Register of NewWords. Nine years later he went freelance, editing Bloomsbury's Word Originsand spending 1987 and a good part of 1988 on the food book. He has justcompleted a new book with Bloomsbury, Foreign Words in English.

 

This is the savviestof eccentric careers. He is a notable player in the recent boom of specialistdictionaries. Several years ago, hefty encyclopaedias containing a little abouta lot of things appeared to be losing ground to specialist volumes focusing oneverything from pop songs to military slang to aphrodisiacs. They seemed allthe rage, but The Glutton's Glossary has apparently sold only 2,094 copies.

 

At pounds 20, theprice was certainly a deterrent; more likely mainstream consumers suspected ashoddy repackaging job. Old product, new cover. Mr Ayto readily concedes thatLarousse Gastronomique, Jane Grigson's complete works and the Oxford EnglishDictionary were primary sources. Serious cooks already own most of these. His book,however, is distinguished by the frequency and vigour with which he went beyondhis primary sources.

 

He chose his termswell. ''Principles of exclusion were important,'' he says. ''As a rule, Ididn't include things that are simply named after a place, or the name of ananimal simply because it is eaten.'' He observed ''notions of frequency'',eschewing anything ''too eccentric''.

 

Even standard itemsthrew up challenges. Haggis, for example, was particularly troublesome.Documented as having once been popular as far south of the border asGloucestershire, he guesses haggis might come from haggess, theseventeenth-century word for magpie which, in turn, came from the French namefor the bird, agace. This allusion to a feathered collector of myriad ingredientsmight even, he speculates, be the root of the term ''pie''.

 

''There are quite alot of wild guesses in etymology, particularly from the nineteenth century whenall sorts of notions got stuck in dictionaries,'' he says. He admits with ablush to being caught out on an unsound one of his own. It was to do withaubergines: having traced the word back to Sanskrit, he lighted on a root to dowith gastro- intestinal wind. The mystery was whether it was so named as astopper or inducer. He referred to the professor of philology at Oxford. ''Shewouldn't commit herself one way or the other,'' he says. He then opted for JaneGrigson's version: that it is a stopper.

 

''Shortly afterpublication,'' he recalls, ''a prickly letter arrived from Elizabeth David demandingsomething to the effect of 'How can you say that the aubergine is an anti-windvegetable when everyone knows that it is just the opposite?' '' Chastened, andreckoning he had finally got his authoritative answer, he quickly penned areply. For all the pains taken, the lexicographer had missed the obvious test:eating the things. They even stuff well.

 

The longest andpossibly most vivid entry in The Glutton's Glossary is for gin. A fine pottedhistory it is. From the Dutch genever, a grain or molasses spirit flavouredwith juniper berries, it came to Britain with sailors as ''geneva''. Between1690 and 1727, writes Mr Ayto, ''annual consumption soared from half a millionto five million gallons''. It became an ''infamous'' and deadly liquor, inspiringthe phrase ''drunk for a penny, dead drunk for a tuppence'' and successive GinActs. By the 1740s, he notes, 20 million gallons were being distilled in Londonalone. He also distinguishes the aromatic Dutch gins, the dry London gin andfuller Plymouth gin. And on the word association of gin and beefeater, a gemawaits: the famous drink is named after ''a contemptuous seventeenth-centuryterm for a well-fed servant''.

 

Mr Ayto finds noshortage of contempt in our language of food. A national staple of the lesswell- fed, he says, is not only often mis- named, it is racist. ''Welsh rarebitis totally spurious. I think people made it rarebit because they thought rabbita bit vulgar. And the Welsh is rather racist. It came from a tendency to usethe word Welsh for things that were inferior. Take 'Welsh comb', meaningfingers - that you comb your hair with your fingers. So Welsh rabbit meant thatyou couldn't afford rabbit and just had toasted cheese.''

 

Mr Ayto is under theimpression that a paperback of the glossary will be produced soon. Hispublishers are unsure. In the meantime, he keeps tabs on new dishes. ''I waswatching a programme about Joan Sutherland,'' he says, ''and some chef wascreating a rather ghastly looking dessert to be named after her.'' In anyevent, ''The food vocabulary is expanding so much I'm sure a new edition willbe necessary soon.'' It will be a stiff task. ''Language is inherentlyanarchic,'' he says. ''It doesn't do what you want it to do.'' Nor, alas, dobook-buyers.

 

Copyright 1991Newspaper Publishing PLC.