I once heard tale of a young woman from Japan wandering the halls of a Canadian mall, looking for a taste of home to to fill the hole in her homesick soul. "Excuse me," she'd say to passers-by. "Where can I find shoe cream?" They'd point her to the nearby Footlocker store with a bemused smile. She walked dutifully to the shoe store, but never entered. She simply looked in with sad eyes.
She didn't want shoe cream. So what did she want?
The Japanese are a fairly pragmatic bunch, especially when it comes to words. While they have many of their own to describe those things that are common to them, they see no need to make up new words for the things introduced to them from other parts of the world. They call bread pan from the French word pain1. They call coin lockers "coin rockas". They have a word for it: gairaigo. (It's not borrowed from anyone else.)
Borrowing words is hardly uncommon, but the Japanese language has fewer sounds than most other languages. That's why they make some drastic alterations to some words, dropping many or even most of the relevant sounds, or changing the sounds enough to baffle even the most careful listener of the original language. An example of the first is “pah so con”, which is meant to mean “personal computer”. That's a loss of half the syllables! An example of the second is “stah ji oh”, which is meant to mean “studio”.
Most Japanese are unaware that their borrowed words have been changed so drastically that they're no longer intelligible at the source. They think the mangled terms should be understood just fine. Much hilarity ensues.
This brings us back to “shoe cream” which, even when you know what it means, is still baffling. It means cream puff. At least now you can understand her disappointment in finding footwear when her craving was for cream puffs. But what is the origin of the term? I always thought it likely to be French, for two reasons. One: pastries. Two: the sounds. My knowledge of French is limited, but francophones I asked were also stumped.
Then by random chance I found the answer on Wikipedia. It’s slightly strange. A florentine chef moved to France with the court of Catherine de’Medici (I had no idea, either, but she became Queen of France, which at the time was a pretty big deal) and seven years later invented a new way to cook dough puffy. Inevitably, the puffy pastries had nipples added and were named after boobs (Popelins). Also inevitably, the booby pastries lost both their charm and their nipples and (here the inevitability ends) were renamed to celebrate their resemblance to cabbages.
The French word for cabbage is “choux”, which to English ears sound exactly like “shoe”. Add a little cream (technically, the Japanese use custard) and you’ve got yourself a sweet little treat. Unlike the poor woman at the start of this story.
By the way, I have no recollection how I ended up reading about the history of cream puffs. You can find yourself in the strangest places when you meander the internet. I promise not to write about all of them.
1 UPDATE! It has been pointed out to me that pan comes from the Portuguese word pão.
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