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Comment by dagmx | Hacker News Reader

A lot of Japanese dishes that are popular today have foreign origins.

Tempura, curry, ramen, and salmon for sushi.

It’s why I find it hilarious when some people obsess over the authenticity of Japanese food and deride fusion cuisine.

It (much like most great cuisines) is the result of intermixing and interpretations of dishes.

Many Indian dishes too wouldn’t have existed without foreign interaction. Potato dishes obviously (which are very prevalent) but even things like Butter chicken or many Mughal based dishes.

The origin of food is in many ways just as as interesting as the etymology of words.

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Salmon for sushi seems not to be the famous story that was going around. Like, it has all the tenets of a nice fake story, talking about Japan and how a foreign more familiar power outsmarted them, but apparently salmon was popular way before Norway theoretically started marketing it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1k4x9FrD5k4

That video isn’t the refutation I think he thinks it is. I’m sure there’s more nuance than “Norway invented salmon sushi” but his argument is a little flakey imho.

His premise is based on American documents of sushi, but salmon was already a popular fish in the west by then. So it stands to reason that they’d use local fish for this dish that depends on good quality protein.

I’m not saying he’s necessarily wrong but his process of arriving at the result is weird, so I don’t think he’s necessarily right either.

Very many dishes in nearly every cuisine have at least some foreign origins. The majority of spices and seasonings used in most countries originate from many places all over the world.

The idea of any pure culture (locally, ethnically, linguistically, or culinarily) is a complete myth, unless that culture has been entirely isolated from every other culture for its entire development.

A lot of Indian dishes have Persian, Mughal influences.

And it goes way beyond Persian influence.

vindaloo ~= Portuguese vinhalo (wine/vinegar flavored)

Southeast asian ingredients introduced via trading empires based in South India (i.e. nutmeg).

Tomatoes, chilies, potatoes, all pre-Columbian American products introduced to India by the Portuguese.

Tea (from China by way of the British)

Coffee (introduced even earlier than tea via the Arab trading networks via Yemen during the Ottoman empire).

Some things are actually bidirectional. Biryani, the Mughal/Persian rice dish emerged after rice was introduced to the middle east in ancient times, probably via India, and it came back in the form of Biryani.

Tea in India came by way of land, before the British

It grew wild in Assam, but the widespread consumption across the Northern part of the subcontinent is a product of British rule.

https://www.thehindu.com/society/how-chai-arrived-in-india-1...

Nice List. The spice road wasn’t limited to spices.

One of my favorite Indian dishes is Poori Masala (eaten with Poori obviously), which is mostly potatoes & tomatoes, both of which come from the New World.

I was trying to think of which of my childhood dishes could have existed without the new world imports.

So much of Indian cuisine today is so heavily influenced by the new world.

I found this Reddit thread that went into it a bit which I found quite fascinating.

https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4rwri1/what_was_...

Even the lentil dishes, where lentils were native, now have a lot of new world additions to enhance them.

Potato, tomato, chili. https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-colum...

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