The Language of Food

I’ve always had trouble spelling broccoli. Crazy, right? Broccoli. Not that difficult. Sure, there’s a double “c” in there, but that’s really the only hurdle. So why is it hard for me? Maybe because they never spent any time on foods in school. I can spell Mississippi with my eyes closed (yes, blind people can spell too,) because it came with a cute little diddy in school. But I’ve never been to Mississippi. I’ve had broccoli a million times in my life; why can’t I spell it? It’s not fair.

It didn’t pose too much of a problem until a few years back. I was working the daytime sous position at Lumiere, which made it my responsibility to keep everything in storage properly labeled and organized. And in comes a beautiful case of broccoli (local, of course. Right, and I’m Tony Curran. Seriously, I might be. Look him up. Same birthday too! I know!). And I start writing out the label with my Sharpie, and I stop. Two c’s? Two l’s? Two of each? Crap! Luckily, with a slightly blunt Sharpie, I could fudge a line to look like one or two l’s. So that’s what I did. And then I went into the office and had to LOOK UP how to spell broccoli on the computer. Me, the spelling bee kid. Ah, how the mighty have fallen.

Crêpes farcies aux champignons? Got it. It didn’t even take any getting. It was gotten before it was even got. Get it? It must be the harshness of English getting in the way. We all know food should be sexy (we do know that, right?), so we should look to the French for help. Où est le pamplemousse? C’est sous le parapluie, et à côté del’hippopotame! Mais non! Mais fucking OUI! After six years of French class, it comes easy. The only thing that came close to food language in our schools involves ooples and bononos. They’re not even real!

And the pamplemousse? Grapefruit is as much a cop-out name as Grape Nuts. There’s no relation to a grape of any sort, and adding fruit onto the end of the name of a fruit is, well, stupid. Today at the store I picked up some beanvegetables, melonfruit, and milkmilk.

Courgette is better than zucchini, which I just spelled zuchini. Aubergine instead of eggplant. Hell, aubergine instead of Andrew. The only way I ever spell my friend Jon’s last name right is by thinking of beer (BraunSTEIN, and yes I know it’s brown stone, and not even beer-related).

Even in cooking school, with students from eight different countries, we were less interested in trying to spell what we were cooking, and more interested in reducing our sauces “au sec.” Well, that and stabbing each other. If the National Spelling bee included a fight to the death while spelling for the last two contestants, than those little dorks would at least earn some more street cred. It would probably earn them some time on ESPN, instead of Univision, or whatever channel hosts it these days.

Spelling is one of those skills that you don’t truly need to make it through life in one piece, but it does help. It only really pisses me off when I see menus with typos, at which point it’s fun to be the critical hypocrite. As such, I’m reticent to ever put broccoli on my menu….that beautiful, perfect, non-existent menu that I’ve got at the moment.