Debunking the Myth of the National Dish | Hacker News Reader

Debunking the Myth of the National Dish

atlasobscura.com

27 pointsprismatic61 comments

Post 1550 as part of the Columbian interchange, the Old World owes these to the New: tomato, maize/corn, squash, peppers, chili pepper, cocoa, potato, sweet potato, avocado, vanilla, tobacco.[0]

It would seem that although most staples and dishes are hundreds-thousands of years old (bread c. 30k BCE), what would qualify as modern pizza couldn't exist before the 16th c., although it arrived c. 18th-19th c.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_crops

Irish food with no potatoes, Italian without tomatoes and Indian without chili peppers. Sort of breaks a lot of people's preconceptions doesn't it?

Traditions must begin at some point in time. Clearly, "traditions" that started 5 years ago are not considered traditions in the common usage of the word and concept. But assuming that in Italy the tomato began to be used in 1550 or so, I, and surely many others, can certainly consider the tomato a traditional food for Italy.

Absolutely. It should smash any preconceptions that traditions are either ancient or perpetual.

PS: I'm drooling at the thought of growing some tomatoes on my balcony: San Marzano, cherry, and beefstake. I tried to grow some hydroponically but it failed spectacularly as the equipment isn't sized for the volume of roots.

They reached Italy by then but only became a common food ingredient mid 19th century.

To be fair, Italy only became a unified state mid 19th century too...

Which makes it an actual national tradition. Nations only really started to appear at the end of the XVIII century.

My pet theory is that the beginning of the idea of a nation start with Louise de Savoie. The intrigues she ran harshly reduced the power of dukes while giving the royal domain and it's merchants a lot of power. The narratives the French crown drew around itself and its power helped, and the consolidated territories, removing a lot of enclaves and foreign vassals (things other crowns started to do too) was to me the beginning of the 'territorial integrity' idea.

And it's only her second biggest achievement.

A modern falsehood. The concept of a nation is far older - it really should not come as a surprise that defining the in-group based on kinship is an ancient practice. That's what the word itself is derived from - the Latin word for birth, i.e. common birth. Only the scale has changed, and even that not as much as some like to claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation

Even groups such as the Navajo fit perfectly well under the 'nation' concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation

In general, I'd advise more skepticism of such outlandish claims that fly in the face of common sense and instinct.

Your links don't support your claims.

Can you really claim that nationalism existed among the majority of people when those people were illiterate, had never traveled more than 10 miles outside their place of birth, and had never met someone who they could place outside their concept of their nation?

> Your links don't support your claims.

Adrian Hastings has claimed that England's Anglo-Saxon kings mobilized mass nationalism in their struggle to repel Norse invasions. He argues that Alfred the Great, in particular, drew on biblical nationalism, using biblical language in his law code and that during his reign selected books of the Bible were translated into Old English to inspire Englishmen to fight to turn back the Norse invaders. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation#Medieval_nations

This was in the 9th century. More than a millennium before that, Greek city states realized they had more in common with one-another than with the Persians, and organized along those lines in the Greco-Persian wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Persian_Wars

Even Aristotle spoke on the importance of kinship: Also difference of race is a cause of faction, until harmony of spirit is reached; for just as any chance multitude of people does not form a state, so a state is not formed in any chance period of time. Hence most of the states that have hitherto admitted joint settlers or additional settlers have split into factions; - https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

> had never met someone who they could place outside their concept of their nation?

You mean like during a war? Or their cultural inheritance of history? The Jews for example have a ~3000 year tradition of passing down stories of their nation interacting with others, e.g. the story of Moses. Even someone who hadn't left their shtetl for generations would have heard tales of other nations, e.g. the Egyptians, growing up.

I'm sure you'll agree that though based on common birth, a nation is flexible - the neighbor you quarrel with becomes kin and ally when a larger threat from further away arrives. But that doesn't imply it's based on nothing, "culturally constructed" out of thin air. So your claim that people didn't travel much supports my argument, through the rootedness required for a nation to form.

“Indian food” itself is a major generalization given its variety of regional cuisines. You can say the same thing about Italian food.

In this case, people’s preconceptions are typically just ill-informed.

There are even more recent examples - the ancient age ended relatively recently in Hawaii, but even though they were not present prior to European contact, outsiders expect "Hawaiian food" to include pineapple or coconut or macadamia nuts.

Or for instance pad thai, which was created in the early-mid-1900s as part of an intentional effort to create a national dish.

Pizza predates the use of the tomato. The oldest mention of pizza in text is from 997 C.E.

Millions of internet pedants will leap at you for calling various American styles of pizza "pizza", since only the "traditional" Neapolitan/Roman style is "real" pizza (or a different internet pedant might declaim that only NY pizza is pizza). That standard honestly applied would preclude anything much farther back than 100 years.

Now, I tend to think those internet pedants are boring and obnoxious, but the entire reason we have to have a discussion about the "myth of the national dish" is because of people like them.

Once you decide that these things don't matter and food should just be enjoyed without caring about "authenticity" and that every tradition is only traditional in a certain context and time period, the whole idea of fighting about it kind of gets silly.

older, at least 2000 years now

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/world/europe/pizza-mural-...

Dishes similar to pizza (bread with stuff on top) existed across all of the Mediterranean since forever.

Back in the day people had no proper phyisical dishes (read: recipients) and they just ate food on top of bread slices.

Trenchers... but it was old bread and you didn't necessarily eat it. Or sometimes you gave it to the poor after your meal if you were being gregarious.

There wasn't something like "old bread" at old times except if it had mold on it. You just placed it near fire and made a toast of it, or you softened it either with wine or homemade liquors. If you were a loaded guy (not rich but the one who had a TV in the village in the 60's), you for sure culd acces milk at a daily pace.

> Pizza predates the use of the tomato.

What makes it pizza specifically at that point?

Yeah, I find the idea that a flattened leavened (maybe?) bread with something on top is "pizza" to be quite a stretch.

Some of my favorite pizzas have no tomato sauce:

* White clam pizza

* Amici's Milano or Trentino

* State of Mind's Peas on Peas on Peas (when it's in season)

Why would the lack of tomato sauce make it not a pizza?

(You didn't specifically mention tomato sauce, but GP did and it sounds like you are in agreement? Please forgive me if I misunderstood.)

I'm saying Bread + topping is not inherently a pizza. There are lots of other dishes that are bread + topping that we don't call pizza.

Is crostini a pizza? Is bruschetta? Is sabich? Is lahmacun? Arepas? Is an open face bagel with cream cheese?

I think you hit the nail on the head. Yes, bread + topping is by definition not pizza. Pizza is made with pizza dough and toppings, not with already-baked bread.

Of course if the pizza dough is wrapped around the toppings/fillings, pinched around the edge in a half moon shape and then baked, now it is a calzone, not a pizza.

Or is it an empanada? ;-)

And thank you for that list! I have never had sabich or lahmacun, so you have given me some new things to try.

Pizza is cooked on one side; it is cooked after adding toppings; it is cooked rapidly in an oven. Most flatbreads are flipped; some are cooked with open heat.

Because they called it pizza and modern pizza is a direct descendant of it.

Whats more interesting is how fish sauce or Garum fell out of favor.

There are many others, e.g. the common beans, peanuts, sunflower, the cultivated strawberries and, more recently, the cultivated blueberries.

The European wild strawberries and wild bilberries are much tastier than the cultivated species brought from America, but unfortunately they are much less productive, being much smaller.

Also cotton. While different species of cotton have been independently domesticated in America and in the Old World, most of the modern production of cotton is based on American cotton species.

Wild strawberries and bilberries... I grew both for years. :) They are wonderful.

It is crazy to me how much our modern ideas on food and clothing are more modern than we realize. Always fun to point out that places that have what we call "spicy" food got there by import.

Even bread, I suspect, is probably a lot different than we realize. There is a wide range in what that can cover, with many of the types of bread that last longer being popular for their longevity in older times.

And that doesn't even get into the drastic shift in diet that came from rationing times. There are a lot of parts of the animal that we used to directly eat.

This seems to be a common thread throughout history. It's hard to distinguish old traditions from very old traditions from ancient ones, so they all become a blurred jumble, and the traditions just are whatever they are at any given time.

Tradition is anything your grandparents did that you also do. Few people remember their great-grandparents well enough to know if they also did something, (with modern medicine this is somewhat more likely, but still not common) and thus few have any clue if it is something their grandparents started or not.

Unless of course it was written down. Some religions have things written down as of a few thousand years ago. Just looking at them though we can see plenty of examples of things written down being ignored for a while and then some reformer comes and revives the tradition. Anything not written down is questionable in ability to survive for long.

Bread is indeed different nowadays, specially in the americas.

Modern wheat was "invented" by Norman Borlaug in the 60s. It was genetically modified (through breeding and other means) to provide higher yield.

Some places, like Italy and France, still use the old low yield "original" wheat.

I learned this painful lesson when I thought I had gluten allergy. I can't eat any kind of bread in the US. But when I went to France, I had no problems. Turns out (AFAIK), high yield wheat is also really hard to digest...

I only use French flour now.

Also, AFAIK they don't add iron shavings to it

I'm afraid to ask?

The form of iron "supplementation" universally added to flour in the US is little more than that. There's some theories that this impacts gut bacteria, particularly the ones associated with B-vitamin.

Iron shavings -> bad bacteria -> poor Vitamin B status -> intestinal lining damage -> celiac, allergies and autoimmune

TLDR; bread in the US makes people sick, not in Europe

<rant>

Bread in the USA is an abomination. There. I said it.

Any bread in the normal isle that you can buy and have on your counter for over a week, where it still looks and feels and tastes the same is an abomination.

It is not bread. It is a super-processed food which makes you initially feel full but digests very rapidly, leaving you hungry again.

100 calories of engineered US bread compared to 100 calories of steel cut oats is a good example. The latter will keep you full much longer.

I remember going to an actual bakery in Belgium, you know, the guy who wakes up at 3AM to make bread. Get a fresh bread. Still warm. If you leave it on the counter for 2 days it is rock hard. Because it is unprocessed (or at least a lot less).

I guess we have to thank Kroger for putting the bakeries in the US out of business.

Wonder 'bread'. I wonder if it's bread...

</rant>

> I remember going to an actual bakery in Belgium, you know, the guy who wakes up at 3AM to make bread. Get a fresh bread. Still warm. If you leave it on the counter for 2 days it is rock hard. Because it is unprocessed (or at least a lot less).

> I guess we have to thank Kroger for putting the bakeries in the US out of business.

While I agree with you about typical bread found in US grocery stores, there are plenty of small bakeries in the US that make "real" bread. Every city or even decently-sized town that I've been in had a least one solid bakery with bread/pastries/etc baked fresh every day. Find them and support them!

They exist in some cities, sure, but across wide swathes of the country, they are nowhere to be found. The craft is dead, and in its place we have industry and logistics.

Where I see 'real' bread for sale in the US, it is marketed as a luxury good for the affluent, and the price reflects this. I see this as scandalous - charging a premium for what I would consider ordinary 'natural' food.

What really pains me is that an ordinary loaf of industrial spongebread at Walmart costs the same as a very high quality (and heavier/denser) loaf of proper bread (such as a standard Mischbrot) at a bake shop in Germany. It's obscene given that labor and especially energy costs are considerably higher in Germany, so it isn't like comparing a US price to a dirt cheap low-wage country.

I have noticed that since the pandemic there seems to be a lot more interest in quality home baking in the US, but it seems that people are rediscovering fire in a vacuum without any real training or knowledge - because the traditional craft is dead.

I am growing a little spelt in the garden this year from organic seed sourced in Germany. If it works, I will save my new seed and try it on a larger scale next year.

I remember my first trip to Germany, would pick up off the shelf supermarket bread, white, wheat, whatever. It was great. Especially pretzels. I ate so much bread, and was surprised at how much regularly I was still pooping. I'm not even going to touch on local bakeries, because that shit was fucking fantastic.

But in the U.S, we're forced to be the slaves of Metamucil to poop. Eat white bread here and you basically have cotton stuck up your ass. Good luck.

Most grocery stores have a "fresh" bread section where they're at least giving it the final bake in the store. Some grocery stores have quite competent bread selection.

Yes but it's all squishy. Bread is not supposed to have that texture, ever. I can only guess that most Americans object to actually having to chew their food.

> Any bread in the normal isle that you can buy and have on your counter for over a week, where it still looks and feels and tastes the same is an abomination.

Sourdough does exist and keeps well.

The sweet potato is an extremely unusual case in that it was transported across the Pacific by Polynesians before the Colombian exchange! In fact, this is some of the most reliable evidence that the preindustrial Polynesians reached South America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato_cultivation_in_Pol...

> In her latest book …, Anya von Bremzen goes on a multi-year quest … In the process, she “crushes” bowls of noodles with a ramen otaku in Tokyo, learns to make pasta puttanesca in a former brothel in Naples, and drinks ceremonial cacao at her own wedding in Oaxaca.

The primary purpose of a book like this seems to be so that the author can go on a tour around the world and write the costs off as a business expense. If the book sells well, that’s just gravy (pun intended).

Completely true. And the books never sell, so the losses just offset other income.

Brilliant, really.

I also get the feeling that the whole thing is shoehorned for the obvious purpose of being contrarian for the obvious reason that being mainstream doesn't separate you enough from the pack to sell. So: arguing that national dish IS A REAL THING would require a much more elevated level of content and research. Claim the contrary with shallow arguments mixed with "I traveled The World to experience it myself" and easy peasy, must be true because.

Other than that, National Dish is as much a thing as National Language. Take Latin / Romance languages for instance. It's something of a trope that in the old days (before modern communication and standardization of "national language" with one dialect proclaimed "the reference" and evangelized through media), going from Rome to Paris to Madrid meant every two adjacent villages would understand each other but 100 villages away this would cease to be true. Language changed so it makes just as much sense that food recipes changed.

This is brilliantly illustrated for the Balkans region by Key & Peele's sketch "Macedonian Café": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1KiFON-GWg

There's "Ćevapi" as "national dish" of Bosnia, a country the size of a pea grain so sure, THEY invented it. In fact it's the exact same situation for Latin dialects. Go from Bosnia to Serbia to Romania and every two villages will make a ćevapi that's similar enough but 100 villages away the flavor and recipe would have changed enough to create the "Macedonian Café" situation :)

This is nitpicking, but part of what makes the Key & Peele sketch funny is that the two recipes the cafe owner describes appear to be the exact same. I read it as poking fun at extreme nationalism creating artificial differences when there really are none.

That being said, it is a comedy sketch, so ultimately it’s up to interpretation.

In this case your perception is very different from mine.

The recipes appear the same but there's subtle differences. Exactly the situation in real life and they chose, probably knowingly, the one food that's very controversial and every nation around claims their recipe is the best.

Ćevapi -> ćevapčići -> mici (Romanian). I can understand Kay and Peele's sketch because I feel exactly the same looking over the Bosnian / Serbian recipe and it's nothing nationalistic here. Only a lot of "chef" pride: we got the best recipe in town, everyone else is subpar. Like what do they think, eat it with onion and cream? Disgusting! Proper way to eat mici in order to savor their flavor is with just a little bread and mustard: https://i0.wp.com/sunt-sanatos.ro/wp-content/uploads/2020/05...

You can eat them with fries, salad or what else but you're effectively trashing the effort of the cook. Like ordering an expensive and rare Kopi Luwak coffee and drowning it with sugar and milk and ordering a cola on the side to add insult to injury, I guarantee that the barista will smack you in the head if you do that.

Kudos to the K&P writers for choosing such a representative dish then, it adds another level to the sketch that I’ll wager the average American audience member missed. To me, the two recipes the cafe owner describes sound exactly the same (the male diner even says as much), which I suppose is the point.

Me: oh, I'm Canadian

Them: don't know much about Canada, it's a friendly country. What is Canadian food?

Me: uhm... French fries with cheese and gravy...

Them: O.o

Don't forget the hyperglycemic ent blood.

Some national dishes were manufactured by their tourist ministries or other bodies connected to the government.

Pad Thai is like that; it was invented by a politician.

The few OPs here are surprising -- if you read TFA, it's about how political perturbations (putting it lightly) affect not just what is eaten, but what ingredients are promoted. The interviewee -- I don't know her, but she has a wikipedia page. It doesn't have her date of birth, but (corrections welcome) seems to me, her first book came out circa ~1990 because she updated it after the USSR's respective republics regained their cultural identities.

Does this person get paid to fly around the world? It seems so. If she's providing insight -- who fucking cares? Powerful influences -- wait for it --

...influence! That concept's not novel but the details help a lot

Great. Now I can make pizza any way I damn well want. And chili.

I believe it's spelled "Chile".

(This is a pun. At least in my corner of the U.S., people typically pronounce "chili" and "Chile" the same way.)

Going off on a tangent, but still related to national cuisines, a few years ago Spanish speakers in the UK would find it hilarious how many restaurants and pubs would call their vegetarian alternative to chile con carne... wait for it... veggie con carne.

I haven't seen that term in the wild recently. I guess they eventually realised.

In the US at least it's common to refer to jus as "au jus" even in situations where the "au" doesn't make sense.

My college cafeteria would serve "beef sandwiches with au jus gravy."

The article is informative, even eye opening, but to be honest, I get wary of the iconoclastic affect that surrounds it. Truth is, I am attached to certain food traditions and would like to see them continued properly. I know culture evolves, but if anything, I want to look back, not forward, and see what past things we have been missing out on.

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