{"id":133,"date":"2018-03-01T07:36:12","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T07:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/?p=133"},"modified":"2018-03-01T07:36:12","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T07:36:12","slug":"entree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/2018\/03\/01\/entree\/","title":{"rendered":"Entree"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the peculiar habits that strikes a foreign visitor to a restaurant in the US (alongside heaps of ice in your drink and the sneaky habit of leaving sales tax off the price) is that menus typically list main course dishes as \u2018entrees\u2019. But \u2018entr\u00e9e\u2019 \u00a0is a French word that means something like \u2018entry\u2019 or \u2018entrance\u2019, so shouldn\u2019t it be the same thing as appetizer or hors-d\u2019oeuvre or starter? It seems like some fundamental misunderstanding of the term, like the rectangular chocolate \u2018croissants\u2019 shamelessly marketed outside of France.<\/p>\n

Well, yes and no. As an American I feel duty-bound to show that there is a systematic and logical explanation to how we got here, and that it\u2019s not just people being, well, confused. Partly it\u2019s a story of how word meanings change over time, but it\u2019s also a story of how the things words refer to themselves change to the point of unrecognizability.<\/p>\n

Things start in France, of course, as well summarized by Dan Jurafsky<\/a>:<\/p>\n

[\u2026] the word entr\u00e9e originally (in 1555) meant the opening course of a meal, one consisting of substantial hot ‘made’ meat dishes, usually with a sauce, then evolved to mean the same kind of dishes, but served as a third course after a soup and a fish, and before a roast fowl course. American usage kept this sense of a substantial meat course, and as distinct roast and fish courses dropped away from popular usage, the meaning of entree in American English was no longer opposed to fish or roast dishes, leaving the entree as the single main course.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jurafsky dates the shift in meaning to sometime between the 30s and the 50s, and identifies it as a particularly American phenomenon. In fact, the change appears to have started considerably earlier, and not just in North America. The secret of entr\u00e9e\u2019s success seems to have been its inclusiveness: fish is fish, roast is roast, but an entr\u00e9e could be pretty much anything. A 1908 issue of Good Housekeeping<\/em> tells us:<\/p>\n

An entree is often but a Made-up dish of leftovers, palatable and attractive, or it is a little more complicated way of serving an ordinary dish so that it can take the place of an entire course. All made dishes, therefore, are not entrees; they are only such when served as the main part of a course. So if one serves any complicated dish with a main dish of meat or poultry or fish, or even with a salad, it is not then called an entree, but a side dish.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By 1916 the St. Charles Caf\u00e9 in Dickinson, North Dakota combines entrees and roasts in a single course:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And by 1919 the Chocolate Shop in Phoenix, Arizona offers a Special French Dinner with an entr\u00e9e as the centerpiece, subsuming the roast:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

By 1928 fortunate diners could treat themselves to an entire meal based on Jell-O, with a Chicken Mouse as the entr\u00e9e, squeezed between Jell-O Fruit Cocktail and Jell-O Salad Supreme.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, in Australia things went quite a different route. There, the entr\u00e9e really has become the first course appetizer. Could this be the result of taking things too literally, like when people think that sugarplums — pretty much a forgotten food — were actually made from plums<\/a>? This would then be a kind of folk etymology — the reinterpretation of the meaning of a word on the basis of what it looks like it ought<\/em> to mean (and a topic well worth a separate post).<\/p>\n

I think though the story may be rather different; at least that\u2019s what I gather from exploring old issues of The Australian Women\u2019s Weekly<\/em><\/a>. The key date seems to be 1968. Before that, menus were structured either in the traditional way (with entr\u00e9e following soup and preceding the main course) or in the \u2018American\u2019 way (\u2018a three-course dinner of soup or fruit cocktail, roast or entr\u00e9e, and sweets or ice-cream and coffee\u2026\u2019 — from 1942). But in 1968 we find these competing orders in different issues:<\/p>\n

traditional: pre-dinner drinks, hors-d\u2019oeuvre, soup, entr\u00e9e<\/strong>, main course, dessert, demitasse<\/p>\n

innovative: pre-dinner drinks, hors-d\u2019oeuvre, entr\u00e9e<\/strong>, soup, main course, dessert, demitasse<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is, the entr\u00e9e has shifted to being before the soup, immediately next to the hors-d\u2019oeuvre. This, I hazard to guess, is the origin of the Australian state of affairs: a change in menu planning brought these two otherwise similar courses in direct contact, and they merged. (If The Australian Women\u2019s Weekly <\/em>can be taken as representative of Australian society as a whole.)<\/p>\n

In France meanwhile, the entr\u00e9e seems to have gone the same route as in Australia, and now occupies a position somewhere towards the beginning of the meal. Jurafsky suggests that this was indeed a kind of folk etymology, since the \u2018real\u2019 meaning of entr\u00e9e is pretty obvious in French. But if the (admittedly scanty, so far) Australian evidence is any indication, the \u201cobvious\u201d explanation may not be the correct one. Rather, it could well be a post-hoc justification. In any case, it does leave American English as the outlier.<\/p>\n

Or does it? The dictionary of the French Academy will have none of this. In its entry under entr\u00e9e, alongside the more-or-less classic definition (\u2018Mets qui vient apr\u00e8s les hors-d’\u0153uvre et pr\u00e9c\u00e8de le plat principal\u2019 [dishes which come after the hors-d\u2019oeuvre and precede the main dish]) it adds \u2018Par ext. Plat principal. Un repas compos\u00e9 d’un hors-d’\u0153uvre, une entr\u00e9e et un dessert.\u2019 [By extension: main dish. A meal consisting of an hors-d\u2019oeuvre, an entr\u00e9e and a dessert]. In other words, just like our Jell-O meal of 1928. Perhaps American usage isn\u2019t so peculiar after all. But this flies in the face of contemporary French usage. That may be par for the course for the French Academy Dictionary, but one does wonder what usage this definition is actually reflecting. This suggests the semantic development of the word has been far more complex than is apparent on the surface. Some serious archival work is in order\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the peculiar habits that strikes a foreign visitor to a restaurant in the US (alongside heaps of ice in your drink and the sneaky habit of leaving sales tax off the price) is that menus typically list main course dishes as \u2018entrees\u2019. But \u2018entr\u00e9e\u2019 \u00a0is a French word that means something like \u2018entry\u2019 or \u2018entrance\u2019, so shouldn\u2019t it be the same thing as appetizer or hors-d\u2019oeuvre or starter? It seems like some fundamental misunderstanding of the term, like…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,25,19],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-languages","category-etymology","category-french-languages"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":160,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morph.surrey.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}