Food and Language

Cooking may be simply the provision of nourishment palatable to the human body, but it needs language to soar beyond the kitchen stove and a viable vocabulary to make communication between cooks and diners profitable and possible. This is the rich field for the collective endeavours of the 28th Symposium at Oxford. Linguistics and etymology may be a tool for unravelling the history of foodstuffs and their migration from one culture to another; or language may supply a social and cultural subtext to what would otherwise be solely a culinary message; or the tools of literary criticism may be unleashed with profit on texts of cookery manuals or recipe books. Subjects covered include: Reading Between the Lines of a Japanese Menu; A Limousin-French dictionary as a source on the history of cooking; Sex, Food, and Valentine's Day: Language of Food - Language of Love; Russian food words: at home and abroad; Retrieving Food History through Linguistics; The Language of Butchery Diagrams; The sweet-sour journey of Sephardic cuisine and Ladino language; Gynaecophagia: metaphors of women as food in the Talmudic literature; and Western Dishes in Cantonese Cooking. The contributors are amateurs and academics from five continents and the style is fully referenced and academic.