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Ha! Great story. And to think I was disappointed the other night because I couldn't find the exact type of hot pepper I was after and had to settle for habaneros. We are living in a golden age of food. Yet wars were fought over access to black pepper.

It's difficult to believe, but just 100 years ago a food as commonplace as spaghetti with tomato sauce was considered somewhat exotic; at the least predominately an ethnic Italian dish.

Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat. Cornell university is famous for a basting sauce, as a result of an effort to encourage more domestic consumption of chicken.

I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.

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On one hand, global shipping has made this a golden age of food. On the other, we're living through a food apocalypse, where local ingredients, styles, and recipes are being obliterated by processed ingredients, factory food, and fast food.

In Minneapolis, there's a chef who calls himself the "Sioux Chef", who is dedicated to preserving pre-colonial Native American foods. A big part of this is the ingredients... no flour, no cooking oil, no refined sugar, no beef or pork, etc. The "frybread" that we think of as "Indian food" today is totally a product of conquest... when the only ingredients available were flour, cooking oil, and cheap ground beef.

I hate to even imagine what's happening to the Kentucky bbq tradition I grew up on.

Growing up in the frozen north gives a nice impression of this.

As half the year makes it impossible to farm, the winter months consisted traditionally of anything that could be salted, dried, and/or pickled.

But these days we can pick up fresh strawberries in the store year round.

In Copenhagen, there's a similar style restaurant that only uses old world ingredients for similar reasons.

Two Michelin starred, too! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noma_(restaurant)

> I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.

I'll have to try stretchy Turkish ice-cream sometime (where do you find that?) but Pad Thai and bulgogi are already everyday foods you can find on every corner of every strip mall in the part of America where I live.

Yeah, and I've been seeing bulgogi marinade in mainstream Bay Area supermarkets. I use it for everything. Which reminds me that I need to call my grandparents...

I think Trader Joe's has a heat-n-eat pre-marinated vacuum pack, too.

By the way, since ‘Stretchy Turkish Ice Cream’ is a handful, it is called ‘Dondurma’. It is a form of gelato, but stretchier, and with a different flavour set. The city of Maraş is famous for it.

Important to note that native speakers would refer to the stretchy ice cream as "dovme dondurma", which roughly translates to "beaten ice cream".

The distinction seems to be: > Two qualities distinguish Turkish ice cream: hard texture and resistance to melting, brought about by inclusion of the thickening agents salep, a flour made from the root of the early purple orchid, and mastic, a resin that imparts chewiness.[citation needed]

> The Kahramanmaraş region is known for maraş dondurması, a variety which contains distinctly more salep than usual. Tough and sticky, it is sometimes eaten with a knife and fork.[citation needed]

I'm a native speaker, I think it depends on the region. But yeah, "dövme dondurma" is more specific. The part I'm from did not make the distinction, however.

Could have sworn that HN had an article a while back about Japanese icecream that had similar additives, for the purpose to slow the melting.

I tried that in Turkey and it was really meh. Probably I was was way too deep in a touristy area and got the worst quality possible, but there is something about the taste of the things that make it chewy that covers the actual flavour: the pink, brown and white ones tasted all kinda the same. I'll ask for suggestions to some local friend and try again.

next time try with baklava :)

The requisite starch for dondurma (Turkish ice cream) is banned from export, due to the rarity of the orchids that produce it (also slow growth and very low yields). I'd be surprised if anyone regularly makes dondurma in the US.

See the BBC's legendary spaghetti tree hoax from April Fool's Day, 1957. A lot of viewers really were taken in by the idea that spaghetti grew on trees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU

> Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat.

I remember going to my great-grandparents' house with KFC, because, to them (born circa 1900) fried chicken was food you ate on special occasions.

Which makes perfect sense: Frying anything is messy work (I know from personal experience aerosolized grease stings) and if chicken is expensive on top of that, fried chicken would be doubly uncommon for the average person, especially if they grew up poor, as my great-grandparents did.

Fried chicken is the perfect food to eat at a restaurant. Prep starts 24 hrs in advance with brining the chicken. Breading process is messy. Lots of oil required. Difficult to get the temperature and timing just right. None of these are issues for restaurants where they are making it constantly and have enough experience to dial in the cooking. Plus, since those restaurants are usually selling large volume, it's still cheap.

The best fried chicken in the Twin Cities, the prep starts on monday and it's only served on friday. Two-stage brining process, first in a very intense salt/sugar brine, and then in buttermilk. My daughter used to work the kitchen there and has the recipe, but it's like 40 ingredients and the breading is best made in buckets.

You don't make something like that at home.

Wow, what is the name of that restaurant? I don't plan to be in the twin cities any time soon but I'll still make a Yelp bookmark just in case!

Sandcastle. It's the food stand at Lake Nokomis Park, which is run by Doug Flicker, who created the late great Piccolo (an internationally famous restaurant), and the Esker Grove restaurant at the Walker. Amazing just how good a food shack in a city park can get when you let a famous chef run it!

They are only open during the summer (April-ish to October-ish), and fried chicken is only served on fridays. And they only make 30 servings, so GET THERE if you want some, before it sells out. There will be a line.

If you want Doug Flicker fried chicken and don't want to wait, you can also get some at Bull's Horn, his new neighborhood tavern at 46th St and 34th Ave. It's a different recipe, but still very good.

Everyone else agrees that Revival has the best fried chicken. They're wrong. Revival's chicken is a bit underseasoned imho (but excellent). Victory 44 was right up there with those two, but closed recently. Sigh.

>Cornell university is famous for a basting sauce

See: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cornell-chicken-barbec...

Yep. That's the stuff. We use it all the time on grilled chicken. Best made fresh (and it's quite easy) but there's a commercial brand called "Spidie's State Fair Sauce" or similar that gets very close for those who can't wait.

>> Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat.

Hoover promised voters 'a chicken in every pot' almost 100 years ago. 50 years ago, yard bird was a very common meal for Americans of every income level.

But 200 years ago, everyone had their fill on passenger pigeons.

The story of how they went from most populous bird in North America to totally extinct is fascinating, if a bit depressing.

> I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.

I guess it would depend on the individual definition of "everyday." Personally, I eat more pad thai than I do cheeseburgers. I don't eat much Korean BBQ anymore but my wife and I do stop by a Korean place pretty often to have Galbi-tang and sometimes Dolsot Bibimbap. I haven't had In-N-Out in probably 7 or 8 weeks, though, which would make it more of a rarity in my own life than: Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai food.

Yeah, everyday food is a matter of where you live. I make a point of going out for banh mi every two weeks or so. I eat a remarkable amount of Somali food, thanks to a local restaurant I like (most Somali restaurants aren't that great, but this guy Gets It). If we had more western African food rather than just east African, I'd eat a LOT more of it... I love Nigerian and Ghana kinds of cooking.

It's interesting to see the dynamic of new ethnic food. Immigrants come and discover that their best hope of owning their own business is a restaurant where they work themselves to death to offer cheap interesting food. I'd love to see a history of ethnic food in America: Jewish, Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Mexican. There's a Somali restaurant near where I work, next door to a mosque, but the only thing I've been brave enough to try there is the Gyros which is quite generic. It's good food at a great value if you don't mind waiting forever while they prepare it.

Minneapolis is a sanctuary city and has a huge Somali population, so there are a lot of Somali restaurants. But Somalis haven't really "cracked the code" on how to run an American-style restaurant in terms of service, for the most part. And really, I don't think Somali food is a "great cuisine" food the way Ethiopian is (man, Ethiopians and Somalis are nothing alike!), or Vietnamese, or Thai, or Mexican, or Indian. It's more like, say, Polish food... something workmanlike that can be made excellent with effort, but lacks the ease of the great cuisines.

On the positive side, a couple of Somali places and a Kenyan place in town have cracked the code, and are offering slick, friendly Chipotle-style counter service experiences with really delicious food.

The crazy thing about garlic is that the harsh flavor disappears quickly with cooking and leaves only a mushy sweetness.

I tried this out recently and it was delicious and not at all what you would think if you're only familiar with raw garlic:

https://altonbrown.com/40-clove-chicken-recipe/

Wrap a head of garlic in aluminum foil and stick in the oven for a while and I'll eat it by itself (or maybe spread on bread with a dash of salt).

Garlic is delicious.

Garlic ice cream :)

The Stinking Rose in SF.

There's a neat, somewhat old documentary on how good garlic is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garlic_Is_as_Good_as_Ten_Mothe...

https://vimeo.com/111386326

I certainly hope bulgogi is! My absolute favourite food. 24 hours to prepare, at least how I was shown when I lived in Busan

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