The search for authenticity in food is a weird obsession anyway since cuisine changes on contact with new ingredients.
Things like tomato sauce and pasta in italian cuisine wasn't until almost 1800. Yet we talk about 'authentic' cuisine we usually use it in context way before 'America'. Yet most cuisine we eat didn't come into existence until AFTER America.
Another example is chilis in thai cuisine. Capsicum didn't make it over the ocean until america was discovered. So all the spicy peppers in so many dishes from Thai to Vietnamese food didn't exist in their cooking until it was brought over and eventually incorporated.
Potatoes is another one. Originated in Peru. Russian potato vodka? Irish Potatoes? Germans bangers and mash?
Nope, nada until America was discovered.
Chocolate, Vanilla. Staples of desserts of european cooking...except not until America was discovered.
These above ingredients alone are associated with so many traditional recipes but they didn't exist until recently. It really shows how quickly food and traditions change and the idea of 'authenticity' is over blown.
> Yet we talk about 'authentic' cuisine we usually use it in context way before 'America'.
I can pretty much guarantee that's not true of discussion of authentic cuisine of the Mexican or Tex-Mex varieties, since “Mexico” and “Texas” are both post-Millenial identities, and both identities of the Americas. Sure, it might apply to some views of authenticity of European, Asian, or African cuisines (and if by “America” you actually mean the “European colonization of America”, which some parts of your comment suggest, it might apply to similar views of authenticity of Native American, including Inuit, Aztec, Inca, etc. cuisine.
But, even where it might apply, I don't think that is what people usually mean by authenticity; they mostly mean before changes made to support mass commercial distribution or production, and without adaptation to ingredients they are locally cheaper or more popular in places outside of the place where the cuisine originates. (In America, that concern might often be phrased as “before Americanization”, but that's not “before any impacts of the discovery of America”.)
I have gone to many local restaurants where local ingredients are used and not mass-produced and seen the same attitude from friends, colleague or acquaintances in my life.
I also extensively worked in the kitchen, in fact it was my first career, and i can say the attitude was prevlevant there too.
I've worked with plenty of people from mexico itself that had less of that attitude since they could actually see the influence of different dishes and spices in both foods.
So I can pretty much guarantee from actual experience this attitude stems from the same attitude that other people have that leads them to say things like 'italy doesn't have pepperoni pizza' or 'french wine will always be better than nappa' etc. It stems from the same place.
I will concede there are probably people like you describe, but the issue the article describes and the issue I am talking about is seen quite a bit against 'tex-mex'.
I never said that people in general have a different attitude about authenticity toward Tex-Mex food than most other food, I said that it is impossible for the source of that attitude to be a desire to get to what the cuisine was like before the discovery of America.
I didn't gather that from your reply. I apologise for misunderstanding.
I agree with that point. But I also don't think people are 'wanting' what it was like before in either attitude.
I think it something else, maybe a way to seem more 'culture' or a way to seperate themselves from common 'americans'? I mean i don't really know where it stems from.
Example is we have quite a few people that complains how all these 'chemicals' and stuff in our food is killing us and how they only buy organic and they won't eat this or that cause of the 'processing' and then they light a cigarette and crack open a can of PBR.
A lot of times we identify with something on a different level then is logical, I believe the same is happening with a lot of these people and 'authenticity'. I could be wrong though, but I believe we are all susceptible to this kind of behavior.
I'm reading The Elephant in the Brain. Its shocking how much we do as humans that we delude ourselves into believing.
I would posit that mostly, what these people mean is that “French wine will always be more French than Napa.” And they have an aesthetic preference for the terroir of French wine.
To put that another way: a lot of culinary aesthetics—and aesthetics generally—is just a rationalization of nostalgia. People want food that tastes like food they remember enjoying (even if that memory has more to do with their mood at the time, or the ambiance, or any other thing that can colour a memory), rather than particularly caring about food being good in the same way as food they remember enjoying. People would prefer a food that recaptures their youth, to a food that’s an optimized, culinarily “better” version of that food, every time. (Unless they’re chefs, or professional food critics.)
Not that germans don't eat plenty of potatoes and sausage, but "bangers and mash" is a British thing.
Tomatoes and potatoes, and the vanilla bean, were cultivated in Europe, by Europeans.
Chilies were cultivated in the Americas (over 6000 years ago), and then traded to European explorers who took them back home and grew them there, too.
The cocoa bean was cultivated in the Americas, by the Olmec; and then traded to European explorers who tried to grow it, failed, and ended up invading the area to farm it.
Of these, the first is European cuisine, through-and-through. The second is aboriginal Mesoamerican cuisine. And the third is what you might call “American” cuisine, insofar as—like most of the historical cuisines in America itself—it was a cuisine invented by farmers from Europe (and the slaves they brought from everywhere else) learning to live in the Americas.
It isn't wrong to describe Europeans discovering America as long as you aren't claiming they were the first to discover it.
"Authentic" viking bread would have been made with hand-milled oat and rye, with some wheat; to date you can see much more oat and rye harvest in most parts of Scandinavia; but just as you point out, potatoes are today also seen as an essential part of an "authentic" Norwegian diet and is a part of most dishes considered traditionally Norwegian.
Even more amusing to me is that while porridge is authentic in that respect, the most common modern types are not: rice porridge is certainly quite modern, yet it's pretty much considered as authentically Norwegian as you can get to have rice porridge served with butter, sugar and cinnamon, with both sugar and cinnamon being "modern" introductions.
And it was first a few years ago I learned that most of the Christmas cookie traditions we have are less than a century old, with ironic ones like "fattigmann" (literally "poor man") being introduced in the 1930's in a cook book where the recipe including more eggs than the average 1930's family consumed in a year, and so not actually spreading until much later.
Christmas traditions in particular, now that I have a kid of my own, has driven how that "authentic" and "tradition" usually really for the most part stays consistent only a generation or two. What my son is growing up with certainly has some parts in common with the Christmas celebrations of my childhood, but it has already morphed drastically, both in terms of traditions and even the food we insist is very authentic.
An amusing side note: I read about an analysis showing that Stradivarius used a red pigment from America in some of his violins. I doubt it had an effect on the tone, but it's just interesting to see what kind of trade was occurring.
Lots of bread.
Seriously loads of the stuff, along with other grains and grain products (oats, barley, porridge, beer).
We also ate other root vegetables native to Eurasia such as carrots, parsnips, swedes and turnips; and plenty of beans and legumes.
Obviously there was no going back once we figured out how to roast a potato though.
Example: Dutch speculaas cookies [1].
"Speculaas dough does not rise much. Dutch and Belgian versions are baked with light brown (sometimes beet) sugar and baking powder. German Spekulatius uses baker's ammonia as leavening agent. Indian, Indonesian, and Mediterranean spices used in speculaas are cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom and white pepper; these were common in the 1600-1700s due to the Dutch East Indies spice trade. Family recipes may also include other small amounts of spices like anise, etc." [emphasis mine]
I don't know what's been more important for which cuisine, but not mentioning say VOC's imports and only WIC (which was smaller and came a good ~20 years later) is inaccurate. The WIC was more into slave trade, especially after conquering of Angola and Brasil from the Portuguese.
It's a shame, because these people seem to be unaware of how large a country Mexico is, with myriad cultural influences and traditions, regional variations, and a vibrant modern food culture, especially in regards to Mexico City.
The taco truck under the BART tracks in Oakland with the $6 heart-attack (and heart-burn) burritos doesn't serve traditional/authentic Mexican food, it serves traditional Cali/NorCal Taco Truck food. If you love it, that's great, but honor it by celebrating what it really is, which is a separate food tradition that is wonderful in it's own way.
Like Chico's Tacos!
> It's a shame, because these people seem to be unaware of how large a country Mexico is, with myriad cultural influences and traditions, regional variations, and a vibrant modern food culture, especially in regards to Mexico City.
Fact! I prefer the style of cuisine that comes from the Chihuahuan desert.
They reportedly got it from the British Navy, and it has evolved into something distinctively Japanese. The British of course brought it from India.
Japanese curry is sweeter, and has cocoa in it.
My daughter remarked that you can apparently put any random vegetables in Japanese curry and it still tastes awesome.
Because of the warm spices, my first taste of it actually gave me a nostalgic memory of my long gone grandfather who liked to cook "old world" German food. Germany was also influenced by the spice roads and incorporated a lot of these same spices into its cuisine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry
According to that Wikipedia article, the word originates from Tamil, and:
"Archaeological evidence dating to 2600 BCE from Mohenjo-daro suggests the use of mortar and pestle to pound spices including mustard, fennel, cumin, and tamarind pods with which they flavoured food."
Theory is that Tempura is just corruption of word "Tempero"
It's one thing to object to food being sold as a certain style when that style would never include some of the ingredients that are being included, but it's well more important to just make delicious food.
Pretty sure it applies neither for French or Italian cuisine.
You mean the food quality at Walmart is superior to the the quality of the food you can find in a french organic market? the quality of milks? cheeses? wheat and meats is automatically superior in US? I know Jacque Pepin. I also know the food you can find in US markets is disgusting and low quality when compared to foods for the same price in France. There is a reason why US has an obesity crisis as sever as it is.
Growing up Italian-American, with relatives who came off the boat cooking things for me, then having a 'merican who did a semester abroad in a single city in Italy tell me the way I cook isn't "authentic."
Like, what? I'd understand the complaint if we'd gone to a place advertised as texmex.
I guess the annoying thing is they misleadingly refer to texmex food as "mexican" which it is not. It is a separate (and also tasty) cuisine that relies on different traditions and ingredients, eg flour instead of corn tortillas. Food is all great, but lets not use confusing terms
I strongly disagree; it can be pretty useful in certain contexts. Namely, on contact with US/Western market demand, a lot of cuisines get blander, sweeter, less complex, and sometimes heavier. (The history behind this is pretty interesting, and if you'd like i can pull up a source on this). For those whose palate is used to more flavor and complexity than the Western palate, the difference between the Americanized form of a cuisine and the "authentic" version can be pretty substantial. The latter can be preferred for either reasons of taste or reasons of variety (the difference between American Chinese and American Thai is far tinier than the difference between a given regional Chinese cuisine and a given regional Thai cuisine). Note that this is probably the case in every country: I was born and raised in the US, and I remember finding McDonald's to be pretty bizarre when I'd visit India, because the flavors had been modified to fit the local palate so heavily (this was about 20yrs ago; I gather that the menu has changed a lot since).
This isn't a search for authenticity per se, which as you say, is pretty much meaningless. It's just an attempt to avoid the flattening of every cuisine into a similar spectrum of flavors. Unfortunately, restaurants only exist if there's enough demand for them, so food with flavors outside of the country's palate are hard to sustain unless there's an ethnic enclave nearby that can support an "authentic" place.
As an aside, the "more flavor and complexity than the western palate" stuff is another of those things I have a bit of a problem with. Yeah, American food in some (most) parts of the country is bland but Mexican food (for example) is American, at least if California, Texas, New Mexico are still part of the country. Add BBQ, Cajun, and other regional cuisines and American food has its own complexity. Standard diner fare is pretty bleak but so is street cart pad thai after the thousandth time you've had it.
Besides if we're talking about the western palate we're including all of Europe in that, with an incredible diversity of cuisines and tastes.
This isn't remotely relevant. Picking a given regional cuisine and just calling it "Thai food" when transplanted is a completely separate axis from how closely the transplanted cuisine adheres to the dishes from its original country.
> As an aside, the "more flavor and complexity than the western palate" stuff is another of those things I have a bit of a problem with. Yeah, American food in some (most) parts of the country is bland but Mexican food (for example) is American, at least if California, Texas, New Mexico are still part of the country. Add BBQ, Cajun, and other regional cuisines and American food has its own complexity. Standard diner fare is pretty bleak but so is street cart pad thai after the thousandth time you've had it.
I'm not going off of some random intuition of my own: food chemistry is literally an entire field of science that focuses (in part) on the molecules that produce flavor, and how they interact with each other. They've built taxonomies of these flavors, and Western cuisine tends to use the same flavors in the different components of a dish or meal. By contrast, cuisines like Indian food do the opposite: using multiple flavors which contrast with each other. I'm not using complexity as a value judgment, but as an objective, measurable fact. (The history behind this divergence is really interesting; I can go into it if you'd like).
I was using Western in the generally-accepted sense: of European (cultural) ancestry. Obviously American cuisine is less European than Europe, and the parts that are heavily influenced by (e.g.) Mexican cuisine are less subject to the uncontroversially lower level of flavor/complexity in European cuisines overall. The sum of these things still shifts the Western palate towards the direction I'm talking about relative to many other cuisines. Also, I'm talking about the food preferences of the people, and how that shapes cuisine. The obvious example is spicy heat: the fact that "American spicy" and "Thai spicy" is a thing indicates a recognition on the part of the proprietors that the average American palate is calibrated for a different level of heat than the Thai palate. As I said, moving every cuisine towards the American palate to suit it better has the effect of flattening them out a little. A dish from some part of Mexico tweaked to cater to the American palate will be closer to a Thai dish tweaked to cater to the American palate than the original dishes are to each other. Which brings me back to my original point: if you find places with dishes closer to their cuisines of origin than their Americanized version, you'll enjoy a greater variety of flavor, since the flattening process is somewhat mitigated.
idk, I get what you are saying, it's a bit of an empty cliche, but at the same time, I think there are interesting things people are trying to ask for, just using the wrong words
They cannot see eye-to-eye over whether burritos are "real" Mexican food. Obviously, being the good friend I am, I liked to poke and prod this.
Burritos are Sonoran food and Sonora is part of Mexico.
Many Americans might not have heard of "crawfish étouffé" and therefore assume it's not American food. A foreign tourist who has visited New Orleans could (quite authoritatively) correct them.
Btw, I'd be willing to bet that I have more contact with people from Sonora than the typical person from Puebla has.
The problem is that citing "I'm a habitual tourist" is not really a credential anyone can verify. Maybe "I'm a travel blogger as well and here is a link to my 10 year long blog and here are the posts about the many times I went to this place, so you can check the depth of my knowledge if you desire." would work.
The phrase quite authoritative suggests credentialing. I am extremely knowledgeable about a number of subjects. I even have 6 years of college. But I have a serious problem with trying to get taken seriously in part because a lot of my credentials are akin to "I'm a habitual tourist."
Maybe you really are a habitual tourist. Maybe you are more knowledgeable on the subject than the world's foremost expert with two PhDs. The problem is that "I'm a habitual tourist" simply fails as a verifiable credential as a stand alone thing without something to back up your claim of depth of accurate knowledge.
Time marches on and maybe burritos are a regional cuisine but they are surely not a general national cuisine.
As a comparison, pizza is a USA national dish. Scrapple on the other hand is more of a Philadelphia area regional dish, even if Philadelphia is indeed inside the USA.
Use whatever words you want, I'm just sayin'...
It's like saying that something that's popular must be bad, or that something that's expensive must be good. I mean, if you're a connoisseur of something, then you inevitably end up learning about the more authentic, less well-known, more exclusive versions of that thing. But saying that those are defining qualities of anything is BS, and only reveals the degree to which someone is a connoisseur because they actually appreciate something, vs. it's just part of the personal image they want to project to other people.
I liken this obsession with simulacra[0]. People looking for an original of something that never existed. “Greek” or “Mediterranean” food in the US is like this too.
Although nothing beats Tex-Mex, fight me.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation
On a more serious note, one of the interesting things about the IBM Watson Cookbook was looking at food not by region but by k-means clustering around a set of spice vectors. It really drove home for me the notion that 'regional' food really was more about the reliable availability of certain flavors and spices than it was around culture or people.
The closest place to great food is the TeePee, which is about as unassuming as a restaurant can get. The fancier places just crank up the spiciness to uncomfortable levels.
The best mexican?/tex-mex? I've ever had is still Chez Jose in Portland, Oregon. I'm really not sure how it's classified, other than awesome. Every trip back we eat there almost every day.
I grew up in Phoenix and love going back for the amazing Mexican food. From more established places like Los Dos Molinos to the little out of the way dives, there is no way you can convince me that Phoenix doesn't have good Mexican food. Tex-Mex I don't care about but I've spent plenty of time in Mexico too and Phoenix has great Mexican.
Mexican independence: 1810
US acquires New Mexico: 1848
This is a principle that I've often found applicable to Mexican/Mexican-American food: the more impressive the decor, the less impressive the food. The Chicago area has lots of unassuming taquerias that knock the socks off of fancy, nationally-advertised chains.
That's like complaining about tomatoes in Italian cooking.
Sometimes, though, is is just comfort. As an example, the donuts from New Orleans are easy to make at home. Ish. I have yet to have them elsewhere be the same. I'll probably call the ones I do authentic, but I confess it is just to my tastes.
i like a good breakfast taco but i'm not generally a fan of most tex-mex. it hits you over the head with lard, carbs and over-cooked meats with no balance to it at all.
of course folks eat beans and grains--my fave street taco stand makes their own tortillas and they're great!
Shortened version of processed cheese and processed beans.
The adjective processed applies to both of the nouns, though it is easy to interpret it otherwise. It's like saying "The problem is the junk food versions of these foods."
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2011/ma...