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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, try to tend to language better than my houseplants. You were too young to die! I’m sorry for whatever it is I did to you!
In today’s episode, we’ve got cakes for a cause. Content note: swears. And a few saucy references.
On with the show.
HZ: I’m recording this in March 2021, and this month, the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Court bill is being rushed through the UK parliament, which seeks to impose heavy restrictions on protest. Police powers would be expanded to penalise demonstrations that cause ‘unease’ or ‘annoyance’, which are highly subjective things. If you say something causes unease or annoyance, it’s hard to prove that it doesn’t. The language of the law being this flexible is somewhat of a problem. Personally, as a craft enthusiast who has attended a fair number of protests over the years in London, I’m always excited to see the banners people have made with very impressive appliqué on them - but one person’s impressive applique could be someone else’s annoying appliqué, right?
Just in case things do take a turn for the draconian, and we’re no longer allowed to march past some of London’s most iconic landmarks chanting the lyrics to pop songs with key words changed to something more pointed, I turn my attention to cake - not for comfort, b for rebellion.
Back in the olden days, when I went to other countries and to cafes, I went to a cafe in Buenos Aires in Argentina, to eat cakes with two local tour guides, Madi Lang and Juan Palacios, because facturas, the pastries in Buenos Aires, have... unusual names. Like ‘priest’s balls’ or ‘friar’s balls’.
priest’s balls AKA friar’s balls AKA nun’s sighs
MADI LANG: So these are the traditional pastries that we eat in Buenos Aires. Bolas di frailes, the friar's balls, is like a round pastry with cream on the inside.
JUAN PALACIOS: Yeah. It's like a full donut.
MADI LANG: Yeah, it's kind of like a full donut, yeah.
JUAN PALACIOS: Basically the same dough, it's fried, then it's just the same thing, it's just a big ball. Beautiful ball.
HZ: Big beautiful ball.
JUAN PALACIOS: Yeah it is. So it has two names, the same pastry has two names: Bolas di fraile, which is friar's - it’s not friar's, actually, it's like a... Yeah, like a priest, I would say priest. Priests' balls. It has another name. It's the same thing, but you can call it two ways. The other one is nun...
MADI LANG: Nun's sigh.
JUAN PALACIOS: Yeah.
HZ: ‘Nun’s sigh’, to imply a nun was emitting orgasmic moans.
As well as religious cake names, there were also libritos, which meant little books, symbolising political pamphlets perhaps, or religious texts (that you eat); then there were the military and law enforcement pastries.
MADI LANG: You've got the cannon which, what is it called, the full name? Cañoncito, the little cannon, which has dulce de leche on the inside.
JUAN PALACIOS: Or crema pastillera.
MADI LANG: Or cream.
JUAN PALACIOS: The cannon is a symbol of the army. They could have called it whatever, but, I mean, it looks like a cannon, and that's a reference to the army. The one I like the best after the bolas de fraile is a vigilante. Vigilante is, how do you say...
MADI LANG: The cop. The policeman.
JUAN PALACIOS: It is the officer, but refers to the guy standing on a corner just watching. El vigilante.
MADI LANG: Yeah. The lookout, but as a cop.
JUAN PALACIOS: Yeah, refers to the lookout. But talking about - exactly - a police officer. And basically that factura, that pastry, is...
MADI LANG: It's like their baston, their stick.
JUAN PALACIOS: That's not the reference I have. The way it looks, it's a long sleeve of dough, a strip of dough, and the version I have - and again, you're going to find different people telling you different versions because this is not written somewhere. There's people, generation passing to generation, these are oral stories, so you're going to have different versions and different interpretations. The one I have - the one I like better - is that it refers to the officer standing in a corner. You know, like, showing an example of the force, like rectitude, whatever you want to make of it.
HZ: So that vigilante, the long stick-shaped pastry, could refer to police officers themselves, standing stick-straight; or, it could refer to the baton they held; or, to the stick -
JUAN PALACIOS: Up your ass.
HZ: Thanks Juan!
The pastries got these names in January 1888, a confection of anarchy with trade union icing.
There had been a lot of political turmoil in the decades since Argentina had declared independence from Spain in 1816, and while the 1880s were a time of prosperity, there had been genocide of indigenous people, fraudulent elections, corruption, and rampant inflation - the lower and middle classes were pissed off. To this mix, add a big wave of immigrants from Spain and Italy, bringing with them two important things: baking skills, and anarchy, a term which I think is now often used to denote chaos, but in its ancient Greek origins meant ‘without a leader’, and this is the sense of the political principle of anarchy also: sovreignty without the rule of church, state or military.
In the late 1870s, Argentina’s first trade union was recognised - the Typographical Union - followed in 1885 by the Carpenters’ Union, and the next year the Bakers’ Union. One of the founders was Ettore Mattei, who had recently been kicked out of his native Italy for his political activities, and he worked with the revolutionary socialist Errico Malatesta, who had fled Italy in 1885, hidden in a shipping box that contained a sewing machine being delivered to South America. It was Malatesta got the anarchists and the workers’ unions working together,
In January 1888, after the police violently broke up a meeting of the bakers’ union, the bakers went on strike, over pay and working conditions. The bakeries shut down. No baked goods! Baked goods were very important in Buenos Aires. Still are.
JUAN PALACIOS: I'm going to tell you about Porteños. They have a really strong relation with the bakeries. Today it's hard to walk more than two or three blocks without finding a bakery.
HZ: So the bakers striking would have a huge effect on people.
MADI LANG: Oh my gosh, my baker has never been on strike, and it's the thing that I would say, the place that's open more than any other shop. Maybe the vegetable guy, but around my apartment I have, I think, four or five bakeries just within one block.
JUAN PALACIOS: There are a few things the government needs to actually look close. The fruits and vegetables, the prices go up and down, nobody cares. Beef and bread? The government really need to look behind that, because if the price of bread goes really up, they're going to have a problem; if the price of beef goes really up, they're going to have a problem. And I don't think you can say the same about any other type of food.
HZ: If you don’t have power but the food has power, make your point through the food. Facturas, the Argentine-Spanish term for pastries, even means ‘bills’ or invoices, so the name of the whole genre carries that sense of a bill unpaid, of something owed, of “Fuck you, pay me”.
JUAN PALACIOS: So as a funny, but actually as a political comment, a political statement, they start naming the pastries with these names. Who would they attack? The police; the army; the church: the structures of power that they were trying to take down. Hence the names. It's funny but it was more than that. It's a political statement.
MADI LANG: It really characterizes the people. Because I don't think they thought they were going to start a revolution. They were just being kind of disrespectful in a very open, normal way,like, what if instead of calling it pizza they called it "the fuck you", you know? That's just the name and we're just saying it and this is just life.
HZ: The bakers’ strike was very effective - after ten days, it was over, the bakers secured a 30% pay rise. This was such a successful action that over the following year, fifteen other Argentinian unions held strikes over pay and conditions.
Lots of other unions formed, borrowing the bakers’ union’s aims and principles, written up by Malatesta.
The other legacy was the pastry names.
MADI LANG: There's lots of slang, so you know that every word has a story. So I went to the bakery one time with a friend and he is ordering bolas de fraile and vigilantes, and I was thinking to myself, like, I know these words - what do they mean? And when I said to him, "Are you saying 'bolas de fraile', are you saying 'the priest's balls'?" He was like, "Oh! Yeah, yeah I guess so." They don't realize. It's the actual word for the thing. They're not saying "the friar's balls" or "priest's balls", they're just saying "bolas de fraile", it's the name of the thing. And so I love that it's just such a normal part of their culture that they don't even recognize it, and that's a really cool thing about travel in general, and either looking at your own city or home, with the eyes of a tourist, or having a traveler ask these questions, because you get to these under-layers of the culture that are really kind of normal for everyone, but they mean something.
HZ: So a hundred and thirty years since the anarchist history in the pastry names, people are just kind of oblivious to it.
MADI LANG: Yeah. It's just the name of a thing.
HZ: Thanks to Madi Lang and Juan Palacios of BA Cultural Concierge.com, if you’re ever in Buenos Aires wanting a very entertaining walking tour, they can provide: find them at BAculturalconcierge.com.
Well now I’m looking around and wondering what things could be renamed to make a point.
There are plenty cakes and treats named as a compliment to someone. Pavlova, for the ballet dancer Anna Pavlova, and peach melba, after the opera singer Dame Nellie Melba. Omelette Arnold Bennett. The Victoria sponge or victoria sandwich, a cake tribute to Queen Victoria - and she got her own plums. The sandwich. Garibaldi biscuits, named in honor of a visit to Britain by General Garibaldi - their colloquial name squashed fly biscuits pays tribute to squashed flies.
Graham crackers, as a tribute to 19th century preacher Sylvester Graham, who exhorted people to live abstemiously, avoid mustard and ketchup because they cause insanity, and to follow a vegetarian diet to minimise the temptation to masturbate. Hold graham crackers in your hands, that would be more likely to minimise masturbation - didn’t think of that, Reverend Graham, did you? Probably did. The crackers weren’t invented by him, they weren’t official Sylvester Graham merch. Nor was the Shirley Temple drink affiliated with the child actor after whom it is named; she didn’t even like it, she found it too sweet. Arnold Palmer, the alchohol-free drink, was named after the golfer who loved to order that combination of lemonade and ice tea, and eventually Arnold Palmer the human started selling Arnold Palmer, the drink. An Arnold Palmer with vodka added was named after the golfer John Daly, not with his blessing, but as a supposedly humorous reference to his alcohol problem. Not cool. Don’t name foods and drinks as a gag about someone’s addiction! Never punch down!
But naming, or renaming, foods as an insult - it’s a bit more rare. The other day I asked etymology maven Haggard Hawks, aka Paul Anthony Jones, if he could think of any, and eventually he came up with ganache, yes the rich creamy chocolate substance. It originates from the Greek word for ‘jaw’, gnathos, and eventually in French it came to mean specifically a horse’s jaw, and thence ‘slack-jawed’, to denote a person you think is foolish.
And then in 1862 the French dramatist Victorien Sardou wrote a hit comedy play called Les Ganaches, which took the piss out of Parisians for being old-fashioned and politically regressive. A fellow playwright Paul Siraudin owned a confectionary shop in Paris, and started selling chocolates he called ganaches, to celebrate the play Les Ganaches, and perhaps also as a jab at politicians who had burdened the confectionary business by opposing changes to sugar import taxes. Calling your chocolates a word that means ‘ignoramus’: sweet revenge with a hint of etymological bitterness.
Bonus Victorien Sardou word-coining fact: his 1882 play Fédora featured Sarah Bernhardt playing the character Princess Fédora who wore a trendsetting felt hat, which then got its name from the play. If you’re looking for somewhere to apportion blame.
On the subject of the French: remember freedom fries? The movement in the US to rename french fries, because France opposed going to war with Iraq in 2003? A restaurant owner in North Carolina named Neal Rowland came up with that, and he also renamed ‘french toast’ ‘freedom toast’. I don’t know if he also renamed his business so he didn’t have to use the French word ‘restaurant’, but he did inspire North Carolina Representative Walter B. Jones to pass on the idea to Representative Bob Ney, who in his role as chair of the House Administration Committee was able to demand that food outlets in the House of Representatives must henceforth call fries ‘freedom fries’.
This did not shame France into joining the war in Iraq, but an ambassador did point out that french fries didn’t even come from France, they were Belgian.
Nonetheless, freedom fries continued being sold as freedom fries in the House until 2006, when Bob Ney resigned and was imprisoned for corruption. The fries were quietly changed back to french fries.
Neal Rowland’s inspiration was the same idea some 90 years before: during World War I, in the USA, sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage”, hamburger was called “Liberty Steak” Frankfurters were renamed “Liberty Sausage” before they became hot dogs. Also the actual dogs were renamed: dachshunds were called “Liberty Pups,” and German shepherds became “Alsatian Wolf Dogs”. And, German measles was renamed “Liberty Measles.”
I’m not sure that Liberty Measles was the ownage they thought it was.
Right now in Taiwan, freedom pineapples are all the rage, since cueca virada China banned the import of pineapples from Taiwan a few weeks ago - before that, more than 90% of Taiwan’s pineapples were being sent to China, but no more! The Taiwanese government has been urging citizens to eat more pineapples, for freedom! Is it freedom or pineapple enzymes that make the inside of your mouth go fuzzy?
Do foods taste different when they’re named for a political cause? When you’re consuming not only sustenance, but meaning? What we’ve seen with ganache and bolas de fraile is that after the passage of enough time, you don’t even know that you’re eating an imbecile or a priest’s ball. You don’t know that as well as eating your feelings, you’re eating the feelings of a movement, or of a nation.
The Allusionist is an independent podcast, coming at you from a cupboard in South London.
On the topic of travel, I just wanted to tell you about another podcast I appeared on recently: Anthems. They asked me to do a short essay about a word, and the word I chose is ‘tourist’. So find the Anthems feed on your podcast app to hear it.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
borborygmus, noun, technical: a rumbling noise made by fluid or gas in the intestines.
Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with thanks to Erin Wade, Ian Steadman, Paul Anthony Jones, Carolyn Wright and Martin Austwick, who composes the music you hear in every episode.
Seek out @allusionistshow on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, tell me what cake you’d rename for a cause.
Kristi, you messaged me ages ago to ask me how the Brazilian pastry cueca virada got that name, which means inside-out underwear - I asked our Brazilian translator friend Caetano Galindo, and he said it’s just the shape; they look a bit like shorts. I don’t know how you can tell the pastry is inside out or right side out underwear, but there you go. Sorry to have kept you waiting.
If you want to support the show, and get behind the scenes glimpses of how this sausage is made, head over to patreon.com/allusionist. And to hear or read every episode, find out more information about the topics therein, get links to all the guests, see the full dictionary entry for the randomly selected words, you can visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
