Tag Archives: Language

tsp to smbc: Culinary Vernacular and the Evolution of Language in Personal Recipes

By KC Hysmith

Brillat-Savarin might be able to tell you about yourself based on the food you eat, but I bet I can tell you even more by how you abbreviate the word “teaspoon” when writing out a recipe. No matter how you learned to shorten it, the way you write “teaspoon” reveals ample information about your culinary influences. Looking at a larger body of work, such as someone’s personal recipe collection, provides even more details.  

Personal recipe collections contain countless semiotic clues about their authors, but they also hold linguistic tells of shared experiences and community, revealing historical, social, and economical insights about all the people and places that made each recipe possible. Through the lens of measurement abbreviations, this post considers the importance of a shared culinary vernacular and how it passes between recipe collections (from one generation to the next; from one demographic to another) in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century American world, and analyzes the evolution of language, especially in regards to transcription and the shift from analog to digital.

Food scholars Amy L. Tigner and Allison Carruth argue that recipe writing serves as a kind of literary vernacular practice with “quotidian modes of writing that develop within specific historical contexts and that intermix rhetorical and aesthetic craft with the dissemination of applied knowledge that is variously empirical, sensory, instructive, interactive, and intergenerational.”[i] The deliberate use of the concept of vernacular versus “jargon,” “dialect,” or “code” highlights the particularity of recipe language and its functional design (which Tigner and Carruth align with the word’s “Latin root vernaculus, meaning domestic”).

There’s no official abbreviation, as each major publication from published cookbooks to legacy media outlets has their own preference, but common versions include: “tsp.” (with period), “tsp” (sans period), a lowercase “t,” “ts,” and “tspn”. It’s never a capital “T,” because that is typically saved for denoting tablespoons (unless you’re German or Dutch, then you’ll likely use a capital “TL” for Teelöffel or Theelepel, which translates to “teaspoon,” respectively). All of these variations came about thanks to numerous colliding forces including culinary literacy, generational trends, cooking methods, and technologies ranging from writing implements to autocorrect (and now, AI).

While personal recipes might start as strictly private, ephemeral texts, they sometimes become shared semi-public artefacts. Countless personal recipes have been shared in community and church cookbooks (often with myriad culinary vernacular stylings)). My departed mother’s recipe for pan de campo (she also uses “tsp,” but funnily does not abbreviate “cup”) sits framed on my office wall. And my personal recipe for cornbread (I use the little “t” notation, when I’m not dealing in metric), has been passed through many hands, in both written and digital forms. Even celebrity chefs with professionally published cookbooks sometimes find their personal recipes in the public eye; consider Julia Child’s handwritten recipe for pain de mie (she uses “tsp” and “c.”) which was pulled from her personal collection and is now on display at the National Museum of American History.

Sharing culinary information is part of our society’s cultural tradition, a custom that blurs the relationship between private recipe text and public artefact.

A scanned image of a page with cake recipes from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896.
Fig. 1. Recipes for cake, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, Fannie Farmer, 1896, Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project.

 

The ubiquitous use of standardized measurements—using a “tsp” versus the more obscure “spoonful”—transformed the world of recipe writing. Until the early twentieth century, recipes were incredibly imprecise, according to food historian Helen Zoe Veit, owing to the lack of oven thermometers, timepieces, and “scant tools available to ordinary people to tell exactly how much of an ingredient they were adding.”[ii] Though many contributed to this shift, domestic scientist and culinary lead of the famous nineteenth-century Boston Cooking School, Fannie Farmer, is widely considered the “mother of level measurements” in the United States. Farmer’s methods—along with several other recipe writing “best practices” such as ingredient lists and ordinal instructions—were quickly adopted along with a nationwide trend towards the scientific standardization of all spaces in the age of industrialization.

But recipes are more than their measured ingredients. How we name recipes (or don’t) plays a part in this vernacular, too, with longer titles losing adjectives along the way. When we write recipes for ourselves, we often write instructions as truncated actions, generously detailed instructions, or some combination. And then there are the recipes that are mere lists of ingredient ratios that expect the reader to know how to combine them, a shift from early historical recipes that were mostly instructions with a few non-standard measurements sprinkled in (if you were lucky).

A folded over lined notebook, messy with ingredient smudges and drips, lists ingredients in metric measurements for a banana and tahini baked good.
Fig. 2. Recipe for Banana Tahini Muffins by Oona O’Toole, baker at While You’re Up Bakery in Carrboro, NC, texted to the author without instructions.
A scanned image of a manuscript page full of sprawling handwriting explaining a 17th century gingerbread recipe.
Fig. 3. A recipe for gingerbread, “A collection of medical receipts and prescriptions,” MS502, 1650, Royal College of Physicians catalogue

 

The advent and exponential use of the Internet in the aughts and 2010s created additional influences on the recipe vernacular, for as the amount of information available grew, our attention spans shrunk even as recipe titles grew longer (ex: Briny, Garlicky, Lemony Green Beans with Quick-Pickled Red Onions). The acronyms and abbreviated words of Internetspeak (LOL) were already well worn linguistic territory of recipe writing. Linguist Gretchen McCulloch argues that “Internet acronyms are a perfect example of the intersection between writing and informality.”[iii] Then came social media. At first there were character limits, 140 characters for X (formerly Twitter) and 2200 for Instagram. Early Twitter users relied on code-like workarounds—slashes, no spaces, symbols—to fit full recipes into the character container.

A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.
Fig. 4. A screenshot of a Twitter (X) post by Maureen Evans (@cookbook) featuring a recipe for Pumpkin Pie.

 

A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.
Fig. 5. A screenshot of the results of a query in the Instagram app for the hashtag #smbc. Results include nine preview square images of various cakes, upclose frosting shots, and a woman holding a massive bowl of buttercream.

 

On Instagram, where hashtags once helped drive more traffic to your post, bakers would use the tag #smbc to share a recipe for Swiss Meringue Buttercream Frosting. With far more characters to work with but even shorter user attention spans, Instagram recipes take on many abbreviated forms using bullet points, articleless phrases, and the ample use of symbolic emoji.

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking featuring a recipe for Funfetti sourdough. An image of a jar of sprinkled, rising dough is on the left and a caption with the emoji-sprinkled recipe is on the right.
Fig. 6. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @natashas_baking.

 

A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury featuring a recipe for SMBC. The recipe is listed in detail in the caption and as an ingredient list in the image.
Fig. 7. A screenshot of an Instagram post by @philkhoury.

 

Even with more technology than ever before, the way we share recipes still tends to rely on a shared culinary vernacular. And while McCulloch argues that “writing systems are greatly affected by the tools available to make them,”[iv] our collective understanding of “tsp” (or “TL” for German speakers) remains. However we abbreviate or piece together our instructions, recipe writers both professional and personal recognize one another by our shared understanding and appreciation of the small—but important—details of recipe writing.

 

[i] Amy Tigner and Allison Carruth, Literature and Food Studies (London: Routledge, 2017), 3.

[ii] Helen Zoe Veit, “The Making of the Modern American Recipe,Smithsonian Magazine, 19 September 2017.

[iii] Gretchen McCulloch, Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (New York: Penguin, 2019), 11.

[iv] McCulloch, Because Internet, 13.


KC Hysmith, PhD, is a food scholar and writer who focuses on the intersections of food history, gender, and digital media. She is the co-author and co-editor of several books on food culture including When Southern Women Cook (America’s Test Kitchen) and An American Girl Anthology. She holds a PhD in food studies from the University of North Carolina and an MLA in Gastronomy. See more of her work at kchysmith.com.

Revisiting Tillmann Taape’s Recipes against the plague – in pharmaceutical code?

Editor’s note: Today we revisit a post originally published in 2013 by Tillmann Taape on plague remedies given by the apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig in his Liber pestilentialis (1500). The book included an interesting mix of recipes in the vernacular German and in Latin. Readers unable to read Latin could copy a recipe, visit their apothecary, and collect their anti-plague remedies a little while later. Tillmann’s post offers  insights into the use of Latin as a sort of code. 

It strikes me that, five hundred years on, in the midst of another pandemic, Latin has now been almost entirely replaced by English in scientific discourse. And yet, Latin still lingers on, not the least in the name of the disease that has changed our lives: corona, the crown. To this classicist, the name ‘coronavirus’ calls to mind an evil crown-wearing tyrant. But as it did in the late Middle Ages, Latin obfuscates as much as it clarifies, and I find it fascinating that, to many, the new plague, under its shortened name of COVID-19, evokes not an item of jewellery, but a family of birds: the corvids (Latin: corvidae).

Laurence Totelin


By Tillmann Taape

Although the plague is best known for having wiped out about a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, it continued to loom large as a threat to people’s health for hundreds of years, and medical writings on the Black Death or the ‘pestilence’ abounded. One of them, the Liber pestilentialis (1500) by the surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig (introduced here), was the first of its kind to be published as a printed book. Written in German, it had the potential to instruct a wide readership, reflecting Brunschwig’s mission to disseminate medical knowledge among laypeople. It struck me as somewhat odd, therefore, that quite a few of the recipes for remedies against the plague were given in Latin. What use were these to the readers of a book which was specifically addressed to all social ranks, including ‘common people’ who were not part of the Latin-speaking learned élite? Fortunately, Brunschwig provided an answer only a few pages on: simply copy the recipe on a slip of paper, send it off to your local apothecary, and collect your anti-plague pills a few days later.

Since Brunschwig was himself an apothecary in Strasbourg where the Liber pestilentialis was first published, one might suspect that by including these recipes he was hoping to advertise his trade, and draw attention to the knowledge and skill required to turn such coded messages into remedies. By his own admission, though, this only worked for readers who lived a manageable distance from an apothecary and could afford his services and ingredients, some of which, like theriac or amber, could be very costly. But Brunschwig also catered for those readers who lived in remote villages or were less well off. Often on the same page as the Latin instructions, he included an alternative recipe in German, using cheap everyday ingredients and simple household techniques.

This commitment to his less privileged readers, present in much of Brunschwig’s work, suggests that he was not printing recipes ‘in code’ simply in order to improve apothecaries’ image or to turn a better profit, much less to monopolise medical knowledge. There was, in fact, another very good reason for the use of Latin, as he explains in an intriguing comment: “Many recipes and ingredients cannot be succinctly expressed in the German language […], so I have left them in Latin.”

Some things are best left to professionals: mixing medicines at the apothecary's shop (from Brunschwig's 'Buch der CIrurgia')
Some things are best left to professionals: mixing medicines at the apothecary’s shop (from Brunschwig’s ‘Buch der CIrurgia’). (c) Wellcome Images

This points to a major difficulty faced by all medical authors writing in their native tongue. They were not only up against the disdain of learned physicians who wanted to keep all medical knowledge within university walls, well away from the ignorant ‘common people’. They were also facing the daunting task of creating a scientific vernacular in which to express medical concepts: how the human body works, what happens when it becomes diseased, and what to do about it. Finding their feet on uncharted linguistic territory and creating medical terminologies was the work of generations of practitioners from the middle ages to the early modern era. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, this process had come a long way, as Brunschwig’s writing shows: in his books on surgery and distillation (see here and here), he articulates elaborate techniques and medical theories in a confident technical vernacular – albeit one peppered with terms borrowed from Latin. In the case of specialist pharmaceutical ingredients and preparations, however, Brunschwig clearly felt that no adequate vocabulary was available in German. Some ingredients were just too  specific or too exotic to be known to the layman. Perhaps even more problematic were shorthand instructions such as fiat pulvis (it shall be a powder) or formentur pillule communi quantitatis (pills of equal quantity shall be formed). One can imagine what these few words translated to in practice: complicated series of decoctions, infusions, drying, boiling, grinding and mixing, all defined and learned over the course of an apprenticeship.

With no alternative to certain elements of Latin pharmaceutical jargon, then, the recipes in Brunschwig’s Liber pestilentialis inevitably fell into two categories. On the one hand, his wealthier readers had the option of having ‘professional’ remedies made according to the Latin recipes, which allowed them to tap into the entire range of medicinal ingredients and preparation techniques available at the nearest apothecary’s shop. Poorer folks and country dwellers, on the other hand, were offered a different type of recipe which could be articulated in the vernacular, required cheaper ingredients and could be managed at home.

Recipes against the plague – in pharmaceutical code?

By Tillmann Taape

Although the plague is best known for having wiped out about a third of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century, it continued to loom large as a threat to people’s health for hundreds of years, and medical writings on the Black Death or the ‘pestilence’ abounded (see e.g. Lisa Smith’s post on coffee as a cure for plague in eighteenth-century London). One of them, the Liber pestilentialis (1500) by the surgeon-apothecary Hieronymus Brunschwig (introduced here), was the first of its kind to be published as a printed book. Written in German, it had the potential to instruct a wide readership, reflecting Brunschwig’s mission to disseminate medical knowledge among laypeople. It struck me as somewhat odd, therefore, that quite a few of the recipes for remedies against the plague were given in Latin. What use were these to the readers of a book which was specifically addressed to all social ranks, including ‘common people’ who were not part of the Latin-speaking learned élite? Fortunately, Brunschwig provided an answer only a few pages on: simply copy the recipe on a slip of paper, send it off to your local apothecary, and collect your anti-plague pills a few days later.

Since Brunschwig was himself an apothecary in Strasbourg where the Liber pestilentialis was first published, one might suspect that by including these recipes he was hoping to advertise his trade, and draw attention to the knowledge and skill required to turn such coded messages into remedies. By his own admission, though, this only worked for readers who lived a manageable distance from an apothecary and could afford his services and ingredients, some of which, like theriac or amber, could be very costly. But Brunschwig also catered for those readers who lived in remote villages or were less well off. Often on the same page as the Latin instructions, he included an alternative recipe in German, using cheap everyday ingredients and simple household techniques.

This commitment to his less privileged readers, present in much of Brunschwig’s work, suggests that he was not printing recipes ‘in code’ simply in order to improve apothecaries’ image or to turn a better profit, much less to monopolise medical knowledge. There was, in fact, another very good reason for the use of Latin, as he explains in an intriguing comment: “Many recipes and ingredients cannot be succinctly expressed in the German language […], so I have left them in Latin.”

Some things are best left to professionals: mixing medicines at the apothecary's shop (from Brunschwig's 'Buch der CIrurgia')
Some things are best left to professionals: mixing medicines at the apothecary’s shop (from Brunschwig’s ‘Buch der CIrurgia’). (c) Wellcome Images

This points to a major difficulty faced by all medical authors writing in their native tongue. They were not only up against the disdain of learned physicians who wanted to keep all medical knowledge within university walls, well away from the ignorant ‘common people’. They were also facing the daunting task of creating a scientific vernacular in which to express medical concepts: how the human body works, what happens when it becomes diseased, and what to do about it. Finding their feet on uncharted linguistic territory and creating medical terminologies was the work of generations of practitioners from the middle ages to the early modern era. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, this process had come a long way, as Brunschwig’s writing shows: in his books on surgery and distillation (see here and here), he articulates elaborate techniques and medical theories in a confident technical vernacular – albeit one peppered with terms borrowed from Latin. In the case of specialist pharmaceutical ingredients and preparations, however, Brunschwig clearly felt that no adequate vocabulary was available in German. Some ingredients were just too  specific or too exotic to be known to the layman. Perhaps even more problematic were shorthand instructions such as fiat pulvis (it shall be a powder) or formentur pillule communi quantitatis (pills of equal quantity shall be formed). One can imagine what these few words translated to in practice: complicated series of decoctions, infusions, drying, boiling, grinding and mixing, all defined and learned over the course of an apprenticeship.

With no alternative to certain elements of Latin pharmaceutical jargon, then, the recipes in Brunschwig’s Liber pestilentialis inevitably fell into two categories. On the one hand, his wealthier readers had the option of having ‘professional’ remedies made according to the Latin recipes, which allowed them to tap into the entire range of medicinal ingredients and preparation techniques available at the nearest apothecary’s shop. Poorer folks and country dwellers, on the other hand, were offered a different type of recipe which could be articulated in the vernacular, required cheaper ingredients and could be managed at home.