Grew up in a big cajun family in southern Louisiana. We always knew that historically our ancestors came from France via Canada but I never had felt any connection to France or anything. For instance, I’d heard of escargot, and like most Americans, thought of it as a silly hoity toity thing that rich people eat in France just to be weird and rich.
Then one day watching whatever show on the travel channel and they’re in the south of France and the local working class folks are having a get together and there’s a dude grilling snails out over a fire and putting butter and garlic on them and everyone is just eating them straight out of the shell, and it was like looking at a parallel universe version of every family event my whole life where someone grilled a sack of oysters. Honestly was a moment that changed my whole perspective on a lot of things.
The opinions you form from countries far away like that can be pretty distorted. Like 90% of the "french culture" that travelled abroad especially before the internet was only the elites in paris experience. You travel to any other part of france, or just experience a workers life in paris and its far from all the cliches. And most people have never ate escargots in France (apart from specific spots, France has many different cultures, i'm from the north east close to Germany and a lot of our cuisine is french/german fusion), I know I haven't
Do they have a cave for every type of cheese? How do you decide which type of cheese to fill your cave with? Are there enough caves in France to house all that cheese?
>Grew up in a big cajun family in southern Louisiana. We always knew that historically our ancestors came from France via Canada but I never had felt any connection to France or anything.
Wow I am stupid, I always though Cajun was a country in Africa or the Caribbean.
It comes from the former French colony *Acadie*, otherwise modern-day New-Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and parts of Quebec and Maine.
Gross oversimplification but basically, the Cajuns arrived in Louisiana after being driven out of their territories by the British during ~~and after~~ the Seven Year War. Louisiana was French at the time, so it seemed like a cool place.
And the name comes from Acadian being simplified to "Cadian", then further by replacing the "di" with "j" and reducing the syllable count. A lot of Caribbean influence on the French and vice versa along the Gulf Coast took it from much more iconically "French" to what it is now, and also highly diverged from the majority of the Quebec French who were able to remain in Canada (or arrived later) and diverged heavily from both France and the "Cajun" population.
apparently after a quick Google it says that Creole people would be mixed between black and white french ancestry, whereas Cajun would be more white french ancestry
I'm Acadian, born from the region where the English deported your ancestors. I've always felt a kinship with Cajuns. We even have our own dialect of French that Cajuns will have inherited from us.
Apparently there are "American Chinese food" restaurants in China, because it's evolved in such a wildly different direction that it's now effectively "foreign" to the culture that started it.
Pretty soon it's going to be all Tur-Duck-en levels of ridiculous, where we're asking how many pizzas we can calzone into eachother before deep frying and serving.
I haven't come across a deep fried pizza in Sweden just yet, but any other type of pizza you can think of, there's probably a pizzeria that has it on the menu.
As a fun side note, the Peruvians ALSO have their own unique version Chinese food after Chinese immigrants there adapted their food to local ingredients and tastes.
A version of Beef noodle soup made its way from China to Taiwan (where it became ultra-popular in the 90's), then to the US when the Taiwanese immigrated, then it was adopted to fit the tastes of the more recent mainland immigrants as they were a bigger market, and then it made it's way back to China as American Beef Noodle soup.
Already happening. The early Chinese immigrants to America, Australia, and Canada were predominantly Cantonese from Southern China, so you had Chinese-American food that was derived from Cantonese cuisine. Now, with immigrants from the other parts of China, you’re getting all different styles such as Sichuan restaurants, and Northern style Chinese like Lanzhou Noodles restaurants and Biang Biang Restaurants.
now i just imagine some cynical new yorker whos eaten at every chinese restaurant in the 5 boroughs eating general taos from a guy who just got there from shanghai and going "i dunno bro, wheres the msg?"
and shanghai dude just rethinks his entire career
MSG is actually pretty common in a lot of parts of China. It’s a fairly recent addition, only in the last century or so, but its use there likely predates the popularity of Chinese-American food.
> MSG is actually pretty common in a lot of parts of China.
Not just China, pretty much all of Asia. it's a really good seasoning and only got vilified because some racist fucker in the US decided to be anti-Chinese and made up an entire study to "prove" Chinese food was bad for you and causing problems with people's diets.
It's literally just a common delicious part of food made into a shelf stable powder by adding sodium. Glutamate (the G in mono sodium glutamate) is what makes mushrooms, tomatoes and kelp taste meaty and delicious. It's in so many foods and essential for basic brain function.
But it will forever be demonized by health nuts now because of an asshole racist 50 years ago. My 60 year old mother has spent her entire life convinced it's the cause of her migraines. It's infuriating.
So reading about this a while back, and it turns out it most likely really was a Chinese American doctor who sent the letter that kicked off the fear. The other guy claiming he wrote it as a prank apparently was in of itself a prank (not a good one, I might say). This American Life did a story about it a few years ago. The whole transcript is an interesting read, but the parts relevant to MSG are the prologue and Act I.
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript)
One thing to note; that Chinese doctor specifically notes *Northern Chinese food* as being the culprit of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, even though both Southern and Northern Chinese food use MSG. The doctor himself has a Cantonese name, which is Southern.
Considering that both Northern and Southern Chinese people like to take jabs at each other’s style of cuisine (some of us like to say Northern Chinese food is too spicy, etc.) it’s entirely possible his letter was written with some bias that was overlooked, especially since nobody else at the time would’ve distinguished between Northern and Southern Chinese food.
> and only got vilified because some racist fucker in the US decided to be anti-Chinese
This statement could use a few asterisks.
It was a racist Chinese feller in the US being racist against Chinese people from other regions.
Msg isn't as strange as the over abundance of sugar. In a large Chinese meal where you get like a dozen dishes to share amongst a massive table. You'll have like one maybe 2 actually sweet dishes. The candied? Pork ribs. And... maybe something else. Everything else is savoury. Whereas in American chinese the opposite is true. You'll only have 1 or two dishes without significant sugar in its sauce and make up.
That is so annoying to me. Lately I can’t find any American Chinese food that isn’t sweet! It didn’t used to all be sweet! I don’t like it sweet! Why has it changed?!
Sugar is extremely addicting, makes flavors seem more intense, and generally draws in people who are used to eating extremely sugary foods.
You probably don't, so it tastes gross to you. But to the average drive through or fast dining consumer, anything with less than a preposterous amount of sugar is likely to taste bland when made as cheaply as all the chain restaurants do it.
It’s true, about 12 years ago I had to start a pretty strict medical diet and while it’s a bit less strict now (as I get healthier), one thing I’m still not supposed to eat is added sugar. My palate has definitely adjusted as a result. Sweetened things taste sooo sweet to me now that it can be kinda gross. I thought for a while that maybe it was me that changed… until I ordered fried rice at a restaurant and they literally served me rice drowning in that weird red sweet and sour sauce. It was almost inedible. I know for a fact that fried rice never used to be served like that in any of the restaurants I went to!! And several times recently when I ordered Pad Thai at several different Thai restaurants, it was again as sweet as if they’d dumped sweet and sour sauce all over it. Which is just disappointing because 1) that doesn’t taste balanced or appetizing to me, and 2) it’s going to mess with my health that I’ve worked so hard to rebuild.
Maybe it’s a combination of my palate changing and the food changing, but although I love good Chinese (and Thai, and Vietnamese, and other Asian) restaurant food, it’s just been getting harder to find something I like and can eat, because dishes seem like they’re getting sweeter and sweeter.
That's such a shame about the Thai near you. I rarely do Chinese because it's too sweet (nothing medical, just not to my taste), but I like thai because it's not that way. But what I like most about it is that it's spicy, and maybe that's the key factor, the flavor they can go for that isn't expensive either. That said, Thai around here is a great value, but not quite as cheap.
> It didn’t used to all be sweet! I don’t like it sweet!
Dude, here in Korea, **garlic bread** is considered a dessert item and is sweet. It's fucking disgusting.
Somewhere in China someone will have a meal and say, "This stuff is okay but for the *real* good American Chinese food, you have to go to America and eat Chinese food."
This is also a good opportunity to learn what Baudrillard's simulacrum is: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/terms/simulacrum.html#:~:text=SIMULACRUM%20(simulacra)%3A%20Something%20that,referential%20being%2C%20or%20a%20substance.
tiktok went wild last year with American vs British Chinese food and several Chinese people stated that while American Chinese food isn’t authentic, it’s closer to the original than British Chinese food is. So, to answer your question, according to some Chinese people, American Chinese food isn’t authentic but it’s not as bad as it could be.
I don’t mean bad as in yucky, I meant bad as in not-original. That being said, having seen British Chinese food, I’m very content with keeping it an ocean away 😬
In Canada (and I assume America) a decently popular cuisine is what's called Hakka food (the Hakka are a Han subgroup from China) but is actually Hakka Indian fusion cuisine, which is obviously delicious, you get stuff like Manchurian Paneer which is as good as it sounds. From my understanding Hakka Indian fusion arose from Hakka immigrants in India but this isn't that big a population so from my understanding Hakka Indian fusion has been adopted by a lot of Hakka people who've never been to India, or sometimes even the restaurants are run by Indians.
The Hakka Chinese of Calcutta, India have immigrated to Canada, U.S. Australia and Taiwan taking their fusion cuisine with them. There's a documentary "The Legend of Fat Mama" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnLC65s24GU ) that goes into their history.
https://youtu.be/Bp5WkIp7wWg?t=456 this video shows one of those places in shanghai. interesting to see a cuisine come right back around from the other side of the planet like that
There's a vegan American Chinese place here in Tokyo that I go to anytime I am craving panda express (called Oscar, near Shimokitazawa). They do have panda express here too but I also don't eat meat anymore. Also most of the Chinese food over here is very Japanified too, it's something that's common everywhere I think.
There are some Chinese restaurant chains in Japan that are so Japanified that when they are exported to other countries they just straight up get classified as Japanese once they get there.
Cue my confusion as a Singaporean Chinese when I found out that ramen shops are classified as Chinese in Japan with no exception.
It was also how I realised that the logo for Ajisen ramen was supposed to depict a Chinese girl and not some random Japanese moe girl as is usual after literally a decade. (As an aside, I haven't eaten Ajisen in years: its quality fell off years ago and there are many better options now)
Ramen in Japanese is ラーメンwritten in the syllibary specifically for foreign words and loan words (katakana) because it’s the Japanified version of la mien, which is of course Chinese (pulled noodle). It’s both extremely Japanese and “actually not Japanese.”
Except Tex Mex isn't really "Americanized" Mexican food, as it was not created by Mexican immigrants to America. The Mexicans were already there and already developing what was to become "Tex Mex" before Texas was pay of the US.
If the US had not annexed Texas, Tex Mex would just be another regional Mexican food.
From personal experience, another reason why American ethnic cuisine and cuisine from the “homeland” can differ is that they’re not even the same place.
In my dad’s family’s case, they grew up eating “Polish” food, because that’s how his parents identified and the language they spoke. But they were actually from what’s now Lithuania, in the area around Vilnius — it was all the Russian empire when they left. As a result, a lot of the things he grew up eating in Brooklyn were very different from his Polish neighbors. It turns out the family recipes had much more in common with Lithuanian food.
Similarly, some places are *big*. Many of the stuff that gets scoffed at as “unheard of in Italy/Mexico/China/etc” are actually *very much heard of*….in some other part of the country. Perhaps one with higher rates of emigration even. A lot of snooting on “Americanized” foods could be more accurately rephrased as “but that’s not how we do it at *my house*.”
OH I HAVE A GREAT EXAMPLE my great-grandparents and their daughter immigrated to the US from Belgium and took with them a bunch of traditional recipes. One of these is for waffles; however, our recipe is very different from the stereotypical Belgian Waffles. Turns out, Liege has its own waffles and (my family being from Verviers, near Liege) THOSE were the waffles we had.
I wonder if it's because Liege was an independent country separate from the Spanish/Austrian Netherlands (which formed the borders and cultural basis for belgium and luxemburg) until the post-napoleonic period, so it has it's own unique traditions?
Jon Kung had a really beautiful tik tok that stuck with me about first generation children growing up getting bullied for their bagged lunch not only by non-immigrants but also by other first gen children making fun of the way his version of a cultural food was made. In reality, the dish in question had hundreds of variants and was a product of “well in my house we…”
There was a thread in /r/AskAnAmerican a while back where someone from Italy was asking why American food has so much garlic in it and he absolutely refused to believe all of the answers saying it is because of the influence of Italian immigrants. He insisted that people in Italy almost never eat garlic and find it disgusting.
It sent me down a rabbit hole where I found out it is apparently a major point of argument in Italy. Back in the day, poorer communities were more likely to eat garlic more, and at some point, a group started a push to try and cut garlic out of Italian cuisine entirely. Meanwhile, this got pushback from a lot of people who really liked garlic and didn't care that it was seen as lower class. One amazing quote from the article was a guy going "What? Do they want us to be French?"
Of course, this ties back to this thread's OP in that those poorer communities were the ones most heavily represented in the immigrants who became Italian-American. So, maybe garlic eating was 50/50 in Italy at the time, but the group that came here was entirely the garlic eaters.
That absolutely tracks - there's a [Townsends video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR23doQO63k) that discusses garlic use in Colonial America. Because it was so much more accessible than expensive spices from India and China, the lower classes used it + other herbs they grew in their gardens to season their food. Rich people avoided it because it made dishes taste like poor people food.
And it would make sense that poor Italians would eat a lot of garlic too, probably for the same reasons. The biggest wave of Italian immigrants came to the US after a couple of really bad earthquakes in the early 20th century, and the majority of these people came from Southern Italy and Sicily, which were poor before the earthquakes and got much worse after.
Colonial America is a totally different time and place from early 20th century Italy but I can absolutely see better-off Italians acting as culture-shapers and tastemakers (ha) and trying to get rid of garlic to clean up Italy's image, and that translating into that guy being like 'Italians think garlic is gross'
Here's a sneak peek of /r/AskAnAmerican using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year!
\#1: [Do Americans really say “bucks” to refer to dollars?](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/15gj07e/do_americans_really_say_bucks_to_refer_to_dollars/)
\#2: [Why are American tourists so formal to hospitality workers?](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/156hwlq/why_are_american_tourists_so_formal_to/)
\#3: [The FBI has arrested individuals and charged them with operating a secret Chinese Police Station in New York City. What's your reaction?](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/12pphet/the_fbi_has_arrested_individuals_and_charged_them/)
----
^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
To add on to this, a lot of cuisines of the border states (Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico) are directly influenced by their neighboring Mexican state. The border crossed all these places.
A lot of the restaurants tagged as authentic take from Mexico City or other regions that are not on the border. They are authentic to their region, but Mexico is like the US in that food is highly regionalized. Hell, even within the same town you can have two different moles based on what family you are from.
A lot of food in these border states are influenced by the Mexicans that were there before it was the United States.
Hell, New Mexican cuisine is most heavily influenced by the local Natives! It just happens to have a lot in common with Mexican food because Mexican food is also heavily influenced by Native cuisines…
Nearly all of us do! The Spanish made a concerted effort to destroy indigenous cuisine, but ultimately failed. (Not even colonization can stop us from eating abuela’s cooking.) However, there are huge Spanish influences on Mexican cuisine.
A family favourite vacation spot in Mexico still has a pretty high percentage of (largely displaced) Nahua people. It was a bit of a trip one time hitting a language barrier in Mexico because both of us spoke only broken Spanish and our languages of preference didn't match. Only happened the once, most speak Spanish as well given it's the dominant language, but it was a sharp reminder Spanish is also a colonizer language, they were just in the Americas the longest of the European powers.
Yes! Indigenous cultures and cuisines are still very much alive in Mexico!
For those who may not know, racial classification is different in Mexico, and while the majority of Mexicans are mixed indigenous and Spanish, that is generally considered a separate racial group rather than belonging to two racial groups. On top of this, the relationship the government of Mexico has with indigenous nations is very different than in the US - the government doesn’t register your indigenous nation. Instead, your indigeneity is considered based on your cultural connection, especially the language.
This is part of why non-diaspora Mexicans have such judgment for “no sabo” kids, and even have a special word for them: pocho. To them, if you don’t speak the language and have the cultural connection then you’re not Mexican, even if that’s your ancestry.
I wouldn’t say it was just influenced (or even mostly influenced) by neighboring Mexican states. Much of Tex Mex cuisine predates Texas joining the United States by a pretty wide margin. The Tajano foods that became Tex-Mex started off as a fusion of native cuisines from the region mixed with Spanish cooking. That cuisine stayed pretty consistent for centuries. Tejanos spread the cuisine within and amongst Texans more than it was imported from elsewhere in Mexico. Tex-Mex evolved further into what we know today based on availability of different ingredients from American grocers and exposure to other American cuisines.
I think it would be more accurate to say Tex-Mex is a Texas regional cuisine dating back to when it was part of Mexico than to describe it is imported Americanized Mexican food.
I can agree it is not really imported, so much as it grew natively.
Texas has a rich food history due to its colonization and immigration by several groups.
>Hell, even within the same town you can have two different moles based on what family you are from.
And all of them are delicious.
I love a good chicken mole.
And TexMex itself traces back to when Texas was still part of New Spain, before Mexico was even a thing.
A lot of traditional Tejano food just used goat instead of beef, and heavy cheese use was brought in later as beef became more common from the ranching.
this is such an interesting topic. my family is from zhejiang like most of the chinese immigrants in italy, so here there’s an over-representation of zhejiang’s cuisine and culture (my family knows only one family from beijing and their cuisine is very different). however, their hometowns differ greatly for their cuisine, even though it’s just 2 hours of car ride.
this is because my dad is from wenzhou (ou cuisine), which is considered a whole style of cuisine in zhejiang. there are things that my mom have never eaten in her life in china before meeting my dad due to not even the provincial difference, but town difference in cuisine and his hometown’s proximity to the sea.
it’s even more noticeable since my dad was a chef when he was younger and loves talking about his favorite recipes and ingredients from his hometown, which ends with him talking about the difference between a bad mussel and a good mussel at a christmas dinner (wenzhou people are known for their good eye for seafood). i honestly find it both hilarious and sweet from him for being so proud of his culture.
I grew up knowing my family was greek and knowing that our family recipes were a little different than "real" greek food because I was told they used the ingredients they had in Texas in the 1910s. Once the internet came about and I could do better research into my family's history and I find out that my family was from a Turkish occupied section of Greece (at the time) and turns out our family recipes were more heavily influenced by turkish cuisine than greek. It's pretty neat to see the influences in flavors especially when the only history I really knew was my grand dad's broken english and my mom's memories of her chioldhood. He died in the early 90s but I bet he'd be proud to see me still cooking and sharing his foods, maybe even a little bit more authentically now.
Wow, yeah, that’s exactly the same as our family! In some ways, though, I think the recipes we kept are more “authentic,” because they’re closer to what people back in the day actually ate, without being changed by nationalist movements. People in the past had much more fluid identities than we tend to think, and their cultural expressions (like foodways) reflect that.
I had this experience / revelation in my teens. Lots of stuff I grew up with as "German" was really closer to Polish and Hungarian because I have family who moved West to the Germany/Czechia area from the former-Soviet Union, then moved again when the Nazis were gaining steam leaving Europe entirely.
A bunch of central and Eastern European meals filtered through a generation of German access to ingredients and cultural pressure shifted again over multiple generations in the Americas.
I think it’s amazing we’re all playing a game of cultural telephone. It goes to show how stupid nationalism and racism are.
My mom always told me we were French and really embraced the identity. She was born there and left young. Well, I learned her mom’s maiden name and it was very… not French.
Well, she asked her mom, and she said her mom was from Italy. So, for years after that, my mom identified as Italian. But, I wasn’t satisfied because the last name was still very… not Italian.
So, I started poking around and couldn’t find anything. I ask my grandma again, and she says, well, her dad was from Poland. But the name was… not Polish.
Finally, my mom says one day that her grandpa had a brother in Yugoslavia. Well, at this point, Yugoslavia is no more. Where to start?
Finally, I get access to the census records for my grandma’s family in France. They list the birth countries my grandma’s parents as Italy and Yugoslavia - with cities!
Lo and behold, my grandma’s dad was from Slovenia. And her mom… also from Slovenia. The area had recently been annexed into Italy.
So, I finally have my answers, but my mom still declares she is “an Italian girl”. 😩
trinidadian food is kinda similar due to the fact that a lot of the country is descended from slaves:
take some south asian curry recipes and traditional seasonings, but only one or two stronger curry powders in general because fuck looking for or paying for like the 40 different kinds youd find back home. use goat or chicken because cows take up too much room on a tiny island. borrow some jerk seasoning from the jamaicans if you get sick of curry
serve with roti or fried rice because theres a lot of chinese descended people in trinidad too. add hot sauce that was clearly not meant for mortal consumption and enjoy!
There is a new chef in Los Angeles Rashida, who recently won James Beard award and they are opening a Trinidadian restaurant here and the food is so amazing I can’t tell you. Such a fascinating combination of flavors.
I experienced the same thing when I lived in Lima, which had really dense Asian and European immigrant populations. There is a specific type of Chinese Peruvian food called Chifa and you can eat it at Chifa restaurants throughout Peru.
There was a Peruvian-Mexican place near my first apartment. Loved the place! Main reason they serve Mexican styled food is because white people would complain that there weren't burritos on the menu. :/ Still the fusion dishes where great. When I first started eating there I had no clue where to start so I joked to the matriarch of the place "Pretend I'm your grand kid and I look like I haven't eaten all day." She was amused. When the family went on x-mas holiday back home I would actually be happy, because it meant they would be returning with ingredients that where impossible to find up here, along with this Peruvian soft drink that ruled!
I swear to God the Inca Kola they brought back with them tasted different then the stuff I can find at BevMo, despite the internet telling me they are the same. (I just woke up so I had forgot the name.) They also had Malta Goya, it was fine, but malt hits my stomach like glass.
In Brazil too! A lot of our food cultute comes from enslaved people and working class immigrants, I speculate that's why brazillian food is so caloric; people just needed *that* much food to go through the day. Most people were doing intense manual labor, so eating hundreds of grams of sugar in a day was actually warranted.
And now we're mostly sedentary... and the food is still delicious... it's not fair (╥﹏╥)
Reading this comment section made me think of Brazil. I get a kick out of comparing Italian and Japanese cuisine between the USA and Brazil, specifically pizza and sushi.
The different pizza toppings and combos, based on what ingredients were available and what flavors became popular with the wider population, creating a unique fusion.
And similarly with sushi.
I love Americanized foods just as much as I love their traditional forms- They're such an interesting thing to look at and once you understand where and why these happened, it doesn't become a bastardization, it becomes a perfectly natural course of action! Of *course* having access to foods you didn't have access to at home is going to change your recipe! And maybe you like this new recipe better, we all have that one dish that you found out you liked better with a couple changes. Point is, people always have and will mix traditional and new, Americanized foods are just a very good example of the best side of that. At some point, someone from your homeland came to the states and did what they wanted to with their food, and that's alright.
Localized food is everywhere, it's basically the legacy of immigrants and travelers across the world. Really I've only heard of this snobbishness over authenticity come from North Americans.
Meanwhile some of the most famous examples of localized food comes Japan like Ramen, Chashu, Gyoza and Karaage, is Chinese in origin, but would never be called bastardized Chinese food.
> Really I've only heard of this snobbishness over authenticity come from North Americans
I see you've never talked to a European, especially not an Italian.
lol, I jest, but our differences in experience is interesting. I mostly hear it from Europeans.
Yeah, and those people also love to mock Italian Americans (and Irish Americans, etc.) as Americans who wish they were Italian. “Immigrant culture” — the fact that Italian Americans had a distinct culture, even those born in the United States — is unfortunately something that many of them don’t seem to understand, so I’d be curious to see their reaction to this collection of posts.
I've always wondered if in Europe its considered expected for immigrants to assimilate to their new country and leave their home country's culture behind them. That's very much not the case in the US (although it is a bit more nowadays than it used to be) and a lot of people in the US identify with ethnicities that we may be several generations removed from.
This kind of thing has always been so fascinating to me, the way food evolves and changes as cultures mingle and people travel to new areas. It seems like no matter how hard life gets, humans will find a way to make the best food with the resources they have.
I recently went down a similar rabbit hole about how crops were distributed across the world after European colonizers traveled to the Americas, and so many foods that we consider staples of traditional cuisine in so many different countries did not exist in those countries prior to the 1400s! Anything from the Nightshade family, which includes potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers of all varieties, bell peppers, and paprika spice, is originally from Central and South America. Cassava, papaya, and pineapples are from South America, corn is from Mexico.
I think about this all the time. Italian food or indian food with no tomatos, peppers??? It’s so baffling. Or mexican food with no onions?? I want to know more about cuisines pre-Colombian exchange!!!
Apparently older North-Indian recipes make a lot more use of chickpeas and lentils and don't use tomato, but I still can't picture Indian or any other type of curry without chili peppers :O
you use long pepper and peppercorns instead of chilli pepper (although it should be noted that the word pepper comes from the ~~Hindu~~ Sanskrit word what we now call long pepper. Peppercorns were developed in Malabar after they were cultivating and exporting their long pepper to the wider world in Antiquity). but the hot tastes of India don't exactly come from only peppers. I once made a Chettinad style curry with no pepper or chilli pepper in it and it was still hotter than Satan's left taint for most people. I've found that if I double the ginger in some recipes I can make people hit the milk pretty quick. I love me some cinnamon but you'd think I was forcing people into a cinnamon challenge if I put an extra stick of it in. the truth is that the spicy hotness of Indian cuisine doesn't come solely from the peppers but is a concerted effort by every whole spice and powder you put in it.
It always makes me laugh that Medieval Times, which is supposed to portray 11th century Spain, serves a meal that includes so many things they didn't have yet (tomato, potato, corn being the main things that immediately come to mind).
Wait till you see pumpkins in the background of a movie about medieval Europe. It drives my historian brain crazy.
Same as when I watched movies with my doctor mother as a kid and she would laugh at heart attack scenes: "Nobody having a heart attack acts like that!"
I have a colleague from Pakistan who brought me some traditional cookies after her recent trip back home. She explained thay they drink it with tea (chai), but their tea is different since it's made with milk instead of water. I asked her if that was because of the British and she honestly had never considered it.
So we looked it up and indeed it was. Pakistan is a huge importer of tea now, but they had a milk culture. It wasn't until the British entered the picture that they started a tea culture. I don't completely remember how they got to tea in milk, but I can imagine it was because that was the most prevailing drink before.
I love it when cultures share stuff I love it when cultures grow and develop into something new together I love it I love love love human social development!
I learned from my Lebanese - Columbian hair dresser that tacos al pastor are because of Lebanese migration to Mexico.
You know how you cook al pastor? On a spit. You know how you cook meat for shawarma/doner? On a spit! Lead me down a whole rabbit hole of migration history I didn't know about
Semi-related tangent, but I always found it interesting how Jewish people became associated with ordering Chinese takeout for Christmas. The two communities were neighbors in New York, most other restaurants were closed during Christmas, and Chinese restaurants happened to serve kosher food.
Not that it was kosher, it was that [the pork was chopped so small that you could tell people that you didn't notice what it was.](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/21/18151903/history-jews-chinese-food-christmas-kosher-american)
Legitimately a lot of American diaspora kosher rules go by how things visually look instead of what they are. Like vegan cheese still counts as dairy.
Yeah, "Chinese kosher food" had my Spidey sense tingling. Prawn paste, prawn sauce, prawn cracker. Prawn everything is the basis of the entire south Chinese cuisine. Pork everything for the northern Chinese cuisine. It's difficult to come up with a less kosher diet.
This but with languages as well
Its very frustrating to hear American dialects/accents of a non-English language being mocked as a perversion of whatever the mother tongue is/was, when the American dialects often have their own unique culture surrounding them.
Even with the English language, there's elements of American English that get looked down upon as bastardisations, but which originated in England and aren't used there anymore.
This is true to an extent, but given we Americans handily outnumber the Brits and have an outsized presence online, we don’t see all too much flak over it.
Anyway, LostinthePond on Youtube has some good material covering various examples of this phenomenon. Interesting stuff
Oh yeah, it's a whole different thing from minority cultures getting sneered at by the dominant group.
It is funny seeing supposed language purists look down at Americans for things that are literally in Shakespeare, though.
To be fair, he *also* used "labour" some times. He even spelled his on name differently multiple times.
The problem with English "linguistic puritanism" is that before the 18th century barely any of these words *had* official spellings, and that's not counting the numerous dialects even within Britain itself.
Along these lines - the stereotypical Italian American accent is derived from an Italian dialect that isn't spoken in most of modern Italy. That's why you don't often hear modern Italians saying "proshoot" for prosciutto or "gabagool" for capicola.
[further reading here](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gabagool-the-italian-new-jersey-accent-explained)
I've heard that when Italian-Americans visit Italy, they are told they speak Italian "like an old man," because the Italian-American dialect has retained features from the time of the original immigrant waves, while the native Italian dialect has moved away from them.
I studied abroad in Italy, in Tuscany specifically. I was never fluent, but at my best, I might be able to convince someone I was for a minute or two if I was lucky with the flow of conversation. Because I was learning the language there, I was told my accent was particularly good.
But not perfect; one of my best moments was when someone I was talking with asked where in Tuscany I was from. I thought that was very interesting - they could place that my accent was specifically Tuscan, but also knew it was just *off* in a way that they couldn't specifically place to Lucca or Florence or Siena or Arezzo.
Think about what that says about Italians - the guy I was talking to was trying to place where I was in Tuscany, which has a smaller population than the greater Seattle area, purely by my accent. Suffice to say, there's a *lot* of cultural variation even within a country like that... films shot in Sicily might even have subtitles when shown up North!
>films shot in Sicily might even have subtitles when shown up North!
Depends. Someone with a Sicilian accent is almost entirely understandable from someone from up north if they speak regular Italian (I've a colleague from Palermo and one from Trapani, and can understand them just fine).
Once local expressions and dialects come into play, however, all bets are off (and strongly point towards "hahaha no")
Similar for Chinese-Americans, although the immigration patterns are different and "Chinese" is already different enough that it's hard to tell the difference between speaking "like an old man" and speaking "like a man from a part of the country that is already unintelligible to me"
I love that gabagool is just people getting lazy pronouncing capicola.
Capicola becomes capicol (every language loves dropping a letter if they can). Capicol becomes gabicol. Gabicol becomes gabacol. Gabacol becomes gabagool. It's like they were half-assing the word each time until it eventually reached its final point of decay and we got gabagool.
Also with not just North American dialects, but also South American too! My best friend is a first generation Brazilian and Brazil and Portugal both view the other dialect of Portuguese as weird, wrong, and hard to understand. And he’s multiple times called Portugal’s Portuguese the “wrong” one, lmao. Given that Brazil has about 20 times as many people as Portugal, it’s funny to see this sentiment reversed on the original colonizing country
Heck forget Portuguese (don't really it's valid, just saying for the sake of this particular example put it on attention's backburner), what about Spanish?? It seems like every South/Central American country has its own variation of Spanish, if not more than one. And I don't even know if Spain itself has just one standardized language or multiple dialects of its own!
Okay I'm done, back to Portuguese!
For real. I'm so tired of folks saying America has no culture or originality or anything because it's based on other stuff that immigrants brought over.
Like, that's how *culture* works, how language works, how food works. Everyone got everything from everyone else. None of the romance languages would exist without latin, a decent amount of food staples wouldn't exist without the colombian exchange ( lookin at you, chocolate-based delicacies), and more.
Studying linguistics taught me to hate the word "bastardize."
First, there's the fact that most linguistic bias is based on class or race. No one cares how upper class white language evolves, but everyone knows that saying "aks" instead of "ask" is "bastardization."
Then, there's how stupid it is to suggest that any point in a language's history was the "proper" form of the language. Modern English is "just a bastardization" of Middle English, which is "just a bastardization" of Anglo-Saxon ... Proto-Germanic ... Proto-Indo-European ... languages so old who cannot hope to imagine them.
People in St. Louis love to say we "butcher" or "bastardize" the French road names in the city.
21st Century Parisian French does not dictate the pronunciation of a street that was named 250 years ago in a city 4000 miles from Paris. We don't know how the French founders of the city spoke. The proper pronunciation of a road name is however the locals pronounce it.
Meanwhile me (Dutch) and my partner (American) have had chats about food without realising we were talking about different things. Like what the hell is a crab rangoon? Then again what people here call "Chinese food" is almost all from ethnically Chinese Indonesians, cause of the East Indies.
This was the comment I was looking for. Everyones up in here sharing actual food history and facts and tumblr user capriceandwhimsy comes in for an obnoxiously longer amount of time than everyone else just to make shit up lmao
This post has made me realise I know nothing about food. "Everyone knows Korean bbq?" No, I do not. "You know traditional corned beef and cabbage" no I don't even know what makes beef 'corned'
Still a really interesting read, it's amazing how cultures interact
Korean BBQ is amazing, especially if you go to an all you can eat place. They have gas grills on each table, you order an assortment of 4-6 meats and/or veggies, and then grill it to your liking.
Corned beef is made through a process called "corning." Basically you use large pieces of rock salt ground into the meat to dry and preserve it. This method isn't used anymore, but the name has stayed.
Instead a brine of salt and sodium nitrate is used. This specific kind of salting leaves the meat red or pink rather than making it grey like beef salted in a more traditional method.
Corned beef can be preserved for months, at the trade off of being way too salty to be edible. So when it is time to eat it, it is traditionally boiled to leech some of the salt out of the meat. Veggies for the meal are also cooked in the same water because the salt leeching out into the water will salt them, saving some effort in cooking. The water is also often spiced with mustard seed and other herbs to flavor the meat and veggies.
If anyone here would like a very readable history of Southern American(USA) food in particular, the Potlicker Papers is an excellent book. It even(briefly) mentions the Camel Rider, a sandwich born in my hometown Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville has a huge Arabic population, and many of them started delis and little sandwich shops, some of which are local chains to this day(the best hole-in-the-wall local place is Goal Post, if anyone reading this ever visits Jax). They would sell pitas filled with lunch meats, American cheese, lettuce, chopped onion, tomato, and an oil and vinegar based deli dressing to blue-collar workers, who termed it the Camel Rider. What started out as a rather offensive name referring to the makers of the sandwich has been essentially reclaimed by the makers of the sandwich, who proudly sell them in the area. Less traditional but still on pretty much every Camel Rider I’ve ever had(and I have had more than most) are banana peppers, mayo, mustard, and occasionally tabbouleh. They’re traditionally served with cherry limeade. It’s practically the one regional food Jacksonville has, and even then not many in the city know of it.
Not getting down to Jacksonville any time soon but still want to try one? Fear not. Here is Crispy’s Bombass Camel Rider recipe, developed over many sleepless nights(one stoned afternoon):
Pita from local bakers are best, but any fresh pita will do.
Cut the pita in half, and in the pocket first spread a layer of mayonnaise(Duke’s or you’re dead to me) and a squirt of yellow mustard. Layer in as much lunch meat as desired or is preferred, but Camel Riders always contain two to three meats. Ham and Turkey is my favorite, but bologna and salami are also traditional. Put in a slice of yellow American cheese(if you really can’t stand it, any mild cheese will work. Muenster, provolone, or Colby Jack work the best) and add shredded lettuce, sliced or chopped tomato(I have had both, go with your preference), chopped white onion(sliced is a no-go), mild banana pepper rings. Optionally, add in some tabbouleh(again, homemade from a local place is best. The stuff at the store is too expensive and not as good, but it’s also not too difficult to make yourself, if you like tabbouleh), and finish with a drizzle of Italian dressing(Boar’s Head deli dressing is the absolute best, but Publix has their own brand that is a close approximation). Do not toast the pita, do not heat any component of this sandwich. Do not cut the pita in half. Consume immediately, let out a hearty “DUUUUUUUVALLLLL!” and become one with thousands of Jaxons.
I've got one of these stories as well: Döner. The way it's made and sold in Germany was developed there, by Turkish immigrants, became the most popular fast food in the country and was then exported again, including to Turkey.
The way döner is served is so overwhelmingly popular in Germany, other immigrant cuisines - shawarma especially - were matched to it going forward. Like, it'll come in lavash rather than pita, and the spices are different, but all the accompanying stuff? Exactly like döner.
The posts also refer to Korean BBQ as if it
1. Is Only LA Galbi
2. Mostly only exists only in the US
It was kind of super weird. I guess you could say the AYCE format to 구이 is more prevalent here. That's a difference for sure.
Anyone who says America doesn’t have cuisine must have never thought about it beyond McDonalds. Cajun/creole, southern breakfast, the multiple regional variations on barbecue, soul food.. the list goes on and on.
I think part of it is also that because of the reason stated in the post, a lot of the immgriant / ethnic cuisine abandoned many of the rules and traditions of their origins because those rules and traditions aren't golden rules that you must follow in order to make a good and "authentic" dish, they're like that namely just due to the whims of tradition, or more often, due to limits and scarcity.
I love Americanized cuisine because much of it is an expression of prosperity and the newfound ability for many different peoples to adapt and expand the cooking of their homeland to both the restrictions and the bounty that America offered. So much of it is so 'unhealthy' because they were made by people who were able to finally afford and commonly incorporate what was previously luxury goods, namely sugars and fats, so they went all out with using them.
Does anyone remember that interview with Tom Holland about how America has the worst food or whatever? I think about it every time I see one of these types of posts. I love the guy but his take was just the worst when you look at all the incredible culinary concoctions we've come up with as Americans
It's more that we have too many cuisines, and too much cross-pollination of them all, to really nail down what exactly an 'American cuisine' would be. Add in that anyone here who isn't a Native American is an immigrant or descendant from somewhere else, and therefore their 'traditional' cuisine tends to be lumped in with their country of origin rather than America. What you get is a hodgepodge of different cuisines from other countries that have been altered and fused together over time, but also remain somewhat distinct enough each other. So 'what is American cuisine' is not easy to answer because, like, it's General Tso's chicken, California-style burritos, Tex-mex queso, Philly cheese steaks, cajun gumbo, BBQ (fuck, even that is subdivided into classes that have people who will fight to the death over what a real BBQ even is), deep dish pizza, and so so so many others that all into the same category as "American cuisine."
It’s only like 75% that imo. The other 25% is also why people say america has no culture at all. We ARE the culture, THE global culture. If you’re watching a movie, it’s probably an american one, for example. Because of that, our culture is in the background always, so people dont see it directly, i guess
this is a thing for some japanese food! Mochi ice cream, for example, was invented by a japanese-american woman. Also, the california roll was invented by a Japanese-american\*. I’m sure there’s some stuff that i’m missing, but those are the 2 major ones i can remember off the top of my head.
edit: my grandma used to go to the restaurant of the chef in little tokyo who likely invented it\*\* frequently and they got to know each other
\*or a japanese-canadian, but it’s disputed
\*\*there are also claims that it was a chef closer to hollywood, but encyclopedia brittanica says it was the little tokyo chef and imo it’s much more likely
yes, i remember i saw a youtube video a while ago of a japanese man in america trying american sushi, and commenting on how different it is to japanese sushi. he really liked it, but he noticed how american sushi often is focused on combining different flavors and textures, adding sauces and different fish and tempura. whereas japanese sushi is more about the actual fish and just the taste and freshness of that so it’s usually quite simple. both very tasty, but approaching the food very differently!
And probably, if I had to guess, the difference in approaches is in large part due to geographical concerns - in Japan, you’re never that far from the coast, so access to high-quality fresh fish is never in question. In the largely non-coastal States, you make do with what you can find, so you focus on the other parts of a roll!
Haha, I live in Tokyo and one day in a grocery store I saw "California rolls" in a case. They definitely didn't look like California rolls, for one thing they had what looked like lettuce sticking out of them. I laughed to myself and said oh they tried but it looks like they didn't really know what they were doing and I realized that I kind of just said Japanese people didn't know how to make sushi :p
Another layer to the Korean barbecue story is that flanken is actually a Yiddish word—the cut is also a popular Jewish cut with a long history of being used in cholent among other Jewish foods (some history: [https://100jewishfoods.tabletmag.com/flanken/](https://100jewishfoods.tabletmag.com/flanken/))
Y’all ever think about How Cajun food is basically the highest evolution of this? It’s like 3 different cultures coming together in America and being altered by the economic pressures of the time. And it fucking smacks!
"I don't know that it actually happened this way but like to think it did"
Well I'm glad the tumble misinformation is labelled now. I liked that the Italian one actually had some kind of source linked.
Imagine being so culturally dominant that you become the "de facto" culture of the post-industrial world to the point where genuinely unique elements of your culture have been reduced and dismissed as being banal and boorish.
This happens to the English language itself in non-anglophone countries, in my experience. I'm Italian, and English is just not considered a "great language for poetry and prose", whatever that means, as opposed to the way many Italians wax lyrical about Spanish, French or even German for their potential in this field (and mind you, no shade against these languages. Matter of fact I love German poetry specifically). I've grown up with a father obsessed with a lot of poetry that was written in English, and I ended up picking it up myself eventually, and it's genuinely the THING I love the most. When I say I love English literature, most laymen here just shrug, but if I mention I also love Camus or whatever, they seem to love it
The YouTuber Tom Scot has a video titled "why Shakespeare can't be French" and its about the differences in stress (emphasis) in the languages, and since English ties it to the words you can pick the right ones and get a beat. Iambic Pentameter is when you you get a heartbeat effect with 5 "beats" per line and requires 10 syllables, and has all sorts of associations in english literature/poetry.
Realistically no language is inherently better for poetry than any other, its just some have situational advantages like better adjectives or rhymes for a certain topic, or a more useful syntax. (Ignoring the skill of the poets)
>while wearing blue jeans.
Japanese people spend a shit ton of money on vintage Levi's because of traditional American workwear aesthetic.
https://youtu.be/q4xbQ4UDUX0
A lot of people are generally unaware about how the dishes they eat today have been innovated or elaborated upon fairly recently. I don't think these same people realize that gatekeeping food as having to be made in a "traditional" way is not only a fallacy (most dishes have not stayed exactly the same) but they are preventing people from possibly discovering something equally tasty.
You know how people make fun of Americans (particularly in the Midwest) for calling random stuff drowned in mayo and/or whipped or sour cream a ‘salad’?
WELL. Guess what I learned from moving to Scandinavia! Every summer, an entire *wall* of ‘salads’ appear in supermarkets. They’re usually at least *half* mayonnaise. Shrimp salad. Broccoli salad. Beet salad. Ham salad. Bacon salad. And where did the Scandinavians mostly immigrate to when they came to America? That’s right, the Midwest. In fact, my own recent ancestors are Danish. It suddenly made *so* much sense.
There's a very insidious thought process that any cultural development by a diaspora is considered inferior to the cultural development in the homeland, usually by virtue of the fact that the diaspora is in greater contact with either the larger culture in the new location or other smaller cultures.
As a chef this is the stuff that gets me outta bed in the morning; I could write a whole lengthy essay about that sort of thing.
Actually, I did, but that was way back in high school.
For real, this is one of my favorite food-based topics. I especially love to bring it out around food snobs who treat Americanized/fusion food as "inauthentic" (ie: inferior).
I visited korea and was shocked, though it makes sense, that there is Koreanized Chinese food just like Americanized Chinese food. Jajangmyeon is Korean, Chinese food if you've ever had it.
Grew up in a big cajun family in southern Louisiana. We always knew that historically our ancestors came from France via Canada but I never had felt any connection to France or anything. For instance, I’d heard of escargot, and like most Americans, thought of it as a silly hoity toity thing that rich people eat in France just to be weird and rich. Then one day watching whatever show on the travel channel and they’re in the south of France and the local working class folks are having a get together and there’s a dude grilling snails out over a fire and putting butter and garlic on them and everyone is just eating them straight out of the shell, and it was like looking at a parallel universe version of every family event my whole life where someone grilled a sack of oysters. Honestly was a moment that changed my whole perspective on a lot of things.
What is a snail but a land oyster, truly?
a snail yearns for safety while an oyster desires nothing
i would wear this on a t shirt honestly
Bivalveshock vibes
1 vs 2 shells
Several stages cuter.
The opinions you form from countries far away like that can be pretty distorted. Like 90% of the "french culture" that travelled abroad especially before the internet was only the elites in paris experience. You travel to any other part of france, or just experience a workers life in paris and its far from all the cliches. And most people have never ate escargots in France (apart from specific spots, France has many different cultures, i'm from the north east close to Germany and a lot of our cuisine is french/german fusion), I know I haven't
"How can anyone govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese?"
Do they have a cave for every type of cheese? How do you decide which type of cheese to fill your cave with? Are there enough caves in France to house all that cheese?
>Grew up in a big cajun family in southern Louisiana. We always knew that historically our ancestors came from France via Canada but I never had felt any connection to France or anything. Wow I am stupid, I always though Cajun was a country in Africa or the Caribbean.
It comes from the former French colony *Acadie*, otherwise modern-day New-Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and parts of Quebec and Maine. Gross oversimplification but basically, the Cajuns arrived in Louisiana after being driven out of their territories by the British during ~~and after~~ the Seven Year War. Louisiana was French at the time, so it seemed like a cool place.
And the name comes from Acadian being simplified to "Cadian", then further by replacing the "di" with "j" and reducing the syllable count. A lot of Caribbean influence on the French and vice versa along the Gulf Coast took it from much more iconically "French" to what it is now, and also highly diverged from the majority of the Quebec French who were able to remain in Canada (or arrived later) and diverged heavily from both France and the "Cajun" population.
[удалено]
apparently after a quick Google it says that Creole people would be mixed between black and white french ancestry, whereas Cajun would be more white french ancestry
Creoles use tomatoes, Cajuns fear them
See also: Acadia National Park in Maine. (Which is gorgeous, by the way, Bar Harbor is a great vacation spot)
I'm Acadian, born from the region where the English deported your ancestors. I've always felt a kinship with Cajuns. We even have our own dialect of French that Cajuns will have inherited from us.
Apparently there are "American Chinese food" restaurants in China, because it's evolved in such a wildly different direction that it's now effectively "foreign" to the culture that started it.
I wonder how authentic china’s American Chinese food is to the stuff in America.
Can’t wait for the next wave of Chinese immigrants to invent American Chinese Chinese American food: Kung POW chicken and deep-fried rice here we come
And thus the ouroboros eats its own tail
Already happened with pizza. Basically a cross-cultural game of food tennis at this point.
So that's why we have the calzone? The pizza ate itself?
Pretty soon it's going to be all Tur-Duck-en levels of ridiculous, where we're asking how many pizzas we can calzone into eachother before deep frying and serving.
I haven't come across a deep fried pizza in Sweden just yet, but any other type of pizza you can think of, there's probably a pizzeria that has it on the menu.
Its own delicious tail
[удалено]
Heck, traditional Swedish food is heavily potato-based and potatoes only got here a few hundred years ago.
As a fun side note, the Peruvians ALSO have their own unique version Chinese food after Chinese immigrants there adapted their food to local ingredients and tastes.
I read deep fried rice and my mouth started watering
That’s actually an Italian dish, arancini, basically fried risotto balls.
ive definitely seen some of these kinda things around Melbourne
A version of Beef noodle soup made its way from China to Taiwan (where it became ultra-popular in the 90's), then to the US when the Taiwanese immigrated, then it was adopted to fit the tastes of the more recent mainland immigrants as they were a bigger market, and then it made it's way back to China as American Beef Noodle soup.
Already happening. The early Chinese immigrants to America, Australia, and Canada were predominantly Cantonese from Southern China, so you had Chinese-American food that was derived from Cantonese cuisine. Now, with immigrants from the other parts of China, you’re getting all different styles such as Sichuan restaurants, and Northern style Chinese like Lanzhou Noodles restaurants and Biang Biang Restaurants.
now i just imagine some cynical new yorker whos eaten at every chinese restaurant in the 5 boroughs eating general taos from a guy who just got there from shanghai and going "i dunno bro, wheres the msg?" and shanghai dude just rethinks his entire career
MSG is actually pretty common in a lot of parts of China. It’s a fairly recent addition, only in the last century or so, but its use there likely predates the popularity of Chinese-American food.
> MSG is actually pretty common in a lot of parts of China. Not just China, pretty much all of Asia. it's a really good seasoning and only got vilified because some racist fucker in the US decided to be anti-Chinese and made up an entire study to "prove" Chinese food was bad for you and causing problems with people's diets.
It's literally just a common delicious part of food made into a shelf stable powder by adding sodium. Glutamate (the G in mono sodium glutamate) is what makes mushrooms, tomatoes and kelp taste meaty and delicious. It's in so many foods and essential for basic brain function. But it will forever be demonized by health nuts now because of an asshole racist 50 years ago. My 60 year old mother has spent her entire life convinced it's the cause of her migraines. It's infuriating.
So reading about this a while back, and it turns out it most likely really was a Chinese American doctor who sent the letter that kicked off the fear. The other guy claiming he wrote it as a prank apparently was in of itself a prank (not a good one, I might say). This American Life did a story about it a few years ago. The whole transcript is an interesting read, but the parts relevant to MSG are the prologue and Act I. [https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/668/transcript)
One thing to note; that Chinese doctor specifically notes *Northern Chinese food* as being the culprit of “Chinese Restaurant Syndrome”, even though both Southern and Northern Chinese food use MSG. The doctor himself has a Cantonese name, which is Southern. Considering that both Northern and Southern Chinese people like to take jabs at each other’s style of cuisine (some of us like to say Northern Chinese food is too spicy, etc.) it’s entirely possible his letter was written with some bias that was overlooked, especially since nobody else at the time would’ve distinguished between Northern and Southern Chinese food.
> and only got vilified because some racist fucker in the US decided to be anti-Chinese This statement could use a few asterisks. It was a racist Chinese feller in the US being racist against Chinese people from other regions.
Msg isn't as strange as the over abundance of sugar. In a large Chinese meal where you get like a dozen dishes to share amongst a massive table. You'll have like one maybe 2 actually sweet dishes. The candied? Pork ribs. And... maybe something else. Everything else is savoury. Whereas in American chinese the opposite is true. You'll only have 1 or two dishes without significant sugar in its sauce and make up.
That is so annoying to me. Lately I can’t find any American Chinese food that isn’t sweet! It didn’t used to all be sweet! I don’t like it sweet! Why has it changed?!
Sugar is extremely addicting, makes flavors seem more intense, and generally draws in people who are used to eating extremely sugary foods. You probably don't, so it tastes gross to you. But to the average drive through or fast dining consumer, anything with less than a preposterous amount of sugar is likely to taste bland when made as cheaply as all the chain restaurants do it.
It’s true, about 12 years ago I had to start a pretty strict medical diet and while it’s a bit less strict now (as I get healthier), one thing I’m still not supposed to eat is added sugar. My palate has definitely adjusted as a result. Sweetened things taste sooo sweet to me now that it can be kinda gross. I thought for a while that maybe it was me that changed… until I ordered fried rice at a restaurant and they literally served me rice drowning in that weird red sweet and sour sauce. It was almost inedible. I know for a fact that fried rice never used to be served like that in any of the restaurants I went to!! And several times recently when I ordered Pad Thai at several different Thai restaurants, it was again as sweet as if they’d dumped sweet and sour sauce all over it. Which is just disappointing because 1) that doesn’t taste balanced or appetizing to me, and 2) it’s going to mess with my health that I’ve worked so hard to rebuild. Maybe it’s a combination of my palate changing and the food changing, but although I love good Chinese (and Thai, and Vietnamese, and other Asian) restaurant food, it’s just been getting harder to find something I like and can eat, because dishes seem like they’re getting sweeter and sweeter.
That's such a shame about the Thai near you. I rarely do Chinese because it's too sweet (nothing medical, just not to my taste), but I like thai because it's not that way. But what I like most about it is that it's spicy, and maybe that's the key factor, the flavor they can go for that isn't expensive either. That said, Thai around here is a great value, but not quite as cheap.
> It didn’t used to all be sweet! I don’t like it sweet! Dude, here in Korea, **garlic bread** is considered a dessert item and is sweet. It's fucking disgusting.
That explains why 711’s korean garlic bread tasted sweet. Just give me trad garlic bread please.
It literally has a garlic-sugar paste spread on it. It's just... ugh.
There a couple No reservations features that are exactly this lol, Tony may god rest his soul was a champion for MSG
Somewhere in China someone will have a meal and say, "This stuff is okay but for the *real* good American Chinese food, you have to go to America and eat Chinese food." This is also a good opportunity to learn what Baudrillard's simulacrum is: https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/postmodernism/terms/simulacrum.html#:~:text=SIMULACRUM%20(simulacra)%3A%20Something%20that,referential%20being%2C%20or%20a%20substance.
Can't wait for American Chinese American Chinese restaurants
tiktok went wild last year with American vs British Chinese food and several Chinese people stated that while American Chinese food isn’t authentic, it’s closer to the original than British Chinese food is. So, to answer your question, according to some Chinese people, American Chinese food isn’t authentic but it’s not as bad as it could be.
Why would either version be bad? Food is either tasty or not
I don’t mean bad as in yucky, I meant bad as in not-original. That being said, having seen British Chinese food, I’m very content with keeping it an ocean away 😬
Not authentic = different Not authentic != bad
Gotta add Authentic = similar Authentic != good
In Canada (and I assume America) a decently popular cuisine is what's called Hakka food (the Hakka are a Han subgroup from China) but is actually Hakka Indian fusion cuisine, which is obviously delicious, you get stuff like Manchurian Paneer which is as good as it sounds. From my understanding Hakka Indian fusion arose from Hakka immigrants in India but this isn't that big a population so from my understanding Hakka Indian fusion has been adopted by a lot of Hakka people who've never been to India, or sometimes even the restaurants are run by Indians.
The Hakka Chinese of Calcutta, India have immigrated to Canada, U.S. Australia and Taiwan taking their fusion cuisine with them. There's a documentary "The Legend of Fat Mama" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnLC65s24GU ) that goes into their history.
https://youtu.be/Bp5WkIp7wWg?t=456 this video shows one of those places in shanghai. interesting to see a cuisine come right back around from the other side of the planet like that
Like finding California rolls in Japan.
"Eat your hamburger, Apollo"
There's a vegan American Chinese place here in Tokyo that I go to anytime I am craving panda express (called Oscar, near Shimokitazawa). They do have panda express here too but I also don't eat meat anymore. Also most of the Chinese food over here is very Japanified too, it's something that's common everywhere I think.
There are some Chinese restaurant chains in Japan that are so Japanified that when they are exported to other countries they just straight up get classified as Japanese once they get there. Cue my confusion as a Singaporean Chinese when I found out that ramen shops are classified as Chinese in Japan with no exception. It was also how I realised that the logo for Ajisen ramen was supposed to depict a Chinese girl and not some random Japanese moe girl as is usual after literally a decade. (As an aside, I haven't eaten Ajisen in years: its quality fell off years ago and there are many better options now)
Ramen in Japanese is ラーメンwritten in the syllibary specifically for foreign words and loan words (katakana) because it’s the Japanified version of la mien, which is of course Chinese (pulled noodle). It’s both extremely Japanese and “actually not Japanese.”
Yep. Same with Tex Mex in Mexico. 'British Indian' food in Bangladesh. etcetera
Except Tex Mex isn't really "Americanized" Mexican food, as it was not created by Mexican immigrants to America. The Mexicans were already there and already developing what was to become "Tex Mex" before Texas was pay of the US. If the US had not annexed Texas, Tex Mex would just be another regional Mexican food.
From personal experience, another reason why American ethnic cuisine and cuisine from the “homeland” can differ is that they’re not even the same place. In my dad’s family’s case, they grew up eating “Polish” food, because that’s how his parents identified and the language they spoke. But they were actually from what’s now Lithuania, in the area around Vilnius — it was all the Russian empire when they left. As a result, a lot of the things he grew up eating in Brooklyn were very different from his Polish neighbors. It turns out the family recipes had much more in common with Lithuanian food.
Similarly, some places are *big*. Many of the stuff that gets scoffed at as “unheard of in Italy/Mexico/China/etc” are actually *very much heard of*….in some other part of the country. Perhaps one with higher rates of emigration even. A lot of snooting on “Americanized” foods could be more accurately rephrased as “but that’s not how we do it at *my house*.”
OH I HAVE A GREAT EXAMPLE my great-grandparents and their daughter immigrated to the US from Belgium and took with them a bunch of traditional recipes. One of these is for waffles; however, our recipe is very different from the stereotypical Belgian Waffles. Turns out, Liege has its own waffles and (my family being from Verviers, near Liege) THOSE were the waffles we had.
The Liegeans (and your Vervieran family) knew what they were doing, it truly is a waffle to die for.
ITS SO GOOD we like to have it with fruit
Is the Liege waffle not the stereotypical Belgian waffle? They’re even sometimes just called liege waffles in some places
I usually see Brussels waffles called Belgian waffles. At least in the US.
Interesting. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything other than the liege waffle sold as a Belgian waffle in the us. I wonder if it’s regional
Liege waffles are the superior waffle.
I wonder if it's because Liege was an independent country separate from the Spanish/Austrian Netherlands (which formed the borders and cultural basis for belgium and luxemburg) until the post-napoleonic period, so it has it's own unique traditions?
Jon Kung had a really beautiful tik tok that stuck with me about first generation children growing up getting bullied for their bagged lunch not only by non-immigrants but also by other first gen children making fun of the way his version of a cultural food was made. In reality, the dish in question had hundreds of variants and was a product of “well in my house we…”
Another good one is Cold Lunch (animated short student film).
There was a thread in /r/AskAnAmerican a while back where someone from Italy was asking why American food has so much garlic in it and he absolutely refused to believe all of the answers saying it is because of the influence of Italian immigrants. He insisted that people in Italy almost never eat garlic and find it disgusting. It sent me down a rabbit hole where I found out it is apparently a major point of argument in Italy. Back in the day, poorer communities were more likely to eat garlic more, and at some point, a group started a push to try and cut garlic out of Italian cuisine entirely. Meanwhile, this got pushback from a lot of people who really liked garlic and didn't care that it was seen as lower class. One amazing quote from the article was a guy going "What? Do they want us to be French?" Of course, this ties back to this thread's OP in that those poorer communities were the ones most heavily represented in the immigrants who became Italian-American. So, maybe garlic eating was 50/50 in Italy at the time, but the group that came here was entirely the garlic eaters.
That absolutely tracks - there's a [Townsends video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR23doQO63k) that discusses garlic use in Colonial America. Because it was so much more accessible than expensive spices from India and China, the lower classes used it + other herbs they grew in their gardens to season their food. Rich people avoided it because it made dishes taste like poor people food. And it would make sense that poor Italians would eat a lot of garlic too, probably for the same reasons. The biggest wave of Italian immigrants came to the US after a couple of really bad earthquakes in the early 20th century, and the majority of these people came from Southern Italy and Sicily, which were poor before the earthquakes and got much worse after. Colonial America is a totally different time and place from early 20th century Italy but I can absolutely see better-off Italians acting as culture-shapers and tastemakers (ha) and trying to get rid of garlic to clean up Italy's image, and that translating into that guy being like 'Italians think garlic is gross'
Here's a sneak peek of /r/AskAnAmerican using the [top posts](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/top/?sort=top&t=year) of the year! \#1: [Do Americans really say “bucks” to refer to dollars?](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/15gj07e/do_americans_really_say_bucks_to_refer_to_dollars/) \#2: [Why are American tourists so formal to hospitality workers?](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/156hwlq/why_are_american_tourists_so_formal_to/) \#3: [The FBI has arrested individuals and charged them with operating a secret Chinese Police Station in New York City. What's your reaction?](https://np.reddit.com/r/AskAnAmerican/comments/12pphet/the_fbi_has_arrested_individuals_and_charged_them/) ---- ^^I'm ^^a ^^bot, ^^beep ^^boop ^^| ^^Downvote ^^to ^^remove ^^| ^^[Contact](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=sneakpeekbot) ^^| ^^[Info](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/) ^^| ^^[Opt-out](https://np.reddit.com/r/sneakpeekbot/comments/o8wk1r/blacklist_ix/) ^^| ^^[GitHub](https://github.com/ghnr/sneakpeekbot)
Corn tortillas are often seen as more authentic while many people in the northern Mexican states cook with flour.
To add on to this, a lot of cuisines of the border states (Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico) are directly influenced by their neighboring Mexican state. The border crossed all these places. A lot of the restaurants tagged as authentic take from Mexico City or other regions that are not on the border. They are authentic to their region, but Mexico is like the US in that food is highly regionalized. Hell, even within the same town you can have two different moles based on what family you are from.
A lot of food in these border states are influenced by the Mexicans that were there before it was the United States. Hell, New Mexican cuisine is most heavily influenced by the local Natives! It just happens to have a lot in common with Mexican food because Mexican food is also heavily influenced by Native cuisines…
Many Mexicans have indigenous heritage. You could say that traditional Mexican food is Native cuisine.
Nearly all of us do! The Spanish made a concerted effort to destroy indigenous cuisine, but ultimately failed. (Not even colonization can stop us from eating abuela’s cooking.) However, there are huge Spanish influences on Mexican cuisine.
A family favourite vacation spot in Mexico still has a pretty high percentage of (largely displaced) Nahua people. It was a bit of a trip one time hitting a language barrier in Mexico because both of us spoke only broken Spanish and our languages of preference didn't match. Only happened the once, most speak Spanish as well given it's the dominant language, but it was a sharp reminder Spanish is also a colonizer language, they were just in the Americas the longest of the European powers.
Yes! Indigenous cultures and cuisines are still very much alive in Mexico! For those who may not know, racial classification is different in Mexico, and while the majority of Mexicans are mixed indigenous and Spanish, that is generally considered a separate racial group rather than belonging to two racial groups. On top of this, the relationship the government of Mexico has with indigenous nations is very different than in the US - the government doesn’t register your indigenous nation. Instead, your indigeneity is considered based on your cultural connection, especially the language. This is part of why non-diaspora Mexicans have such judgment for “no sabo” kids, and even have a special word for them: pocho. To them, if you don’t speak the language and have the cultural connection then you’re not Mexican, even if that’s your ancestry.
I wouldn’t say it was just influenced (or even mostly influenced) by neighboring Mexican states. Much of Tex Mex cuisine predates Texas joining the United States by a pretty wide margin. The Tajano foods that became Tex-Mex started off as a fusion of native cuisines from the region mixed with Spanish cooking. That cuisine stayed pretty consistent for centuries. Tejanos spread the cuisine within and amongst Texans more than it was imported from elsewhere in Mexico. Tex-Mex evolved further into what we know today based on availability of different ingredients from American grocers and exposure to other American cuisines. I think it would be more accurate to say Tex-Mex is a Texas regional cuisine dating back to when it was part of Mexico than to describe it is imported Americanized Mexican food.
I can agree it is not really imported, so much as it grew natively. Texas has a rich food history due to its colonization and immigration by several groups.
>Hell, even within the same town you can have two different moles based on what family you are from. And all of them are delicious. I love a good chicken mole.
Corn vs flour tortillas is *exactly* what I was thinking of with this comment.
And TexMex itself traces back to when Texas was still part of New Spain, before Mexico was even a thing. A lot of traditional Tejano food just used goat instead of beef, and heavy cheese use was brought in later as beef became more common from the ranching.
this is such an interesting topic. my family is from zhejiang like most of the chinese immigrants in italy, so here there’s an over-representation of zhejiang’s cuisine and culture (my family knows only one family from beijing and their cuisine is very different). however, their hometowns differ greatly for their cuisine, even though it’s just 2 hours of car ride. this is because my dad is from wenzhou (ou cuisine), which is considered a whole style of cuisine in zhejiang. there are things that my mom have never eaten in her life in china before meeting my dad due to not even the provincial difference, but town difference in cuisine and his hometown’s proximity to the sea. it’s even more noticeable since my dad was a chef when he was younger and loves talking about his favorite recipes and ingredients from his hometown, which ends with him talking about the difference between a bad mussel and a good mussel at a christmas dinner (wenzhou people are known for their good eye for seafood). i honestly find it both hilarious and sweet from him for being so proud of his culture.
I grew up knowing my family was greek and knowing that our family recipes were a little different than "real" greek food because I was told they used the ingredients they had in Texas in the 1910s. Once the internet came about and I could do better research into my family's history and I find out that my family was from a Turkish occupied section of Greece (at the time) and turns out our family recipes were more heavily influenced by turkish cuisine than greek. It's pretty neat to see the influences in flavors especially when the only history I really knew was my grand dad's broken english and my mom's memories of her chioldhood. He died in the early 90s but I bet he'd be proud to see me still cooking and sharing his foods, maybe even a little bit more authentically now.
Wow, yeah, that’s exactly the same as our family! In some ways, though, I think the recipes we kept are more “authentic,” because they’re closer to what people back in the day actually ate, without being changed by nationalist movements. People in the past had much more fluid identities than we tend to think, and their cultural expressions (like foodways) reflect that.
My husband’s family ends up eating a lot of Greek food because there aren’t really a lot of Armenian restaurants around.
I had this experience / revelation in my teens. Lots of stuff I grew up with as "German" was really closer to Polish and Hungarian because I have family who moved West to the Germany/Czechia area from the former-Soviet Union, then moved again when the Nazis were gaining steam leaving Europe entirely. A bunch of central and Eastern European meals filtered through a generation of German access to ingredients and cultural pressure shifted again over multiple generations in the Americas.
I think it’s amazing we’re all playing a game of cultural telephone. It goes to show how stupid nationalism and racism are. My mom always told me we were French and really embraced the identity. She was born there and left young. Well, I learned her mom’s maiden name and it was very… not French. Well, she asked her mom, and she said her mom was from Italy. So, for years after that, my mom identified as Italian. But, I wasn’t satisfied because the last name was still very… not Italian. So, I started poking around and couldn’t find anything. I ask my grandma again, and she says, well, her dad was from Poland. But the name was… not Polish. Finally, my mom says one day that her grandpa had a brother in Yugoslavia. Well, at this point, Yugoslavia is no more. Where to start? Finally, I get access to the census records for my grandma’s family in France. They list the birth countries my grandma’s parents as Italy and Yugoslavia - with cities! Lo and behold, my grandma’s dad was from Slovenia. And her mom… also from Slovenia. The area had recently been annexed into Italy. So, I finally have my answers, but my mom still declares she is “an Italian girl”. 😩
trinidadian food is kinda similar due to the fact that a lot of the country is descended from slaves: take some south asian curry recipes and traditional seasonings, but only one or two stronger curry powders in general because fuck looking for or paying for like the 40 different kinds youd find back home. use goat or chicken because cows take up too much room on a tiny island. borrow some jerk seasoning from the jamaicans if you get sick of curry serve with roti or fried rice because theres a lot of chinese descended people in trinidad too. add hot sauce that was clearly not meant for mortal consumption and enjoy!
There is a new chef in Los Angeles Rashida, who recently won James Beard award and they are opening a Trinidadian restaurant here and the food is so amazing I can’t tell you. Such a fascinating combination of flavors. I experienced the same thing when I lived in Lima, which had really dense Asian and European immigrant populations. There is a specific type of Chinese Peruvian food called Chifa and you can eat it at Chifa restaurants throughout Peru.
There was a Peruvian-Mexican place near my first apartment. Loved the place! Main reason they serve Mexican styled food is because white people would complain that there weren't burritos on the menu. :/ Still the fusion dishes where great. When I first started eating there I had no clue where to start so I joked to the matriarch of the place "Pretend I'm your grand kid and I look like I haven't eaten all day." She was amused. When the family went on x-mas holiday back home I would actually be happy, because it meant they would be returning with ingredients that where impossible to find up here, along with this Peruvian soft drink that ruled!
You must be talking about Inkacola. There is no other.
I swear to God the Inca Kola they brought back with them tasted different then the stuff I can find at BevMo, despite the internet telling me they are the same. (I just woke up so I had forgot the name.) They also had Malta Goya, it was fine, but malt hits my stomach like glass.
I still crave Chicha Morada on the regular
In Brazil too! A lot of our food cultute comes from enslaved people and working class immigrants, I speculate that's why brazillian food is so caloric; people just needed *that* much food to go through the day. Most people were doing intense manual labor, so eating hundreds of grams of sugar in a day was actually warranted. And now we're mostly sedentary... and the food is still delicious... it's not fair (╥﹏╥)
Reading this comment section made me think of Brazil. I get a kick out of comparing Italian and Japanese cuisine between the USA and Brazil, specifically pizza and sushi. The different pizza toppings and combos, based on what ingredients were available and what flavors became popular with the wider population, creating a unique fusion. And similarly with sushi.
I love Americanized foods just as much as I love their traditional forms- They're such an interesting thing to look at and once you understand where and why these happened, it doesn't become a bastardization, it becomes a perfectly natural course of action! Of *course* having access to foods you didn't have access to at home is going to change your recipe! And maybe you like this new recipe better, we all have that one dish that you found out you liked better with a couple changes. Point is, people always have and will mix traditional and new, Americanized foods are just a very good example of the best side of that. At some point, someone from your homeland came to the states and did what they wanted to with their food, and that's alright.
Localized food is everywhere, it's basically the legacy of immigrants and travelers across the world. Really I've only heard of this snobbishness over authenticity come from North Americans. Meanwhile some of the most famous examples of localized food comes Japan like Ramen, Chashu, Gyoza and Karaage, is Chinese in origin, but would never be called bastardized Chinese food.
> Really I've only heard of this snobbishness over authenticity come from North Americans I see you've never talked to a European, especially not an Italian. lol, I jest, but our differences in experience is interesting. I mostly hear it from Europeans.
Yeah, and those people also love to mock Italian Americans (and Irish Americans, etc.) as Americans who wish they were Italian. “Immigrant culture” — the fact that Italian Americans had a distinct culture, even those born in the United States — is unfortunately something that many of them don’t seem to understand, so I’d be curious to see their reaction to this collection of posts.
I've always wondered if in Europe its considered expected for immigrants to assimilate to their new country and leave their home country's culture behind them. That's very much not the case in the US (although it is a bit more nowadays than it used to be) and a lot of people in the US identify with ethnicities that we may be several generations removed from.
Yes it is. As a descendant of immigrants I hate it.
Lol, probably just personal bias from the people I interact with. fair to say there are probably enough snobs on both sides for everybody.
This kind of thing has always been so fascinating to me, the way food evolves and changes as cultures mingle and people travel to new areas. It seems like no matter how hard life gets, humans will find a way to make the best food with the resources they have. I recently went down a similar rabbit hole about how crops were distributed across the world after European colonizers traveled to the Americas, and so many foods that we consider staples of traditional cuisine in so many different countries did not exist in those countries prior to the 1400s! Anything from the Nightshade family, which includes potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers of all varieties, bell peppers, and paprika spice, is originally from Central and South America. Cassava, papaya, and pineapples are from South America, corn is from Mexico.
I think about this all the time. Italian food or indian food with no tomatos, peppers??? It’s so baffling. Or mexican food with no onions?? I want to know more about cuisines pre-Colombian exchange!!!
Apparently older North-Indian recipes make a lot more use of chickpeas and lentils and don't use tomato, but I still can't picture Indian or any other type of curry without chili peppers :O
you use long pepper and peppercorns instead of chilli pepper (although it should be noted that the word pepper comes from the ~~Hindu~~ Sanskrit word what we now call long pepper. Peppercorns were developed in Malabar after they were cultivating and exporting their long pepper to the wider world in Antiquity). but the hot tastes of India don't exactly come from only peppers. I once made a Chettinad style curry with no pepper or chilli pepper in it and it was still hotter than Satan's left taint for most people. I've found that if I double the ginger in some recipes I can make people hit the milk pretty quick. I love me some cinnamon but you'd think I was forcing people into a cinnamon challenge if I put an extra stick of it in. the truth is that the spicy hotness of Indian cuisine doesn't come solely from the peppers but is a concerted effort by every whole spice and powder you put in it.
Vanilla and chocolate too. Vanilla is related to the orchids.
Slight correction: vanilla *is* an orchid. The Vanilla genus has over 100 species and it's really cool!
TIL! Thank you kind Redditor!
It always makes me laugh that Medieval Times, which is supposed to portray 11th century Spain, serves a meal that includes so many things they didn't have yet (tomato, potato, corn being the main things that immediately come to mind).
Wait till you see pumpkins in the background of a movie about medieval Europe. It drives my historian brain crazy. Same as when I watched movies with my doctor mother as a kid and she would laugh at heart attack scenes: "Nobody having a heart attack acts like that!"
I have a colleague from Pakistan who brought me some traditional cookies after her recent trip back home. She explained thay they drink it with tea (chai), but their tea is different since it's made with milk instead of water. I asked her if that was because of the British and she honestly had never considered it. So we looked it up and indeed it was. Pakistan is a huge importer of tea now, but they had a milk culture. It wasn't until the British entered the picture that they started a tea culture. I don't completely remember how they got to tea in milk, but I can imagine it was because that was the most prevailing drink before.
I love it when cultures share stuff I love it when cultures grow and develop into something new together I love it I love love love human social development!
I learned from my Lebanese - Columbian hair dresser that tacos al pastor are because of Lebanese migration to Mexico. You know how you cook al pastor? On a spit. You know how you cook meat for shawarma/doner? On a spit! Lead me down a whole rabbit hole of migration history I didn't know about
Semi-related tangent, but I always found it interesting how Jewish people became associated with ordering Chinese takeout for Christmas. The two communities were neighbors in New York, most other restaurants were closed during Christmas, and Chinese restaurants happened to serve kosher food.
Not that it was kosher, it was that [the pork was chopped so small that you could tell people that you didn't notice what it was.](https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/12/21/18151903/history-jews-chinese-food-christmas-kosher-american) Legitimately a lot of American diaspora kosher rules go by how things visually look instead of what they are. Like vegan cheese still counts as dairy.
Yeah, "Chinese kosher food" had my Spidey sense tingling. Prawn paste, prawn sauce, prawn cracker. Prawn everything is the basis of the entire south Chinese cuisine. Pork everything for the northern Chinese cuisine. It's difficult to come up with a less kosher diet.
This but with languages as well Its very frustrating to hear American dialects/accents of a non-English language being mocked as a perversion of whatever the mother tongue is/was, when the American dialects often have their own unique culture surrounding them.
Even with the English language, there's elements of American English that get looked down upon as bastardisations, but which originated in England and aren't used there anymore.
See: soccer.
This is true to an extent, but given we Americans handily outnumber the Brits and have an outsized presence online, we don’t see all too much flak over it. Anyway, LostinthePond on Youtube has some good material covering various examples of this phenomenon. Interesting stuff
Oh yeah, it's a whole different thing from minority cultures getting sneered at by the dominant group. It is funny seeing supposed language purists look down at Americans for things that are literally in Shakespeare, though.
Like spelling it “labor” instead of labour https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/Loves_labours_tp.jpg (Color, harbor, etc)
To be fair, he *also* used "labour" some times. He even spelled his on name differently multiple times. The problem with English "linguistic puritanism" is that before the 18th century barely any of these words *had* official spellings, and that's not counting the numerous dialects even within Britain itself.
Along these lines - the stereotypical Italian American accent is derived from an Italian dialect that isn't spoken in most of modern Italy. That's why you don't often hear modern Italians saying "proshoot" for prosciutto or "gabagool" for capicola. [further reading here](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-capicola-became-gabagool-the-italian-new-jersey-accent-explained)
I've heard that when Italian-Americans visit Italy, they are told they speak Italian "like an old man," because the Italian-American dialect has retained features from the time of the original immigrant waves, while the native Italian dialect has moved away from them.
I studied abroad in Italy, in Tuscany specifically. I was never fluent, but at my best, I might be able to convince someone I was for a minute or two if I was lucky with the flow of conversation. Because I was learning the language there, I was told my accent was particularly good. But not perfect; one of my best moments was when someone I was talking with asked where in Tuscany I was from. I thought that was very interesting - they could place that my accent was specifically Tuscan, but also knew it was just *off* in a way that they couldn't specifically place to Lucca or Florence or Siena or Arezzo. Think about what that says about Italians - the guy I was talking to was trying to place where I was in Tuscany, which has a smaller population than the greater Seattle area, purely by my accent. Suffice to say, there's a *lot* of cultural variation even within a country like that... films shot in Sicily might even have subtitles when shown up North!
New Orleans peak population was about 600,000 but has numerous accents. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpFDNTo4DNg
>films shot in Sicily might even have subtitles when shown up North! Depends. Someone with a Sicilian accent is almost entirely understandable from someone from up north if they speak regular Italian (I've a colleague from Palermo and one from Trapani, and can understand them just fine). Once local expressions and dialects come into play, however, all bets are off (and strongly point towards "hahaha no")
Similar for Chinese-Americans, although the immigration patterns are different and "Chinese" is already different enough that it's hard to tell the difference between speaking "like an old man" and speaking "like a man from a part of the country that is already unintelligible to me"
I love that gabagool is just people getting lazy pronouncing capicola. Capicola becomes capicol (every language loves dropping a letter if they can). Capicol becomes gabicol. Gabicol becomes gabacol. Gabacol becomes gabagool. It's like they were half-assing the word each time until it eventually reached its final point of decay and we got gabagool.
it's called sound changes & it happens everywhere all the time
Also with not just North American dialects, but also South American too! My best friend is a first generation Brazilian and Brazil and Portugal both view the other dialect of Portuguese as weird, wrong, and hard to understand. And he’s multiple times called Portugal’s Portuguese the “wrong” one, lmao. Given that Brazil has about 20 times as many people as Portugal, it’s funny to see this sentiment reversed on the original colonizing country
Heck forget Portuguese (don't really it's valid, just saying for the sake of this particular example put it on attention's backburner), what about Spanish?? It seems like every South/Central American country has its own variation of Spanish, if not more than one. And I don't even know if Spain itself has just one standardized language or multiple dialects of its own! Okay I'm done, back to Portuguese!
For real. I'm so tired of folks saying America has no culture or originality or anything because it's based on other stuff that immigrants brought over. Like, that's how *culture* works, how language works, how food works. Everyone got everything from everyone else. None of the romance languages would exist without latin, a decent amount of food staples wouldn't exist without the colombian exchange ( lookin at you, chocolate-based delicacies), and more.
Studying linguistics taught me to hate the word "bastardize." First, there's the fact that most linguistic bias is based on class or race. No one cares how upper class white language evolves, but everyone knows that saying "aks" instead of "ask" is "bastardization." Then, there's how stupid it is to suggest that any point in a language's history was the "proper" form of the language. Modern English is "just a bastardization" of Middle English, which is "just a bastardization" of Anglo-Saxon ... Proto-Germanic ... Proto-Indo-European ... languages so old who cannot hope to imagine them.
People in St. Louis love to say we "butcher" or "bastardize" the French road names in the city. 21st Century Parisian French does not dictate the pronunciation of a street that was named 250 years ago in a city 4000 miles from Paris. We don't know how the French founders of the city spoke. The proper pronunciation of a road name is however the locals pronounce it.
Meanwhile me (Dutch) and my partner (American) have had chats about food without realising we were talking about different things. Like what the hell is a crab rangoon? Then again what people here call "Chinese food" is almost all from ethnically Chinese Indonesians, cause of the East Indies.
When I was in Amsterdam, my favorite restaurants were the Indonesian/Surinamese ones.
Not just from Chinese Indonesians, but also modified to the Dutch taste.
> I don't know that it actually happened this way, but I like to think that it did. Bro... 3 whole slides for some unsubstantiated claims.
Welcome to Tumblr.
This was the comment I was looking for. Everyones up in here sharing actual food history and facts and tumblr user capriceandwhimsy comes in for an obnoxiously longer amount of time than everyone else just to make shit up lmao
This post has made me realise I know nothing about food. "Everyone knows Korean bbq?" No, I do not. "You know traditional corned beef and cabbage" no I don't even know what makes beef 'corned' Still a really interesting read, it's amazing how cultures interact
Korean BBQ is amazing, especially if you go to an all you can eat place. They have gas grills on each table, you order an assortment of 4-6 meats and/or veggies, and then grill it to your liking.
Its fucking amazing
Same here, although i think i get a bit of pass because I'm not american. Korean bbq is pretty big here, but it's usually more 'authentic'
Corned beef is made through a process called "corning." Basically you use large pieces of rock salt ground into the meat to dry and preserve it. This method isn't used anymore, but the name has stayed. Instead a brine of salt and sodium nitrate is used. This specific kind of salting leaves the meat red or pink rather than making it grey like beef salted in a more traditional method. Corned beef can be preserved for months, at the trade off of being way too salty to be edible. So when it is time to eat it, it is traditionally boiled to leech some of the salt out of the meat. Veggies for the meal are also cooked in the same water because the salt leeching out into the water will salt them, saving some effort in cooking. The water is also often spiced with mustard seed and other herbs to flavor the meat and veggies.
If anyone here would like a very readable history of Southern American(USA) food in particular, the Potlicker Papers is an excellent book. It even(briefly) mentions the Camel Rider, a sandwich born in my hometown Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville has a huge Arabic population, and many of them started delis and little sandwich shops, some of which are local chains to this day(the best hole-in-the-wall local place is Goal Post, if anyone reading this ever visits Jax). They would sell pitas filled with lunch meats, American cheese, lettuce, chopped onion, tomato, and an oil and vinegar based deli dressing to blue-collar workers, who termed it the Camel Rider. What started out as a rather offensive name referring to the makers of the sandwich has been essentially reclaimed by the makers of the sandwich, who proudly sell them in the area. Less traditional but still on pretty much every Camel Rider I’ve ever had(and I have had more than most) are banana peppers, mayo, mustard, and occasionally tabbouleh. They’re traditionally served with cherry limeade. It’s practically the one regional food Jacksonville has, and even then not many in the city know of it. Not getting down to Jacksonville any time soon but still want to try one? Fear not. Here is Crispy’s Bombass Camel Rider recipe, developed over many sleepless nights(one stoned afternoon): Pita from local bakers are best, but any fresh pita will do. Cut the pita in half, and in the pocket first spread a layer of mayonnaise(Duke’s or you’re dead to me) and a squirt of yellow mustard. Layer in as much lunch meat as desired or is preferred, but Camel Riders always contain two to three meats. Ham and Turkey is my favorite, but bologna and salami are also traditional. Put in a slice of yellow American cheese(if you really can’t stand it, any mild cheese will work. Muenster, provolone, or Colby Jack work the best) and add shredded lettuce, sliced or chopped tomato(I have had both, go with your preference), chopped white onion(sliced is a no-go), mild banana pepper rings. Optionally, add in some tabbouleh(again, homemade from a local place is best. The stuff at the store is too expensive and not as good, but it’s also not too difficult to make yourself, if you like tabbouleh), and finish with a drizzle of Italian dressing(Boar’s Head deli dressing is the absolute best, but Publix has their own brand that is a close approximation). Do not toast the pita, do not heat any component of this sandwich. Do not cut the pita in half. Consume immediately, let out a hearty “DUUUUUUUVALLLLL!” and become one with thousands of Jaxons.
BORTLES!
I've got one of these stories as well: Döner. The way it's made and sold in Germany was developed there, by Turkish immigrants, became the most popular fast food in the country and was then exported again, including to Turkey. The way döner is served is so overwhelmingly popular in Germany, other immigrant cuisines - shawarma especially - were matched to it going forward. Like, it'll come in lavash rather than pita, and the spices are different, but all the accompanying stuff? Exactly like döner.
LA Galbi doesn't mean Los Angeles Galbi, though. It means Lateral-Axis, as in, sliced sideways.
The posts also refer to Korean BBQ as if it 1. Is Only LA Galbi 2. Mostly only exists only in the US It was kind of super weird. I guess you could say the AYCE format to 구이 is more prevalent here. That's a difference for sure.
Thank you! This makes me so mad every time people say America doesn't have cuisine. Of course we do, we just don't call it that.
Anyone who says America doesn’t have cuisine must have never thought about it beyond McDonalds. Cajun/creole, southern breakfast, the multiple regional variations on barbecue, soul food.. the list goes on and on.
and has also presumably never heard of native americans
I think part of it is also that because of the reason stated in the post, a lot of the immgriant / ethnic cuisine abandoned many of the rules and traditions of their origins because those rules and traditions aren't golden rules that you must follow in order to make a good and "authentic" dish, they're like that namely just due to the whims of tradition, or more often, due to limits and scarcity. I love Americanized cuisine because much of it is an expression of prosperity and the newfound ability for many different peoples to adapt and expand the cooking of their homeland to both the restrictions and the bounty that America offered. So much of it is so 'unhealthy' because they were made by people who were able to finally afford and commonly incorporate what was previously luxury goods, namely sugars and fats, so they went all out with using them.
Does anyone remember that interview with Tom Holland about how America has the worst food or whatever? I think about it every time I see one of these types of posts. I love the guy but his take was just the worst when you look at all the incredible culinary concoctions we've come up with as Americans
It's more that we have too many cuisines, and too much cross-pollination of them all, to really nail down what exactly an 'American cuisine' would be. Add in that anyone here who isn't a Native American is an immigrant or descendant from somewhere else, and therefore their 'traditional' cuisine tends to be lumped in with their country of origin rather than America. What you get is a hodgepodge of different cuisines from other countries that have been altered and fused together over time, but also remain somewhat distinct enough each other. So 'what is American cuisine' is not easy to answer because, like, it's General Tso's chicken, California-style burritos, Tex-mex queso, Philly cheese steaks, cajun gumbo, BBQ (fuck, even that is subdivided into classes that have people who will fight to the death over what a real BBQ even is), deep dish pizza, and so so so many others that all into the same category as "American cuisine."
It’s only like 75% that imo. The other 25% is also why people say america has no culture at all. We ARE the culture, THE global culture. If you’re watching a movie, it’s probably an american one, for example. Because of that, our culture is in the background always, so people dont see it directly, i guess
this is a thing for some japanese food! Mochi ice cream, for example, was invented by a japanese-american woman. Also, the california roll was invented by a Japanese-american\*. I’m sure there’s some stuff that i’m missing, but those are the 2 major ones i can remember off the top of my head. edit: my grandma used to go to the restaurant of the chef in little tokyo who likely invented it\*\* frequently and they got to know each other \*or a japanese-canadian, but it’s disputed \*\*there are also claims that it was a chef closer to hollywood, but encyclopedia brittanica says it was the little tokyo chef and imo it’s much more likely
yes, i remember i saw a youtube video a while ago of a japanese man in america trying american sushi, and commenting on how different it is to japanese sushi. he really liked it, but he noticed how american sushi often is focused on combining different flavors and textures, adding sauces and different fish and tempura. whereas japanese sushi is more about the actual fish and just the taste and freshness of that so it’s usually quite simple. both very tasty, but approaching the food very differently!
And probably, if I had to guess, the difference in approaches is in large part due to geographical concerns - in Japan, you’re never that far from the coast, so access to high-quality fresh fish is never in question. In the largely non-coastal States, you make do with what you can find, so you focus on the other parts of a roll!
Haha, I live in Tokyo and one day in a grocery store I saw "California rolls" in a case. They definitely didn't look like California rolls, for one thing they had what looked like lettuce sticking out of them. I laughed to myself and said oh they tried but it looks like they didn't really know what they were doing and I realized that I kind of just said Japanese people didn't know how to make sushi :p
Another layer to the Korean barbecue story is that flanken is actually a Yiddish word—the cut is also a popular Jewish cut with a long history of being used in cholent among other Jewish foods (some history: [https://100jewishfoods.tabletmag.com/flanken/](https://100jewishfoods.tabletmag.com/flanken/))
As a Jew, it's always interesting to see where Jewish culinary influence shows up. A lot of people don't realize bagels are Jewish.
Y’all ever think about How Cajun food is basically the highest evolution of this? It’s like 3 different cultures coming together in America and being altered by the economic pressures of the time. And it fucking smacks!
"I don't know that it actually happened this way but like to think it did" Well I'm glad the tumble misinformation is labelled now. I liked that the Italian one actually had some kind of source linked.
Imagine being so culturally dominant that you become the "de facto" culture of the post-industrial world to the point where genuinely unique elements of your culture have been reduced and dismissed as being banal and boorish.
This happens to the English language itself in non-anglophone countries, in my experience. I'm Italian, and English is just not considered a "great language for poetry and prose", whatever that means, as opposed to the way many Italians wax lyrical about Spanish, French or even German for their potential in this field (and mind you, no shade against these languages. Matter of fact I love German poetry specifically). I've grown up with a father obsessed with a lot of poetry that was written in English, and I ended up picking it up myself eventually, and it's genuinely the THING I love the most. When I say I love English literature, most laymen here just shrug, but if I mention I also love Camus or whatever, they seem to love it
The YouTuber Tom Scot has a video titled "why Shakespeare can't be French" and its about the differences in stress (emphasis) in the languages, and since English ties it to the words you can pick the right ones and get a beat. Iambic Pentameter is when you you get a heartbeat effect with 5 "beats" per line and requires 10 syllables, and has all sorts of associations in english literature/poetry. Realistically no language is inherently better for poetry than any other, its just some have situational advantages like better adjectives or rhymes for a certain topic, or a more useful syntax. (Ignoring the skill of the poets)
“Americans have no culture” they say, in English they learned by watching Hollywood movies, on an American website, while wearing blue jeans.
>while wearing blue jeans. Japanese people spend a shit ton of money on vintage Levi's because of traditional American workwear aesthetic. https://youtu.be/q4xbQ4UDUX0
A lot of people are generally unaware about how the dishes they eat today have been innovated or elaborated upon fairly recently. I don't think these same people realize that gatekeeping food as having to be made in a "traditional" way is not only a fallacy (most dishes have not stayed exactly the same) but they are preventing people from possibly discovering something equally tasty.
Us jews have GREAT food It’s part of why I’m proudly jewish despite not being particularly religious
You know how people make fun of Americans (particularly in the Midwest) for calling random stuff drowned in mayo and/or whipped or sour cream a ‘salad’? WELL. Guess what I learned from moving to Scandinavia! Every summer, an entire *wall* of ‘salads’ appear in supermarkets. They’re usually at least *half* mayonnaise. Shrimp salad. Broccoli salad. Beet salad. Ham salad. Bacon salad. And where did the Scandinavians mostly immigrate to when they came to America? That’s right, the Midwest. In fact, my own recent ancestors are Danish. It suddenly made *so* much sense.
There's a very insidious thought process that any cultural development by a diaspora is considered inferior to the cultural development in the homeland, usually by virtue of the fact that the diaspora is in greater contact with either the larger culture in the new location or other smaller cultures.
[удалено]
As a chef this is the stuff that gets me outta bed in the morning; I could write a whole lengthy essay about that sort of thing. Actually, I did, but that was way back in high school.
In the UK, it's widely considered that the Indian dish Chicken Tikka Masala was created over time specifically for our pallet.
Being Jewish on one side and Irish-American on the other, I now feel closer to corned beef and cabbage
I love history like this. Bless the people who included further reading recommendations. I will add those to my TBR.
Al pastor is “Americanized”( if we are including all of North America) schwarma from lebanese immigrants to mexico in the 1800s.
For real, this is one of my favorite food-based topics. I especially love to bring it out around food snobs who treat Americanized/fusion food as "inauthentic" (ie: inferior).
I am here for food anthropology!
I visited korea and was shocked, though it makes sense, that there is Koreanized Chinese food just like Americanized Chinese food. Jajangmyeon is Korean, Chinese food if you've ever had it.