The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (9 page)

Fish
sikb
j
, Egypt, 13th century

Provide yourself with some fresh fish, vinegar, honey, atr
f tib [spice mix], pepper, onion, saffron, sesame oil, and flour.

Wash the fish and cut it into pieces then fry in the sesame oil after dredging in the flour. When [they] are ready, take them out.

Slice the onion and brown it in the sesame oil.

In the mortar, crush the pepper and atr
f tib. Dissolve the saffron in vinegar and honey and add it. When [the sauce] is ready, pour it over the fish.

The recipe continued to move westward along the ports of the Mediterranean, the name and the recipe metamorphosing as it did so. By the
early fourteenth century there were recipes for
escabetx
in Catalan, the Romance language spoken in what is now northeastern Spain and by the late fourteenth century
in southwestern France for
scabeg
, written in Occitan
, the medieval language spoken in Provence, the southern part of France. Later in Italy we see the word in the
dialects from Sicilian (
schibbeci
), to Neapolitan (
scapece
)
, to Genoese (
scabeccio
).

The journeys of
sikb
j

In all these areas the word refers to a fried fish dish. For example,
a Catalan cookbook from the first half of the 1300s
, the
Book of Sent Soví
(Saint Sofia), has a recipe called
Si fols fer escabetx
(If you want to make escabeche) that describes fried fish made into minced fishballs and served cold with a sauce made of onions in vinegar and spices.
In Muslim regions like Baghdad or Spain, by contrast
, cookbooks like the
Book of Dishes (Kitab al-tabikh)
still mostly describe sikb
j as a meat stew with vinegar.

Why did the fish rather than meat sikb
j become so prevalent in these Romance languages? One clue is geographical: these scapeces and scabegs all appear in ports along the Mediterranean (in southern but not northern France, in coastal but not inland Italy), consistent with the idea that it was sailors who continued to spread sikb
j.

But the key difference between Italy and France, on the one hand, and Spain and Baghdad on the other, is that the
sikb
j
eaters of Italy and France were Christians.
Medieval Christians had very strict dietary restrictions
, abstaining from meat, dairy, and eggs during Lent, on Fridays and sometimes Saturdays and Wednesdays, and on numerous other fast days like Ember days. Medieval food scholar
Melitta Adamson estimates
that medieval fast days amounted to more than a third of the year for most Christians. Cookbooks were full of fish recipes for these extensive fast periods. Even as late as 1651, the famous French cookbook of La Varenne,
The French Cook
, is divided into three sections
: meat recipes, Lent recipes, and “lean” recipes for non-Lenten fast days like Fridays.

While the fish descendent of sikb
j was traveling from port to port,
another Christian borrowing of the sikb
j stew took a different form. In the fourteenth century Arabic cookbooks and medical texts were translated into Latin and, as Italian scholar Anna Martellotti shows us, the full name
al-sikb
j
began to be transcribed as
assicpicium
and
askipicium
. Medieval medical texts often focused on broths and their medicinal qualities, and Latin medical texts emphasized the broth of the cold sikb
j. When sikb
j was eaten cold, the vinegary broth results in a jelly, and
assicpicium
became
aspic
in French, still our modern word for a cold jellied broth.