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Acadian Food Words & New Origin of the Word Acadia

A New Origin of The Word Acadia

&

A Brief History of Acadia and Acadian French

 

Acadia was the name of the first permanent colony that France founded in North America, roughly comprising parts of what became the Canadian provinces of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Acadians are descended from French colonists who homesteaded first in 1604 on St. Croix Island and then in 1605 at Port Royal. For most of the next 150 years, Acadia was a political pingpong ball, batted back and forth between warring enemies, England and France. Most Acadian pioneers who arrived from France throughout the 17th century trace their ancestry to French emigrants who came from areas in France south of the Loire River. More than half of Canada's present Acadian population of approximately 400,000 have forebears who came from the historic French provinces of Poitou, Aunis, Santonge, and Guyenne.

Acadian French & The People Who Speak Chiac

Present-day Acadians speak a lively dialect of French which contains many archaic vocabulary items that arose in the provincial dialects of old France and that long ago disappeared from standard French. Acadian French also boasts words and usages that differ from the other chief dialect of the language in Canada, namely Québécois French. For example, Quebec French uses a Huron word atoca for 'cranberry.' Standard French is canneberge. Acadian French is pomme de prée 'meadow apple.' Note another common kind of difference here in which the form of words alters slightly between a dialect and a literary language. Here the old Acadian word for meadow, la prée, is feminine, but in standard French it is masculine, le pré.

As well as distinctive phonetic features, words like charrette 'cart' and coquemar 'kettle' adorn Acadian speech.

                                                                                                        © Canada Post Corporation

 

A wild herb of the maritimes that tastes like coriander and can be used to replace it in recipes has the delightful Acadian name of poivre des pauvres gens 'poor people's pepper.'

On the predominantly Acadian Îles de la Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, one still hears bargou (see the entry below for this word), an old Acadian word for oatmeal porridge, distinct from the standard French for porridge, gruau, related to the Old French word gruel, which was borrowed into Middle English. Old French gruel was a diminutive form of Old French gru 'coarse-ground grain.' Bargou seems to have been borrowed into Acadian French from 17th-century English nautical slang where the word burgoo meant 'thick oatmeal porridge.'

Like all dialects, Acadian has its own slang, and its own word for this argot, chiac, based on a local pronunciation of Shédiac, an Acadian town in New Brunswick, also famous for its Shediac oysters. Chiac has plenty of Acadian words from old French dialects, and some North American English borrowings transformed by Acadian French spellings and pronunciations.

By 1755, Acadia was again British and called Nova Scotia, and the British wished to secure the colony against all further French "trouble," first by bringing colonists loyal to Britain into Nova Scotia. In the decade from 1750 to 1760, more than 10,000 emigrants arrived from New England and from parts of Germany like Hanover and Brunswick. The defining catastrophe of Acadian history began in 1755 when England, fed up with Acadians who staunchly refused to swear oaths of allegiance to Britain but also wanting to rid Nova Scotia of anyone with French ties, ordered mass deportation of the Acadians by imperial fiat. This expulsion of the Acadians, which lasted until 1762, forced more than 10,000 people out of their homes. Families were broken asunder. Acadians who did not cooperate in their own deportation were jailed or sent back to France, in some cases by way of prison camps in England. Acadians were also shipped unwillingly down the eastern seaboard to New England to British colonies that did not want them but were forced by London to take them.

 

Some Acadians, after deportation into the British Colonies, England, English Territories and France and French Territories, found their way into the swampy bayous of Southern Louisiana beginning in 1762 through 1785 where they formed their own culture, and where the word Acadien was shortened and Americanized to Cajun. Cajun folk music is still alive and distinct in Louisiana, as are Cajun dishes like jambalaya and the spicy filé gumbo in which powdered sassafras leaves are used to thicken the gumbo.

Some Acadians did not wait to be deported but fled into hiding in parts of what would become Quebec. Other exiled Acadians died of hunger, shipwreck, disease, and forced marches out of heir homeland.

Only after France gave up all claims to her Atlantic holdings and to all of New France in the Treaty of Paris in 1763, did England grudgingly permit sporadic resettlement of the Acadian people. Fugitives came out of their hiding places inland; Acadian prisoners were released from custody; other Acadian exiles returned from British colonies in the south. They had to swear unconditional loyalty to Britain, of course. To their great dismay, returning Acadians found that the very farmlands they had themselves cleared had been given during their exile to British and German immigrants. Acadians were not welcome where fields were fertile. Poor and kept poor, they were forced to settle on remote and rocky shorelines, and to take up a new way of making a living, subsistence fishing. As Roman Catholics, they had no civil rights and did not exist politically. Until 1789, Acadians could not vote in Nova Scotia. They couldn't vote in Prince Edward Island until 1830. During the period of the expulsions from 1758 to 1763, Acadians could not own land in the colony.

The expulsion of the Acadians, at Grand Pré, near Windsor on the Bay of Fundy, when hundreds of Acadians were driven from their houses and into waiting ships to carry them south, in the 1760s.
ID #10144 Credit: National Archives of Canada / C-24549

By grit and slow perseverance Acadians today in Canada have left behind their exile, but not forgotten it. Memories of poverty and subsistence remain, however, in the kinds of foods that are traditional among them, in the simplicity of make-do recipes, which ingenious cooks have fashioned over four centuries into a tasty cuisine that, as much as any part of their heritage, still calls forth Acadian joy and memories of the warm comfort of home cooking.

I could not list every food word that is exclusively Acadian in this brief survey, but I hope you will see in the notes and dishes offered here something of the remarkable resilience of Acadians, who now abound in every important profession of Canadian life, from the Governor-General's house of Rideau Hall where the genial Acadian Roméo LeBlanc once welcomed the world on behalf of his people and his country, all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada where another Acadian adorned our highest legal office, Mr. Justice Michel Bastarache. In folklore and folk music, Acadians have always been strong and proud. One thinks of Acadian singer-composers like Edith Butler and Angèle Arsenault.

 

 

 

The mid-twentieth century has seen the rise of talented Acadian writers, perhaps of most renown the dramatist and novelist Antonine Maillet whose dramatic monologue of an old Acadian washerwoman, La Sagouine (1971), is one of the masterpieces of Canadian literature. Among the wry memories of this seventy-two-year-old scrub lady are recollections of how the poor eat: flapjacks reheated for three meals and the only Sunday treat a serving of beans. Maillet's work gives a voice—many voices—to the personal history of her people.

My own favourite Maillet is the chorus of voices of returning Acadians in her novel Pélagie-La-Charette (1979), available in an English translation as Pélagie: The Return to a Homeland (1982). This unepic epic sold a million copies in France and won the prestigious Prix Goncourt. In this saga, a young Acadian widow performs a laborious ten-year trek in an oxcart from exile in Georgia up the eastern seaboard of America and back to her home in Acadia. Maillet's French is a unique mélange of Acadian dialect and literary French, but her characters and their humour and their tribulations sound gongs in any human heart that is open to fellow beings.

Acadian French Itself

Acadien, Acadian French, is spoken along our east coast in Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton Island, and also heard in some communties on the north shore of the St. Lawrence and the islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Acadian settlers came chiefly from the French provinces of Aunis, Poitou, and Saintonge, and this historical fact accounts for the wonderful, burly clout of Acadien, for the stock of old French vocabulary items and bits of ancient syntax preserved in the amber of this robust dialect. Standard French for wheelbarrow may be brancard, but in L'Acadie it's boyart. The mailman might be a facteur in France, a postier in most of Quebec, but in purest Acadien the name of his occupation recalls the days of coach and four, because he's a postillon. English borrowed this to get postillion, one who rides a post-horse or one who rides the near horse of a team when there is no coachman. Another Acadianism is bec for any high ground, instead of the Standard French élévation. Fence in SF is clôture, but in Acadian French it's a mouthful, bouchure.

Barachois on the Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland

Barachois is an Acadian French word that is used in English on Cape Breton Island, and in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and sixty-six times in Newfoundland place names. Barachoix was Norman French for sandbar. Early Basque fishermen used it too, referring to a sandbar or gravel bar in front of a saltwater pond, where they could haul up their boats. In Canada's Atlantic provinces it means a saline pond near a larger body of water that is cut off from it by a sandbar or narrow strip of land. Sometimes one sees it Englished as barrisway or barrasway. Newfoundland has Barasway de Cerf (a pond where you might see a deer), and the delightful mouthful L'Anse au Loup Barasway (Wolf Bay Cove). Also on The Rock the diligent toponymist finds Rocky Barachois Bight. Barachois is a very frequent element in maritime place names. Almost at the tip of the Gaspé peninsula is the Quebec village of Barachois-de-Malbaie. Near Shediac in New Brunswick is another big B, while Newfoundland's south coast claims Barachois Bay and Barachois Point. In Nova Scotia, there's MacLean Barachois, pleasantly combining the memories of two of the province's founding linguistic forces: Gaelic and Acadien.

A Newly Suggested Origin of the name Acadia

Nova Scotia means 'New Scotland' in Latin. So stated the royal grant of land issued to Sir William Alexander in 1621. But until 1713 the area was officially called Acadia, which at the time included parts of Quebec and New England. Now Acadia is generally used to mean the area of original French settlement in our maritime provinces. The Italian navigator Giovanni da Verrazano first named it Archadia in 1524, while he explored the east coast of America as commander of a French expedition. He also discovered what became New York Bay, and the Verrazano Bridge to New York City is named after him. He misspelled the Latin word Arcadia—possibly because of its pronunciation in his particular Italian dialect. But that was not the only slip of the pen affecting this place name. In the diary of his voyage to the New World, Verrazano stated that he named a stretch of the coast along what came to be called Chesapeake Bay Archadia because of "the beauty of its trees." Later in the 16th century, mapmakers applied the name Arcadia to land to the north around Cape Cod. Slightly later yet another cartographer pasted the label on the coast of Maine; still later, Arcadia was applied to the Atlantic regions of New France, particularly to present-day Nova Scotia. The letter r began to disappear from the name on early maps—probably at first through a single copyist's error—so that eventually the region was known as Acadia and in French Acadie.

The First Arcadia

The Romans borrowed the word from the ancient Greeks who used it to denote a geographic area of mountainous forest in the centre of the Peloponnese. For Greek pastoral poets like Theocritus, Arcadia was a symbol of rural simplicity and the joys of the shepherd's life, tending flocks and making music all the day long with flute and pipes. It is probably the source of one of the oldest jokes in the European tradition. What do you call an Arcadian with forty mistresses? A shepherd.

The god Pan haunted the caves and streams of the original Arcady or Arcadia (shown on the map above). Sportive nymphs bounded happily through upland pastures and centaurs frisked in the clover.

Arcadia was such an evocative token of pastoral ease that it entered all the later languages of Europe. Although the precise origin of the word is lost, a study of classical Greek makes clear the reverberations that Arcadia set off in the Greek mind. Ancient Greeks heard similarities in its sound to arkys, a hunter's snare or net. Arcadia was the stomping grounds of the goddess Artemis, the virgin huntress known to the Romans as Diana. It reminded the Greeks also of their verb arkein 'to be strong, to endure, to be sufficient,' and its impersonal form, arkei moi  'it's enough for me; I'm happy, content.'

 

Stylized Victorian view of an Arcadian landscape in ancient Greece

And now, from frisky nymphs to the beckoning aromas of Acadian kitchens! Some of the Acadian food words presented here, like bargou, are exclusive to the Acadian dialect and are not common in Quebec French. Acadien shares other words, like fricot, with Quebec and continental French.

 

 

 

 

 

A Few Acadian French Food Words

 

BARGOU   (Oatmeal Porridge)

This Acadian word for oatmeal porridge is still heard on the Îles de la Madeleine. It is not in standard French and is infrequent in Quebec French. It appears to have been borrowed into Acadien directly from 18th-century British naval slang where burgoo was oatmeal gruel eaten by sailors. Canadian and American English also grabbed the term from British traders who used burgoo to name any unappetizing food, especially a thick stew made from camp or kitchen scraps of meat and vegetables. In the United States, a burgoo was a stew or meal eaten outside at a picnic or gathering, then burgoo came to be applied to such a gathering itself.

The word was first borrowed into English late in the 17th century by travellers who encountered a wheaten porridge in the Middle East called burgul, which in Arabic and Persian was 'bruised grain' or what we would call cracked wheat. Later on in the 20th century, English borrowed the word again in its Turkish form burghal. Bulgur or bulghur or bulgar wheat is still popular among vegetarians. It is basically coarse-ground dry porridge, made by boiling whole wheat grains, drying them, and then grinding them up. Lovers of Lebanese cuisine will know the use of bulghur wheat in the minty treat of tabbouleh salad.

Adding to the hop, skip, and jump of this word's voyages through history, we suggest that this wheat dish may bear the name of the people who first invented it, the Bulgars, an ancient Turkic people from grain-rich steppelands of central Asia who migrated and conquered indigenous Slavs of the lower Danube region during the 7th century and founded what became Bulgaria.

BOUCANIÈRE   (Smokehouse)

Some Acadians still smoke herring, hareng boucané, in little shacks with fires made of spruce sawdust. Salted herring, hareng salé, is hung above the smokey fire for two or three weeks. Smoked herring is eaten hot, cold, and even sometimes flaked and put into soups and stews.

Female pirates & buccaneers on a Jamaican stamp

Those nasty old pirates, the buccaneers, took their name from the same root that gives boucané 'smoked.' At the end of the 16th century and throughout the following century, boucaniers were, first, rough French hunters on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo who hunted the large herds of wild cattle sprung from escaped domestic stock brought earlier by Spanish explorers. These lawless ruffians dried and smoked their beef on a wooden grid called a boucan. The word could also refer to the little cabin in which the smoking was done. The French freebooters and criminals who infested the island and preyed on Spanish ships had borrowed the word and the technique from local Tupi people, in whose language mokaém or bokaem meant 'wooden grill on which meat or fish was smoked.' Soon boucanier came to refer to any Caribbean pirate. And it entered English quickly. By 1719, novelist Daniel Defoe had his most famous character, Robinson Crusoe, declare that he had "been an old Planter at Maryland, and a Buccaneer into the bargain." Even earlier, in 1700, Defoe referred in print to "Buccaneering Danes."

The actual fate of one buccaneer named Bluebeard

In Quebec French boucane is a slang word for bootleg hootch or homemade whisky, presumably because one needs smokey fires to make homebrew. One Quebec phrase for sunglasses is lunettes boucanées.

PETS DE SOEUR (Nun's Farts)

There is a hefty dollop of anticlerical humour in all dialects of French, and le français acadien is no exception. The stranglehold that the church once kept firmly about the neck of even secular affairs in small Acadian and Canadian French communities in olden days caused occasional resentment among people of the parishes, and one of the relatively innocent ways ordinary folk could get a soupçon of revenge against dictatorial priests and strap-armed teaching nuns was in the sacrilegious, off-colour satire of folk names for daily things. Nun's farts are little dessert pastries that look like cinnamon rolls. The t in pet is pronounced in Canadian French, but not always in continental French. These wee confections are also called bourriques de soeurs nuns' belly buttons,' or more politely rondelles 'slices' or hirondelles 'swallows.' Inching a little higher up the obscenity scale, one finds a doughnut-like roll made from leftover home- made bread dough called trous de soeur 'nun's holes.' They are usually eaten with molasses—to sweeten the experience.

 

Next Page, Part 2 of Acadian Food Words

 

 

For many more Acadian food words, see the entire chapter in my book Canadian Food Words.