Within the world of gastronomy and culinary history, one of the greatest past and present challenges is the translation of terms, ingredients, techniques, or processes within the culinary scene.
In a global era, it seems customary and even "natural" to incorporate foreign words into our everyday relationship with food. Fifty years ago, in Mexico for example, it might have been difficult to explain the concept and difference between a nigiri and a maki; pasta al dente could have been mistakenly interpreted as pasta with a type of "dente" sauce rather than a cooking method; and "mise en place," now popularized by cooking shows as the prior preparation of ingredients for a recipe, could have simply been an expression without a relevant translation.
Although all these foreign expressions and forms are now part of our food vocabulary, not so many years ago, they still remained lost in translation. What allows these terms to transcend borders and be adopted as expressions in another context? How do these terms become popular and transmitted to a large number of people? Many of these terms refer us to historical facts about cuisine. For example, when French gastronomy was hegemonic in the nineteenth century, especially in Europe and the United States, many culinary terms for cutting food or for techniques used were in French. Although this hegemony is no longer present in the same way today, as world cuisines have gained their own prominence and expressions beyond borders, even today, professional culinary training still uses French terms.
Evidently, this is not only related to the circulation of goods and products, but also to the circulation of ideas, people, news, perceptions, and stories. Every foreign term referring to a culinary practice contains a wealth of stories and culture from a country's gastronomy. Sometimes, so many centuries have passed that the endemic term adapts to the local language, as in the case of the Mexican ahuacatl, which has found variations in pronunciation in several languages (avocado in English, German, Dutch; avocat in French; abacateiro in Portuguese; avokado in Croatian and Danish), but always refers to its origin in Nahuatl.
Although this may seem inconsequential, there are some challenges around gastronomic vocabulary, especially those referring to endemic processes. For example, the process of nixtamalization of corn in Mexico, which is significant as cultural heritage but also for modifying corn to obtain better nutritional benefits. This procedure is not yet incorporated as part of the usual language in other languages, because the use of corn is more historically anchored to peoples belonging to Mesoamerica, and in other latitudes it is replaced by cereals such as wheat or rice.
Although some people view the incorporation of foreign terms with suspicion in defense of their language, in culinary matters they have not been able to adapt to the local language because, probably, they are of recent incorporation or have not been culturally significant for a massive number of people who incorporate them not only in speech but also in everyday practices around their food.
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.
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