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In pre-Covid times, Sundays at our Bangalore home were for biriyani with family and friends.
One Sunday, I received the verdict on my first attempt at my mother’s famed recipe. Everyone loved it but said that it lacked her “kai guna.” The phrase is from Kannada, the language of the South Indian state of Karnataka. It refers to the quality of the hand of a creator, or, in this case, the cook. There are variations of this word across South Indian languages that refer to the intangible uniqueness that people bring to something they have created.
While my family’s sentiments were understandable, this led me to think about whether the English language contained its own expressive words that encapsulated entire concepts about food. Was there a word like the Japanese “kuchinaoshi,” which translates to “mouth fix,” a way to describe eating something tasty to “fix” the bad taste in your mouth from something else? What about the Swedish idea of “lagom,” which means “not too much, not too little”? It’s a way of expressing the need for balance in life, even when it comes to eating. In Spanish, there’s “sobremesa,” which captures the idea of lingering at the table long after a meal is finished and enjoying one another’s company.
Cornelia Gerhardt, an English linguist at Saarland University in Germany and one of the founders of culinary linguistics, a field concerned with the ties between language and food, believes that English is a language that does not like to pack too much information into one word.
“English is analytical, using a series of words to explain an idea,” Dr. Gerhardt said, “unlike polysynthetic languages (where entire concepts are reduced to a single word) or agglutinative languages (where suffixes and prefixes are added to a root word to create new words).”
The Norwegian word “utepils,” for example, is a noun that translates to “outside beer,” or the experience of having a beer outside on a sunny day. The literal meaning is easily understood in English. But to truly grasp its cultural context, one would need to understand that Norway is dark and cold for most of the year and, even in warmer weather, it can be rainy and overcast. So sitting outside with a beer on a sunny day is a rare pleasure. And all of that is encapsulated neatly into a single word.
Peggy Mohan, a linguist and visiting professor at Ashoka University in Delhi, said via email that many languages had “cryptic terms,” words whose meanings are difficult for nonnative speakers to grasp. Many of these are food words, she said.
“Such words get invented easily, and there is even a sense of fun and humor in creating these little tokens of an existence shared by a small community and obscure to outsiders,” she said.
But “English, especially American English, is in no way a ‘minority’ language in this global age,” Ms. Mohan continued. “It is a language that expects to have nonnative speakers, so it needs to be accessible. Cryptic terms would go against this need to engage and speak for the global community.”
But does that mean that English has not developed socially or culturally deep-rooted words about food of its own?
“The Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings and the Norman French all had a huge impact on English lexically,” said Anthony F. Buccini, an independent scholar in historical linguistics at Cornell University. The word “butter,” for example, comes from the Old English “butur.”
This borrowing, Dr. Buccini believes, does not prevent English speakers from coming up with concepts of cultural significance that require names of their own. The word “barbecue” — which can be traced to the Mexican word “barbacoa” — has taken on an institutionalized meaning for Americans. To most, it suggests grilling hot dogs, hamburgers, chicken, sausages or steaks in your backyard, often beside a cooler filled with soft drinks and beers.
Then there is “diner,” which Webster’s New World Dictionary describes as “a small, usually inexpensive restaurant with a long counter and booths and often housed in a building designed to resemble a dining car.”
There are also compounds such as “pub crawl,” a group of people roaming from one bar to another. “Junk food” or “comfort food” suggest specific kinds of food, and it’s difficult to find similar words for those concepts in other languages. “Pizza parlor” or “greasy spoon” have clear associations, and they’re unique to the American English-speaking culture.
Regionalisms also occur in English, such as the Southern “pig pickin’.” A “pig pickin’” is a party that takes place outdoors, where a whole pig is roasted and shared by the community. “It’s not just about eating roast pig, but it’s the whole event and what you eat and drink with it,” Dr. Buccini said. “The informality of it is captured in the use of -in’ instead of -ing.’”
So while English may not have a single word that describes sitting outside on a sunny day while enjoying a beer, it has some lovely terms for culturally specific food concepts. They just take longer to say.
Ruth Dsouza Prabhu is an independent features journalist based in Bangalore, India. She has been published in Al Jazeera, Whetstone SA, The National, Good Beer Hunting and other publications in India.
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