I mentioned in andouille that the sausage that’s a staple of Cajun cuisine came originally from Normandy and was also spread to Calabria by French nobles from Anjou. But the Cajuns themselves trace through many places in the New World, notably parts now named after Scotland and an English king with German roots but at the time named after a place in Greece, and ultimately came from France – but not Normandy or Anjou.
That “place in Greece” is Arcadia, in the heart of the Peloponnesian peninsula, and I’ve already written in detail about it. Arcadia became a byword for an idealized idyllic unspoiled wilderness with forests primeval. It was applied by Giovanni da Verrazzano to the Atlantic coast of North America north of Virginia (which would include not just Baltimore, New York City, and Boston but Cheesequake too). Eventually the name shifted farther up the coast and even inland, and – possibly under the influence of a Mi’kmaq word for ‘fertile land’ – dropped the r, to become the French colony of L’Acadie (or, sometimes, La Cadie), which was located primarily on the peninsula we today call Nova Scotia, spreading north into what is now New Brunswick.
The fact these provinces are now called Nova Scotia (“New Scotland”) and New Brunswick (in honour of King George III, who was also prince-elector of Brunswick-Lüneburg in Germany) gives a clue to how the Acadians became the Cajuns.
The French settlers in Acadia arrived in the early 1600s from the area of Aquitaine, in southwest France; in that way they were different from other French settlers in New France, who largely came from Paris and the northwest. In the early 1700s, when England gained control of Acadia, the Acadian settlers were required to declare loyalty to the English crown, which, in general, they would not do (for reasons religious as well as political). And so most of them were forced out in what came to be known as the Grand Dérangement, or the Expulsion of the Acadians.
This event was memorialized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadia, which (ignoring the Mi’kmaq, who had been there before and were – and are – still there), draws again on the Arcadian mythos:
This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks, Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight, Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic, Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms. Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.
This is the forest primeval; but where are the hearts that beneath it Leaped like the roe, when he hears in the woodland the voice of the huntsman?
This A(r)cadian ideal is also a key part of the national Canadian mythos – see the paintings of the Group of Seven, among other emblematic bits of Canadiana. But massive movements of people, often involuntary, have always been an important part of Canadian history.
The Acadians were first relocated to Maryland, New York, and New England – which you may remember were Verrazzano’s Arcadia, not that it matters – but subsequently they largely ended up deported to France. Some of them ultimately came back around to Canada, to Acadia, to rejoin the few who had escaped expulsion. But they didn’t return to the part they had left; they were forced farther north into New Brunswick, and that is where les Acadiens still have an important presence (Suzie LeBlanc has released two lovely albums of Acadien folk songs, just for example). The name Acadia has hung on in Nova Scotia as well: in the Annapolis Valley, for instance, one of the varieties of grapes the local wineries grow is called L’Acadie, and after a day of wine touring you can drive into Wolfville and have a look at Acadia University.
But in 1785 some of the Acadians in France chose instead to follow the lead of one Henri Peyroux de la Coudrenière, who had a financial interest in inducing them to resettle in a colony farther south in America, one that already had a significant French presence but had more recently been acquired by Spain: Louisiana. These Acadiens, who had – through dropping the a or rebracketing l’Acadie to la Cadie – become Cadiens, became known by their English-speaking neighbours (and by themselves as they spoke English) as Cajuns, through the same process by which Barbadians have come to be called Bajans and by which Canadian became, on the cover of Mark Orkin’s bestseller, Canajan, Eh?
And the area of Louisiana that is the Cajun heartland, about a third of the state on the south and southwest (and not actually including New Orleans), is these days called Acadiana – a name that it first got in the 1950s, drawing in part on Acadia Parish, which has had that name since 1886. Some things keep coming around.
New Orleans, as you may know, is famous not just for its drinks (such as the Sazerac) but also for its food. If you like Cajun cuisine, you’re in for a treat. If, on the other hand, you disdain shrimp, crawfish, shellfish, or other fish, and can’t be induced to eat andouille, well, your options are a bit fewer.
Andouille! Who among carnivores would not want an andouille? They’re so very delicious, both the large andouilles and their smaller unsmoked kin the andouillettes. And yet we do find some people who, though they may not dislike pigs, nonetheless hate their guts – and it’s the pigs’ guts that make these sausages. And even if you don’t mind what animal bits go into the sausages, the seasonings can be rather lively, and the garlic or peppers could be their undoing.
And do we even know how to say andouille, for that matter? There seems to be a dispute going on – do we have a resolution? Yes and no. The word, as you may have deduced, is from French, and in French it’s said as two syllables, /ɑ̃.duj/, something between “on dooey” and “on dwee” (allowing that the n is really just a nasalization of the vowel before). In England, you might hear it as “on doo we” (or “undo we”) but in America, including New Orleans, you’re more likely to hear “ann doo we” – like in “and do we know, or don’t we?” (You can hear my butcher in Toronto say it in my sausages pronunciation tip. As to andouillette, I think if you say “and do we yet” you’ll get away with it.)
But however a word or sausage may taste, it might be somewhat removed from what went into making it. In the case of andouille, which is produced by putting pigs’ guts inside pigs’ guts, the name comes from Medieval Latin inductilis, which comes from Latin induco, ‘I put in’ or ‘I overlay’ (or actually quite a few other related senses). That -duc- is the same one as in duct, conduct, produce, deduce, induce, introduce, education, and so many other words having originally to do with leading or putting. (Yes, it’s even related to duke.)
And if you think andouille is somewhat removed from induco, let me introduce you to another lovely bit of food and language: ’nduja, pronounced “’n’ do ya,” a Calabrian sausage. It’s very spicy, like Calabrese salami, but it’s spreadable – once you cut open the sausage, you get a thick textured paste. What’s happened to the ingredients of the sausage is about like what’s happened to the ingredients of the word, because ’nduja – like what it names – is derived from andouille. It was introduced to southern Italy by members of the French house of Anjou in the 1200s.
But the sausage isn’t originally from Anjou. It’s from a bit farther north, in Normandy. In fact, its historical home is the town of Vire, which is also, indirectly and etymologically, the ancestral home of vaudeville. The sausages made it across the Atlantic and down to New Orleans thanks to people from southwest France who came to Canada and then were forced to move to Louisiana.
And if I’m dining on Cajun food with someone who doesn’t fancy it, I pronounce andouille as “And do we not want that? I’ll have yours, then.”
Apologies for the brief hiatus since my last word tasting; my wife and I were on a trip on the train called the City of New Orleans to the city of New Orleans, where we spent an enjoyable few days seeing the city for the first time. One pilgrimage I made was to have a Sazerac cocktail, made with Sazerac whiskey, at the Sazerac Bar. There’s really nothing like the original, you know? And this was, indeed, nothing like the original.
Oh, to be sure, it was the classic Sazerac cocktail in its classic home, as it has been served there since 1949. But their recipe is not the original recipe, and they are not its original home. The name Sazerac is unchanged, but what it names has meandered more than the Mississippi River.
Let’s start with what was in the cocktail I was served: sugar, Peychaud’s Bitters, Herbsaint liqueur, and Sazerac Rye Whiskey, plus an orange peel garnish. I will tell you right away that the one ingredient every recipe for a Sazerac has always had is Peychaud’s Bitters, a herbal mixture (or an herbal mixture, if you prefer) created in New Orleans by Haitian-born apothecary Antoine Peychaud in the 1830s. The recipes often but not always include the sugar and orange peel as well. But neither the liqueur nor the whiskey is in the original.
How could Sazerac Rye Whiskey not be the original whiskey of a Sazerac? It’s not like the case of the Martini, which (it is generally thought) was originally a Martinez but drifted its name to the name of the vermouth used in it (and now you can get a “Martini” that has exactly none of the original ingredients, just vodka and fruit juice served in a conic spilly glass). No, this Sazerac Rye Whiskey is a century and a half newer than the cocktail. It hit the market in 2006.
So the whiskey is named after the cocktail, right? Well, sort of. It’s also named after the company that made the original cocktail, a company that owns the rights to the name Sazerac, a company that since 1970 has been the owner and producer of Peychaud’s Bitters, a company that in the past quarter century has been on a buying spree to make it one of the world’s hugest liquor companies – you’ll be amazed to see all their brands, and if you drink liquor at all you’ve very likely had some of them – but somehow hadn’t ever bothered naming a whiskey after itself until 2006. Before that, the cocktail was made with whichever rye whiskey (preferably from Kentucky) the barman preferred.
But there was a liquor bearing the name Sazerac. It’s the liquor after which all of this was originally named, but it was not whiskey and it was not made by the Sazerac Company. We’ll get to that.
So is the cocktail named after the bar? Of course not. Nor is the bar named after the cocktail – well, not exactly. The Sazerac Bar is named after the original place that made the cocktail, a place that itself was named after either the cocktail or the liquor after which the cocktail was named. If you’re having trouble following, fix yourself a drink and I’ll spell it out.
The Sazerac Bar is just off the swanky lobby in the Roosevelt Hotel, a Waldorf-Astoria hotel. It opened, as I mentioned, in 1949. It was named in honour of the just-closed Sazerac Bar nearby on Carondolet Street (which is what Bourbon Street becomes when you cross Canal Street). I say “in honour” because the modern Sazerac Bar is not owned by the Sazerac Company, although they clearly have a lot of cooperation in their branding, right down to the glassware. The Sazerac Bar on Carondolet that it was named in honour of, on the other hand, was owned by the Sazerac Company. But it was not the original Sazerac Bar either.
There was, you see, a hiatus in official Sazerac consumption, thanks to Prohibition, which was in effect in the US from 1919 to 1933, even in New Orleans (lord knows they resisted – they even tried classifying liquor as food). The Sazerac Bar on Carondolet opened in 1933. The original Sazerac House, which was originally the Sazerac Coffee House, was a bit east, across Canal Street in the French Quarter; there are tiles on Royal Street indicating where its entrance was.
Coffee House! Does that mean that the Sazerac originally had something to do with coffee? No, not at all, sorry. Drinking and meeting establishments in the late 1800s in New Orleans were commonly enough called coffee houses. We need not talk of coffee again; it’s a red herring.
Prohibition was not the only legal contretemps affecting the Sazerac. You may have seen the name Herbsaint in the cocktail ingredients and thought, “What’s that?” And if you’ve had a Sazerac in some place that’s not New Orleans, you may recall a different liquor: absinthe. This is because absinthe was used in the original cocktail – and when I say “in,” I should qualify it: you’re supposed to rinse the glass with it and toss out any extra. (Modern bartenders often use a little spray bottle to mist it.) But absinthe was banned in the US in 1912, because it was very high in alcohol and also contained small amounts of a hallucinogen (thujone, from the wormwood in it).
At first the absinthe in a Sazerac was replaced with pastis, but after Prohibition ended, a New Orleans pharmacist named J. Marion Legendre started producing a version of absinthe he had made. Once the government ruled that you still couldn’t label something as absinthe, he renamed it Herbsaint, said to be after packets of herbs he sold in his store under the label L’Herbe Saint. (If you speak French, however, you might notice that the French pronunciations of absinthe and Herbsaint do sound… a bit similar.) In 1949, Legendre sold the brand to the Sazerac Company.
But there’s one more contretemps that changed what goes into a Sazerac, and it’s the reason that the original liquor bearing the name Sazerac stopped being used in the Sazerac cocktail. That contretemps had the name phylloxera.
The original Sazerac Coffee House was first named the Merchants Exchange Coffee House, but its owner sold it to become an importer of spirits, and around 1850 the new owner named the house after one of the spirits the old owner imported – or perhaps after the cocktail made with the liquor, a cocktail that is commonly said to have been invented by Antoine Peychaud at his apothecary. The spirit in question? A brand of cognac made by Sazerac de Forge et Fils, a company started by one Bernard Sazerac de Forge in 1782. If you have an eye for such things, you may have already noted that the -ac is also seen on other French names such as Cognac, Armagnac, Cyrano de Bergerac, and – yes – Cadillac. The origin of Sazerac, like that of the other names, is largely lost in the mists of time; even the best-known among them have multifarious and controversial theories about their origins.
So, yes, the original Sazerac was a cocktail made with cognac, plus absinthe and Peychaud’s Bitters and sugar. But in the late 1800s an infestation of phylloxera, an insect that had crossed the Atlantic from North America, severely depleted the French grape stocks. The wine industry in Europe ultimately survived by grafting their vines onto rootstock also imported from the Americas, but for a time there was very little wine being made in France, which means there was even less brandy (including cognac) to come across the ocean to America. Which is why the cocktail shifted to being made with rye. Which, in case you don’t know, doesn’t taste much like cognac at all.
Why even keep making this cocktail when the main ingredient isn’t available? Why not make a new cocktail and call it a new thing? Ah, well, not for nothing is Sazerac an anagram of a craze’s. By the time the cognac supply dried up, the Sazerac had already become an exceedingly popular New Orleans institution, as had its home, Sazerac House, with its 125-foot-long bar (which had already passed through several owners). It was not going away, and it has not gone away – in 2008 the Louisiana state legislature proclaimed the Sazerac the official cocktail of New Orleans (sorry to all those Bourbon Street partiers with their big plastic go cups full of Hurricanes, which are a sort of mix of Kool-Aid and disinfectant). So of course one must maintain and honour tradition, even if the details of the tradition wander a bit.
But that’s not the end of it. You can still get a Sazerac made with cognac, and some bartenders use both rye and cognac. (Try all the variations! I have, and I think they’re all delicious.) And you can still get Sazerac de Forge cognac.
Well. Not still. The current Sazerac de Forge cognac is made – wait for it – in honour of the original. The original Sazerac de Forge et Fils company became Sazerac de Forge et Kotniski, and after it was acquired in 1965 the brand name disappeared. But in 2016, capping a year in which it had also acquired several other brands (including Southern Comfort), the Sazerac Company acquired a cognac house named Domaine Breuil de Segonzac (another -ac!). And at that location – not at the original logis of Sazerac de Forge – it started producing, once again, Sazerac de Forge Cognac. The bottles bear labels proclaiming “Maison fondée en 1782” and “Finest Original,” but their website clarifies that the cognac is “named in honor of our roots”: “The Sazerac Company recently returned to Cognac and acquired Domaine Sazerac de Segonzac in order to produce our own ‘Finest Original’ cognac.”
Well, what is original, anyway? When you start trying to trace cultural outputs, be they recipes or be they words, original, like authentic, turns out to be a pretty dodgy concept a lot of the time. The Sazerac Company is not the original Sazerac company; the Sazerac Bar is not the original Sazerac bar; the Sazerac cocktail you get now is not the original Sazerac cocktail – and even if you make it with cognac, it’s not with the original kind of cognac (not even if you use Sazerac de Forge Cognac, and not just because it’s not made in the same place – the taste of French grapes is generally agreed to have changed at least a little since the pre-phylloxera era).
But you can still go to Sazerac House. It’s a museum now, opened in 2019. Aina and I went there and had a nice self-guided tour, complete with free (small) sample cocktails. And it’s in a grand building dating to the 1860s, at the corner of Canal Street and Magazine Street, a mere fifth of a mile from where the original Sazerac Coffee House stood.
What, you didn’t really think it was going to be the original, did you?
This past weekend, we saw a performance of the musical Gypsy, which is based on the life of the burlesque performer Gypsy Rose Lee. It traces her early days as a child named Louise Hovick, performing with her sister June in vaudeville under the influence and guidance of their extraordinarily controlling and commanding mother. It had me thinking about vaudeville.
I first heard of vaudeville, I think, in an Archie comic strip, where the high school principal, Mr. Weatherbee, exclaims “Vaudeville!” after being hit in the face with a pie. Quite reasonably, I assumed it was a place. Even after I learned that it was a word for a kind of variety show, I still assumed that it was an eponym. There had to be an original Vaudeville, right? Presumably in New York City, just like Broadway and Tin Pan Alley?
Well… no. New York City was the Emerald City of American vaudeville, true, but it didn’t start there, and there was no place in the city called Vaudeville. If the word looks French to you, you’re right: it came from France. But there’s no place in France called Vaudeville either. The word vaudeville, like the entertainment form itself, evolved over a few centuries.
It’s not that there were vaudeville performances centuries ago. The variety show genre called vaudeville appeared in France and then the US and Canada in the mid-late 1800s, and it had a good half-century run before having its lunch definitively eaten by motion pictures. But whereas the North American vaudeville quickly came to be what was also called variety theater, similar to the British music hall genre, its French origins were a light drama with songs interspersed. And the French form in turn came from the genre of comédie en vaudevilles, which was a sort of comic opera with popular songs, often as part of a sort of variety show. It got its name from the popular songs that were used in it – they were the vaudevilles.
Yes, vaudeville was first the name of the kind of popular song used in these comic operas. It was a genre of song that developed in the 1600s and 1700s. The name is often said to come from voix de ville, ‘voice of the city’ (and not New York City, not yet). But that voix de ville is likely to have been a pun (or even a folk etymology) on the name of an older genre that fed into it: vaudevire.
And what is vaudevire? It’s vau de Vire – the Vire valley, i.e., the valley of the Vire river, in Normandy, France. That’s where one Olivier Basselin, in the early 1400s, wrote a bunch of popular drinking songs. And in the early 1600s, one Jean le Houx published a collection of songs, Le Livre des Chants nouveaux de Vaudevire, purportedly by Basselin but probably by le Houx himself. This collection broadly popularized the songs, giving rise to the genre.
The Vire valley is a nice enough place, in that part of France that was at one time invaded by Norsemen (the Normans), who subsequently invaded England and brought French to it, resulting (after centuries of blending) in this language you’re reading right now. The region is the home of the andouille sausage. It has also been a site of much military action over the centuries, from the Hundred Years’ War to World War II. After D-Day, the town of Vire was bombed nearly out of existence.
It would be tempting to say that vaudeville bombed out of existence too, but it’s not that the shows were met with boos or stony silence or flying fruit. It’s just that people found other forms of entertainment, and, more to the point, the people who had been presenting vaudeville found more reliable and cost-efficient ways to make money: converting their vaudeville halls into movie theatres. Many people who got their start in vaudeville went on to be movie stars – just about every actor you’ve ever heard of who was in movies before 1950, in fact.
Gyspy Rose Lee, who moved on from vaudeville to burlesque, made a couple of movies, too. But film acting wasn’t her forte. Her sister June, on the other hand, made a good career in movies, TV, and live theatre under the modified name June Havoc. She died in 2010. The past is not as long ago as it may seem.
And vaudeville may be a thing of the past, but it was a forerunner of talk shows, sketch comedy (including Saturday Night Live), stand-up comedians, and talent shows such as America’s Got Talent. And, for that matter, YouTube and TikTok. Oh, and of course burlesque – which is still a thing, in case you didn’t know.
I saw a harbinger of spring today: a red-winged blackbird, which, as Hinterland Who’s Who says, “is one of the first signs of spring in Canada.”
I have a complicated relationship with harbinger. It’s a word I gladly enough use – in fact, it’s in one of my favourite phrases from my own poetry, “The heat-buzzer insect, harbinger of torpor” – but it’s that pronunciation. For a long time in my youth, I thought it rhymed with “bringer.” And since I learned that the g is pronounced like “j,” it’s always sounded to me a bit like a blend of Harbeck and injure.
Not that it has anything to do with injury, mind. It’s a word of presaging, of first signs, more like a bringer or an advance singer, or a herald. One of “The Forerunners,” as George Herbert says of grey hairs:
The harbingers are come. See, see their mark: White is their color, and behold my head. But must they have my brain? Must they dispark Those sparkling notions, which therein were bred?
A harbinger is sent before to help, and also a sign of things to come. Like this blue stapler I bought at Staples.
This is not to say that red-winged blackbirds (or robins, or nightingales, which Anne Finch called “sweet harbinger of spring”), as auspicious as they may be, are making the arrangements for spring. I mean, they could be the season’s John the Baptist, a messenger singing “prepare ye the way,” but they’re not really booking the hotel for spring to arrive, they’re just getting their rooms first, so to speak. Setting up the branch offices, you know.
But originally a harbinger was exactly the person who booked the rooms. Or, before that, the person who provided the rooms. The sense of ‘forerunner’ or ‘first sign’ was in place by the mid-1500s, but the sense of ‘person sent ahead to get lodgings for a royal party, army, etc.’ (as in the office of Knight Harbinger) was around at the time of Chaucer (that’s late 1300s), and the sense of ‘host, harbourer, innkeeper’ was in place in English by the late 1100s.
But, let’s be fair, the word wasn’t harbinger until after Chaucer’s time. Chaucer’s spelling was herbergeour. It came from Old French herbergere, which traces to Proto-West Germanic *harjabergu (‘army camp, shelter’). The modern French word is hébergeur; related words include Italian albergo and English harbour.
So how did that n get there? I’m tempted to say it was sent on ahead to prepare the way for the g. And in a way, that’s true, just as in passenger (one who has passage), messenger (one who carries a message), porringer (a dish for porridge), and a few other words. It’s what is technically called an “intrusive n”; it’s a pre-nasalization before g, not just when it sounds as “j” but also, for example, in nightingale. It cropped up in the passage from French to English in the late Middle Ages, probably under Norman influence.
Still, I prefer to see the n as not mere passenger but indeed messenger, harbinger, setting the mouth ready for the g that comes next. Without it, the sound would be that much more abrupt. Just like a spring that simply shows up one day. Which, admittedly, does seem to happen in Toronto.
You might wonder that it’s mid-May and I’m still talking about signs of spring. But I’m in Canada. And even though I’m in the deep south of Canada, we’re a place that freezes. In fact, there’s some question as to whether it’s truly spring yet. Yes, the patios are open at the bars across the street, but the hockey playoff games on their televisions give the lie to it. Not because it’s hockey – they play that until almost the start of summer – but because tonight they were showing the Maple Leafs versus the Panthers (not the Redwings, though that would be apposite), and the Leafs, on the edge of being dislodged, didn’t lose. And, as Torontonians have seen every year of my life, you know it’s spring when the Leafs are out.
“It was quite the imbroglio,” said Maury, twirling his tagliatelle around his fork.
I took a sip of my wine, an engaging Aglianico from Puglia. “And how did your family become embroiled in it?” I was playing on imbroglio and embroil, which are in fact etymologically related: they both trace to French brouiller ‘confuse, scramble, blur’ (imbroglio by way of the Italian borrowing broglio ‘intrigue, confusion, entanglement’, embroil by way of French embrouiller). Brouiller in turn comes from Latin brodium ‘broth, stew, mixture’, which is also related to English broth and broil – the broil of the cooking kind.
“It was my great-something-great-uncle Giulio,” Maury said. “He wanted a guglio—”
“A what?” Maury had said it in the same anglophone style as he’d said “imbroglio,” not with the “g” pronounced (heaven forbid) but also not with the palatalized sound particular to Italian, /ˈɡuʎ.ʎo/, which tends to confound English tongues; he just said it like “ghoul, yo.”
“An obelisk. Specifically a needle-shaped one. And he wanted hieroglyphs on it. Or some fanciful imitation thereof. Plus a scene from a seraglio.” He arched an eyebrow.
“In relief?”
“Intaglio.”
I tangled some spaghetti aglio e olio on my fork. In the background, a song from the ’90s was playing: “I’m all out of faith, this is how I feel…” (I don’t require “O sole mio” or “Funiculì, funiculà” in an Italian restaurant, but perhaps a passacaglia?) “So what caused the brouhaha?” I asked. (Brouhaha is not etymologically related to imbroglio as far as anyone knows.)
“Well, the intaglio was to be done with pastiglia—”
“Pastiglia?” I said, trying to say it the Italian way on the (correct) assumption that it was another gl word.
“Low-relief gesso, yes. But instead they gave him scagliola.” I raised an eyebrow at him and sipped my Aglianico. “A kind of plaster,” he amplified.
“Which didn’t work?”
“It would seem not.” Maury nodded towards the source of the music. “‘The illusion never changed into something real,’ as Natalie Imbruglia put it.”
“And his perfect sky was torn?”
“Or anyway, his pot was cracked. Literally. He threw a piece of terraglia.” Pause. “A kind of cream-coloured earthenware.”
“Did it connect?”
“We may say it jarred the supplier’s ganglions.”
I giggled. “Well, I suppose when you’re all out of faith, this is how you feel.”
We paused the conversation for a few moments to finish our pasta. Our waiter – who was also, we had learned, a poet whose work I had read and who had won the Trillium Book Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize and had been nominated for the Governor General’s Award, but poetry doesn’t pay the bills, you know – stopped by to refill our glasses. “Are you thinking of dessert?” he asked.
“For some reason,” I said, “I have a hankering for zabaglione.”
The waiter, by the way, is someone real who served me and my friends in an Italian restaurant near where I live. Maury, as always, is fictional. All conversations really took place – in my head, and nowhere else.
New Jersey has a certain reputation, and not an altogether fair one. If you only see that part of it that is in the orbit of New York City, you may be tempted to think the motto on their licence plates – “The Garden State” – is some kind of joke. More like swamps, pavement, dirty old towns, and sprawl malls with fine dining on the line of IHOP, Rainforest Café, and the Cheesecake Factory.
Go a little further, however, and you’ll see that there’s a reason for what’s on those plates. Back in grad school I spent more than a month in Princeton, which is smack dab in the middle of New Jersey, and I can tell you that there is ample garden and greenery in that state.
But New Jersey has another duality, one you can quickly see with a topographical map. The state, as you may know, is shaped like a thick stylized S. The top half of the S is generally hilly (sorry, “mountainous” – I’m from the Rockies and I find it hard to say a place with a maximum elevation of 1,803 feet is mountainous, but it’s all relative). The bottom half is generally low-lying and fairly flat, with a large swath called the Pine Barrens, which is true to its name. The dividing line is right across the waistband stretching from Philadelphia (well, Trenton), passing through Princeton, and touching the tidewater just near New York City. You could put the dividing line at the mouth of Cheesequake Creek.
Of what creek? You read it right: Cheesequake. It’s in the town of Old Bridge, Middlesex County, and it passes through Cheesequake State Park (perpendicular to the Garden State Parkway, which is not especially true to its name). As the New Jersey State Park Service website says,
Cheesequake State Park’s uniqueness lies in its geographical location. Not only is it situated in the middle of the urban north and the suburban south, it lies in a transitional zone between two different ecosystems. Open fields, saltwater and freshwater marshes, an Atlantic white cedar swamp, pine barrens habitats and a northeastern hardwood forest await you. . . .
A striking example of vegetation change along a gradient from coastal salt marsh habitat to upland forests can be observed from the various trails running through the natural area. The natural area displays a diversity of plant species and community types characteristic of both northern and southern New Jersey.
So you might say that if there were a fault cutting across New Jersey, it would be right at this creek. And in fact it is: it’s the location of the New Jersey cheesequake of 1783 (it would have been an earthquake, but it’s New Jersey).
No, I’m lying, that’s completely made up. New Jersey has its faults – the biggest one is in the north – and it has had occasional earthquakes (see New Jersey’s Division of Water Supply and Geoscience for more info), including a noticeable one in 1783. But that has nothing to do with Cheesequake, which is faultless.
So how did Cheesequake get the name? Is it something like that big molasses tank explosion they had in Boston in 1919? No, it’s due to more of a classical tectonic shift… lexically speaking. It’s an English rendition of a local (probably Lenni-Lenape) word. The June 8, 1889, issue of American Notes and Queries gives this nice run-down quoting the Newark Sunday Call:
Some of the local pronunciations of the names of New Jersey places are puzzling. For instance, Hibernia is called Highbarney, Charlotteburgh is spoken of by old-timers as Slottenburgh, Sparta is called Sparty, Newfoundland is called New fun land, with the accent on the land. Wequahick is Wake Cake, Chesquahick is Cheesequake, Acquackanonck is Quack-nack, and Wanaque is Why-nockie, with the accent on the why; Caldwell is Call-well, and Parsippany is Persipny, Plaquemin (French) has become Pluckamin, even in spelling, while our city is Noork or Newick.
Well, yes, that’s a thing that tends to happen. All Canadians know that the province of Newfoundland is “New fun land” (usually with the stress on New, though), and everyone who has ever flown through EWR knows about “Noork.” England is famous for doing this kind of thing – visit Cirencester in Gloucestershire, for instance – but Americans also do it a lot; in Massachusetts they make much of Worcester, and Kurt Vonnegut made light of handling of names taken from local languages with the fictional town of Pisquontuit, Rhode Island, in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater:
About Pisquontuit: It was pronounced “Pawn-it” by those who loved it, and “Piss-on-it” by those who didn’t. There had once been an Indian chief named Pisquontuit.
OK, so Cheesquake is from Chesquahick, right? And what is Chesquahick?
Heck if anyone knows. That one citation is literally the only place the word turns up on Google, spelled that way or even close to it – and Google keeps wanting to show me Chiswick instead. If we look for Wequahick (which appears morphologically related), we find that it’s spelled Weequahic these days, pronounced “Wee-kway-ik” or “Week-wake,” and comes from Lenni-Lenape for ‘head of the cove’.
So therefore Cheesequake would come from something else to do with a head or with a cove, right (I’m not sure which, and online resources on Lenni-Lenape are limited)? You might think. But if you go to Wikipedia, the etymologies it offers are entirely different (and, I gotta say, not as engaging): Cheseh-oh-ke (‘upland’), Chichequaas (‘upland village’), or Chiskhakink (‘at the land that has been cleared’).
Or, ya know what, maybe it really was from a cheese quake. Specifically it could be a parmigiana quake. Here’s my evidence for that: 300 to 400 pounds of pasta were found recently alongside a creek in Old Bridge, the same town as Cheesequake State Park. Admittedly, it wasn’t dumped along Cheesequake Creek, it was dumped along Iresick Brook (and I’d say “I’re sick” if I had that much pasta too, especially off the ground), but the two are a mere 8 miles apart (less as the crow flies). The point is if you can have pasta coming out of the ground (Did anyone see anyone dump it? No) you can also have a cheese quake. Go to the garden and grab a plate!
But what would make someone hungry enough to have all that pasta and cheese in the first place? Well, if you Google Cheesequake, along with the New Jersey geography you get plentiful results for Cheese Quake, also named Cheesequake, which is a strain of marijuana. I’m not going to say that smoking some would give you the requisite appetite, but I’m not not going to say it either. (What do I know? I’ve never tried it.)
And for dessert, if you don’t mind the drive up to Menlo Park or all the way down to Freehold, you can go to the Cheesequake Factory. I mean Cheesecake.
Angry Sub-Editor
Patrick Neylan, Eeditor of business reports. Permanently angry about the abuse of English, maths and logic. Terms and conditions: by reading this blog you accept that all opinions expressed herein will henceforth be your opinions.
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