"Tell me what you eat, I shall tell you who you are."
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 'Physiologie du Goût' (1825)
Italy sometimes seems like a country held together by spaghetti. There was a time when religion played a major role, but nowadays it appears that the only thing that brings any unity to the country is pasta.
Food in Italy, as indeed elsewhere in Europe, lies at the very heart of identity. Remember that spat six years ago at the European Union summit in Belgium when Silvio Berlusconi accused his Finnish counterpart of knowing nothing about ham? Italian prosciutto may be wonderful, but Berlusconi had obviously never tasted joulukinkku, the baked ham which takes centre stage at Christmas dinner in Finland.
Many European nations define themselves through what features on the dinner table. Where would Germany be without its beer and sausages, Poland without its pierogi and England without its roast beef? Indeed, might English antipathy to the French not sometimes be fuelled by Parisian affection for 'fussy' dishes — a world apart from a plate of English roast beef, which embodies puritanical simplicity.
Travellers around Europe encounter heavily encoded menus. Such menus are a fine way of 'outing' the foreigner or impostor who misunderstands them. Only the English really know what is in shepherd's pie — and it certainly isn't a shepherd. It takes a real Bavarian to discern that leberkäse (literally translated as 'liver cheese') contains no cheese. Many a visitor to Belgium (and not just travellers from the USA) has come unstuck with filet américain. The dish may sound like grilled prime American beef, but actually it is spicy minced beef served entirely uncooked — usually with frites. Have you noticed that Belgians eat frites, Brits chips, Germans pommes, and Americans munch French fries? Names matter.
Menus can quite precisely pinpoint our geographical roots or allegiances. No-one in England knows what clapshot is. But every Scotsman knows that clapshot is a mashed mix of potatoes and turnips. It goes well with haggis, another of those iconic dishes that define a nation. Even familiar foods are indelibly associated with places. Aïoli is not just French. It is the very essence of Provence.
Only Cologne folk can really decipher the menus of the Rhineland city. Halve Hahn seems to be crystal clear. Half a chicken. It might appear that there is no scope for misunderstanding here. But actually it is the local Cologne term for a cheese roll.
Generally Germans don't mince words when it comes to giving a name to the sausage made from dried pig's blood. It is Blutwurst (blood sausage). Not in Cologne, where they like to lace their talk of food with a little ambiguity. There it is called Flönz or even Kölsche Kaviar (Cologne caviar). As euphemistic as the name used for the Lancashire variation of the same delicacy: black pudding.
Language often reveals a lot about a nation's relationship with its dinner table. Das war sau gut is a phrase one might hear in Germany, applied not just to food, but equally to novels, a night out or a place. It is a wholly positive term. Equally, Ich hatte Schwein (literally, I had pig) means 'I was lucky'. The English by contrast prefer their beef and lamb and take a less positive view of the pig: pig-sick, pig-ignorant or pig-headed.
Sometimes the odd names we ascribe to dishes hop over a cultural boundary. We always assumed that Welsh rarebit (cheese on toast) was an encoded menu term understood only in Britain. So it was interesting to run across a chain of restaurants in northern France (called Ch'ti Charivari) that feature on their menus an entire section devoted to les Welshs. We savoured the rare delight of finding a French word beginning with the letter W (just think, not many apart from wagon, webmestre and Wisigoth). And we savoured, on successive visits, not only le Welsh simple (plain old cheese on toast) but also le Welsh complet (Welsh rarebit embellished with cured ham and eggs on top). Trust the French to embellish le Welsh simple!
English menus are full of linguistic traps for the unwary. We are trying to convince a Berlin neighbour that the English do not habitually eat toads — he had, while holidaying in Yorkshire this summer encountered Toad-in-the-Hole on a bar menu. And we are still wondering about the packet of sausages we enjoyed in Wales a year or two back. Welsh Dragon Sausages read the label. No wonder one no longer encounters many wild dragons when travelling around Wales nowadays.
We are what we eat. There is something very English about custard (appropriately called crème anglais when it features on French menus). Only a pure-blooded German could possibly sit down to Eisbein. There is something of the soul of a country in its food. In Henry V, Shakespeare portrayed the Englishmen who trounced the French at Agincourt as dedicated eaters of beef. In popular English parlance, French are called frogs and Germans are derided as krauts. Not without good cause one might say.