Read The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu for Free Online

of the fish) and, therefore, comes third in the meal.]
     
    What we have here is a “language maven” complaining about a change in the language. ( Aux armes! The French masses are using the word entrée incorrectly!) Language mavens have probably been around pretty much since there were two speakers to complain about thevocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar of a third. They can be very useful for historical linguists, because grammar writers don’t complain about a change in the language until it’s already been widely adopted. So we can be pretty certain that in popular usage, entrée mostly meant “first course” in French by 1938.
    So, to review: The word entrée originally (in 1555) meant the opening course of a meal, one consisting of substantial hot “made” meat dishes, usually with a sauce, and 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 common usage, the meaning of entrée in American English was no longer opposed to fish or roast dishes, leaving the entrée as the single main course.
    In French, the word changed its meaning by the 1930s to mean a light course of eggs or seafood, essentially taking on much of the meaning of earlier terms like hors d’oeuvres or entremets. The change was presumably helped along by the fact that the literal French meaning (“entering, entrance”) was still transparent to French speakers, and perhaps as more speakers began to eat multicourse meals the word attached itself more readily to a first or entering course. So both French and American English retain some aspects of the original meaning of the word; French the “first course” aspect of the meaning (although that had actually died out by 1651) and American the “main meat course” aspect, which has been the main part of its meaning for 500 years.
    This shift has a deeper lesson about language change. We are carefully taught to clamp down on changes in language as if new ways of speaking are unnatural, adopted by ignorant speakers out of stupidity or even malice. Yet linguistic research demonstrates that the gradual changes in a language over time often lead to significant improvements in the language’s clarity or efficiency, as happened here with entrée . Everyday speakers in both France and America changed the meaning of entrée from an obscure third course in an archaic, aristocratic mealstructure to a useful term for an appetizer (in France) or a main course (in America), sensibly ignoring the complaints of the 1938 editors of the Larousse Gastronomique.
    What about the use of entrée now? One of the advantages of the narrow houses and dense neighborhoods of San Francisco is that the restaurants are all very close by, so a short walk down to Mission Street quickly answers that question. I checked all the menus of the 50 restaurants within a few blocks of us (Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Peruvian, Japanese, Indian, Salvadoran, Cambodian, Sardinian, Nepalese, Italian, Jordanian, Lebanese, barbecue, southern, plus the pairwise combinations like Chinese Peruvian roast chicken, Japanese French bakeries, and Indian pizza). The word entrée was used only at five restaurants. Not surprisingly these serve mainly European American rather than Asian or Latin American food.
    The vast increase in the number of ethnic restaurants and the fading of French words like entrée as a marker of social prestige in the United States are part of a general trend in food, music, and art that sociologists call cultural omnivorousness. Previously high culture was defined solely by a limited number of “legitimate” genres: classical music or opera, or French haute cuisine or wine. The modern high-culture omnivore, however, can be a fan of 1920s blues, or 1950s Cuban mambo, or the ethnic or regional foods championed by writers like Calvin