The Marketplace Magazine May/June 2023

Romaine wasn’t Built in a Day. The delightful history of food language By Judith Tschann, (Voracious/ Little, Brown, and Company 2023, 227 pages, $26 U.S.)

With Romaine Wasn’t Built in a Day, food historian Judith Tschann prepares a literary feast for people curious about the history of food names and word nerds in general.

Her book is an informative and humorous stroll through words for what we consume in every meal of the day. It also demonstrates how much English owes to scores, perhaps hundreds of other languages and cultures around the globe.

As much as 80 percent of the vocabulary of English speakers is borrowed.

The beverages that many rely on for their morning pick up — coffee, tea, and the sugar used to sweeten either — have long and not always pleasant histories involving many cultures. Tschann notes: “the history of sugar (and coffee) is also the history of plantations, and thus, slavery.”

Such unsavory reminders of the evils of colonialism are only a garnish to her narrative, however.

More often, she sprinkles her prose with delicious, if unprovable, stories of the origins of things we eat regularly. Is it true, for instance, that the Earl of Sandwich, an 18thcentury noble with a gambling problem, came up with the idea of putting meat between two slices of bread so he could eat with one hand while holding cards in the other?

Did Romaine lettuce really get its name after a 14th-century Pope fled to Avignon during a schism in the Catholic church and planted a kitchen salad garden in that French community? The book is a worthy, if somewhat earthy, contribution to food literature. — MS