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Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like
* precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century
* cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century
* discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century
* exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)
Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.
For more on this see the book 1493:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
Many folks are probably familiar with what happened in Europe post-1492, but there's a whole bunch of stuff on the Pacific side of the Americas as well.
What era of history are we talking about here? Would it have been transported as flour, or ground locally?
Generally speaking, rice is a lot higher yield per acre, and also, the east coast doesn't have particularly good wheat growing.
I don’t think it’s true that most food sucked at any point, except for people in exceptional circumstances.
In the context of food, I laugh at notions of authenticity and tradition - unless the time scale is over 1000 years there's not much interesting to talk about.
Anyway, obviously cultural identity isn’t inherent: you know what you grew up with. And it can easily turn toxic when we move from appreciating our own culture to putting down others’. But my life would be a lot poorer without it.
Attaching that to your identity is bullshit, though. Neapolitan pizza makers might have some set of principles and practices and you might have an authentic neapolitan pizza that reflects those principles. But that doesn’t give Italians in Naples any authority to gatekeep pizza or even neapolitan-style pizza.
I have seen this behavior from others as well, from all over the world, but Italian cuisine seems to trigger a special protective reaction from the hometown crowd. Perhaps it’s because it is (almost) universally popular?
Asian restaurant cuisine is judged by partly by how different (technique, taste, looks) the dish is from what they can make from home.
You go to a Chinese restaurant to eat something that cannot be made at home, almost by definition. The only exception might be breakfast food.
What's even more interesting is no one actually makes butter or tikka chicken at home, or has a tandoor to do so, but Indians also don't eat it outside generally, instead it's mainly foreigners who like those dishes.
Suppose people say it; why shouldn't they be entitled to their opinion? How does it harm anyone? People who like New York style pizza are equally free to just disagree, and keep making it.
Like "feta" which is a style of cheese across the balkans, if you look in Melbourne Qeen Vic markets you can find Greek, Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Danish Feta, fighting it out when the lights are off... But no, now it's DOC/PDO and so we're going to have to change its name.
DOP/GI is a scam unless it's policed. People try to retconn things into it (prosecco)
Champagne, I can get behind. I don't mind Aus bubbles being sold as -style because they're bloody good.
It shouldn't even mean this much, frankly, as those things are merely protectionist trade policies meant to artificially drive up the price of certain goods without regard for quality. People on the Internet give too much deference to politicized trade regulations.
Nowadays, it is very difficult to find someone who makes brigadeiro or milk pudding without condensed milk, almost always using that ingredient plus sugar, which often produces a sickly sweet mush.
In fact, the whole history of how sugar, or sucrose, entered the human diet is fascinating. It brings together slavery, the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, plantation agriculture in Spanish America and Brazil, and the interests of kings, merchants, and so on. And Nestlé. :)
I suspect if people just said pasta with pork egg and cheese no one is going to make a big deal out of authenticity.
In other words, this is about words more than anything. They do matter, in the sense that most people would be upset to order a pizza and get a sandwich or order a sandwich and get a taco.
You don't need to leave italian (American) food to see the same phenomenon the author describes. Pizza is also endlessly re-interpreted and adapted. There's value in protecting and exploring. So while I share some of the author's opinions, I think the whole locking recipes into imaginary vaults thing is a bit overblown.
Myself, I am not from Valencia, actually my home town is on the opposite side of the country, so I don't care so much what you put on it as long as you follow a few basic principles and don't commit the great heresy of using chorizo xD
(actually I am a brisbaneite so this is fake but you know what I mean)
Everyone has their own personal limit and variations are allowed within certain unwritten boundaries. Swedish meatballs, for example, can be varied in many ways - but if you put garlic in them, I think you should call them something else.
I think there's an element of expectation-setting when we're talking about authenticity. Personally, I wouldn't sweat authenticity too much. There's excellent food to be had by mixing and remixing dishes.
I am living in Australia though so might be biased here
So chicken sandwiches, pork sandwiches, and steak sandwiches, which are all common here and typically served on buns, aren't considered burgers because the meat isn't ground.
It's so thoroughly thought of this way here that that the product "hamburger helper" doesn't involve bread or sandwiches whatsoever: it's a box of pre-portioned ingredients, maybe with pasta or rice, that you cook with with ground beef in a pot or skillet.
Edit: old timey American cartoons used to refer to "hamburger sandwiches" which were by all accounts the same as burgers today; the "sandwich" part got lost sometime before it got to Australia, i guess.
Striving for authenticity is essentially a pause button. While we should absolutely preserve culturally important recipes[1], we also need to move forward and invent the stuff that people in 2080 will call 'authentic.'
Bring on the durian pizza, the strawberry Mapo tofu, and the Kraft singles in Korean army stews. Food is meant to be enjoyed. Don't gatekeep and keep the performative taste-signaling to wine and coffee please.
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[1] As a side note, a lot of culturally important recipes are actually imports. Tomatoes weren't even available in Italy until the 1600s, Neither did Ireland have potatoes until they were brought over from the New World. Most contemporary Chinese dishes were created in the last century; fish and chip was brought over to the UK by Jewish immigrants; the famous red peppers of Sichuan didn't make its way to China until like the 1600s; Japanese tempura was brought over by Portuguese Catholic missionaries; banh mi has its origin in Vietnam during French colonial rule; national dish of UK is chicken tikka masala; al pastor tacos was brought over by Lebanese immigrants; pad thai was literally invented by the government of Thailand to foster Thai identify. List goes on.
Royalty played a role in many Asian food cultures. Sinseollo, biryani, cho muang, birds nest soup. There's plenty of examples of royal influence on cuisine. Wealth, and lack of it, drove a lot of culinary traditions. It's a universal thing.
So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.
Both gricia and amatriciana, too other famous pasta dishes from the same region use the same cheese (pecorino) and guanciale. In fact carbonara is nothing more than a gricia with egg yolks.
It just makes no sense to have parmiggiano or french cheese in a recipe coming from a region that did not have these ingredients in the first place and are not part of its culinary history.
And thus the point of authenticity is into rooting where the recipe originated with local ingredients.
Anybody's free to change the recipe all they want, but to call it carbonara when ingredients don't match is misleading the customer expecting a roman dish with roman ingredients.
But people have an irrational desire treat food as some sacred, immutable artifact.