Food
"Bread. Staff of life." That's how a standard English dictionary - Bailey's - defined this elementary foodstuff in 1745. A basic definition for a basic thing. You can't argue with it, but nor would you call it very imaginative. Just ten years later, Dr Johnson defined the same thing thus: "Bread, ns [Saxon] 1. Food made of ground corn; 2. Food in general, such as nature requires; 3. Support of life at large." What's more, Johnson illustrated his definition with citations from Shakespeare, Dryden, Philips, the Spectator, Arbuthnot, L'Estrange, Pope and King Charles. The shift from Bailey to Johnson is like that from a single hunk of rough-hewn soda bread to a whole baker's shop of knotted loaves, tea-breads and rolls, some metaphorical, some edible. The one merely sustains; the other feeds.
Dr Johnson's dictionary is a larder of treats for the food-lover. It stimulates the appetite and informs at the same time. Butter, for example, is "an unctuous substance made by agitating the cream of milk, till the oil separates from the whey". Johnson is as good on the texture of food as he is on its mode of production.
His definition of honey is both poetical and technical. It is: "A thick, viscous, fluid substance, of a whitish or yellowish colour, sweet to the taste, soluble in water, and becoming vinous on fermentation, inflammable, liquable by a gentle heat, and of fragrant smell." We are then told how the finest "virgin honey" differs from the "common yellow" variety and how the bee sucks up sweet flower juice through its proboscis before depositing it in the comb. Finally, Johnson gives the figurative meaning of honey, as in "a honey tongue" from Shakespeare. Then, there are "honey-bag", "honey-comb", "honey-dew" and "honeyless", meaning "being without honey". No recipe book would offer as much.
There is a glorious idiosyncrasy to Johnson, lacking in 20th-century dictionaries. He forgets to mention "bun", a well-established snack, but includes "cake", "a kind of delicate bread", as well as "gingerbread", "a kind of farinaceous sweetmeat made of dough . . . sweetened with treacle, and flavoured with ginger and some other aromatick seeds".
He names an astonishing 84 species of pear, including "the burnt cat", "the musk robin", "the villain of Anjou", "the red muscadelle" and "the great onion pear". The plum, which is a "raisin" as well as "an oval or globular fruit", is given 34 varieties. Who could resist "the violet Perdrigon plum"? The great lexicographer must have preferred plums and pears to the peach, which is minimally defined as "a tree and a fruit".
Johnson's words offer us glimpses into a lost market economy. Along with butcher and cook-maid and fishmonger, there are "orangewife" and "applewoman" and "porkeater". There is also "Chocolate-house, ns, A house where company is entertained with chocolate", and where Johnson no doubt thought up some of his definitions. There are pleasing snatches of 18th-century delicacies now forgotten, such as "oglio" from the Spanish "olla": "A dish made by mingling different kinds of meat", or the "queen-apple" and "warden", kinds of fruit.
I never knew that to "gip" meant to gut herrings, or that a "lickerish" was a glutton, "greedy to swallow". "Bulimy", in its pre-Diana meaning, was "an enormous appetite, attended with fainting, and coldness of the extremities", and "anorexy" was "inappetency, or loathing of food", something that Johnson himself seldom suffered (of which more next week). His lexicography even extends to delicious insults. How one longs to call one's enemies "beef-witted" or "milk-livered". Meanwhile, I'm happy guttling away on this tastable, salsuginous and thoroughly esculent dictionary.
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