I think what is so interesting is also, if you peel back the curtain, most recipes have standardized at a fairly recent point in their national mythos, depending on how long that is.
Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like
* precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century
* cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century
* discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century
* exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)
Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.
i think there’s another component to this that most food sucked. your daily food was probably bad because it had few seasonings. it was likely starch (rice/bread), and stew. you don’t need a recipe for soup, it’s boil water and throw in whatever vegetables you have on hand. maybe meat if you had it
Recipes were the province of the wealthy. The average person would have had a very repetitive, bland, and potentially malnourishing diet. They might have had some herbs or even foraged like you say, that still is very bland and boring compared to what we’re used to.
From what I have read the diet of people in classical antiquity was only terrible for the very poor. Most people in ancient Rome got to, at least rarely, eat honey cakes and fresh fruit and dried fish and maybe once a year at festivals even a small chunk of meat. They grew chives, dill, garlic, asparagus, radish, parsley, thyme, mustard, cumin and many other spices. And they made vinegar and olive oil and garum (fermented fish sauce) on an industrial scale. Mostly these would be used as sparing garnish to the grain-centric diet. But usually present.
Pad Thai was an invention to unite the country and forge an identity in the face of Chinese influence. After WWII it was popularized because it was cheap and thus able to feed a post war population.
The older I get, the more I view identity as a sort of trap door. There's no there there that can stand up to sustained scrutiny. Everything has a history, everything is made of something other than what it is.
In the context of food, I laugh at notions of authenticity and tradition - unless the time scale is over 1000 years there's not much interesting to talk about.
I think identity and authenticity are separable and distinct. I agree there is nothing to identity. But there is something to authenticity. Food, art, etc., are intentional creations and there is value in getting an authentic experience that’s the product of application and refinement of a particular set of principles. That doesn’t mean that other things can’t be delicious, of course. But experiencing something “the way it’s supposed to be” has a non-zero value.
Attaching that to your identity is bullshit, though. Neapolitan pizza makers might have some set of principles and practices and you might have an authentic neapolitan pizza that reflects those principles. But that doesn’t give Italians in Naples any authority to gatekeep pizza or even neapolitan-style pizza.
There’s a lot to be said for shared culture and customs. I am a second-generation American, and I love the familiarity and uniqueness of my family. I think people get really wrapped up in this idea of food as a proxy for culture, which makes sense, because food is really important! But shared culture really shows its value in the hard parts of life: for example when someone dies, there is a shared script, a defined way of making space for grief, a shared way of remembering the dead, etc.
Anyway, obviously cultural identity isn’t inherent: you know what you grew up with. And it can easily turn toxic when we move from appreciating our own culture to putting down others’. But my life would be a lot poorer without it.
Sometimes something really is lost when people stop paying attention to the origins of a recipe. It is well known that Nestlé, through advertising campaigns and sponsored cookbooks, introduced its condensed milk into many traditional Brazilian dessert recipes, some of Portuguese origin and others of African origin.
Nowadays, it is very difficult to find someone who makes brigadeiro or milk pudding without condensed milk, almost always using that ingredient plus sugar, which often produces a sickly sweet mush.
In fact, the whole history of how sugar, or sucrose, entered the human diet is fascinating. It brings together slavery, the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, plantation agriculture in Spanish America and Brazil, and the interests of kings, merchants, and so on. And Nestlé. :)
Well to start chicken and rice are the name of ingredients. Carbonara is a unique name given to a particular set of ingredients and a method of preparation.
I suspect if people just said pasta with pork egg and cheese no one is going to make a big deal out of authenticity.
In other words, this is about words more than anything. They do matter, in the sense that most people would be upset to order a pizza and get a sandwich or order a sandwich and get a taco.
You don't need to leave italian (American) food to see the same phenomenon the author describes. Pizza is also endlessly re-interpreted and adapted. There's value in protecting and exploring. So while I share some of the author's opinions, I think the whole locking recipes into imaginary vaults thing is a bit overblown.
Indeed, same reason I don't usually go to Indian restaurants, I can just make the same thing at home with much fewer costs. The only ones I'd go to are specialized or well known ones, such as some South Indian places I've been to recently.
What's even more interesting is no one actually makes butter or tikka chicken at home, or has a tandoor to do so, but Indians also don't eat it outside generally, instead it's mainly foreigners who like those dishes.
I feel like similar to the chinese, indian home cooking and indian restaurant cooking are very different; I can try my hand at a lot of restaurant style recipes at home but it's not what I usually cook or what I grew up eating at home.
I'm assuming by tikka chicken you mean "chicken tikka masala"? Because chicken tikka is something my family made all the time growing up. I still make it at home often. That's mostly been with a charcoal grill and not a traditional tandoor, but like you said, most people don't have tandoors at home. That's restaurant food.
I don't know how relevant it is, but my wife and I like to eat out at places where the dish/cuisine is something that we simply cannot make at home. If it is too similar, my wife will sigh "we could have just made this at home".
We have a similar situation in Spain with paella, people argue endlessly about what a "real paella" should or should not have, to the point that some people joke that "real paella" can't possibly exist, only "rice with things" xD
Myself, I am not from Valencia, actually my home town is on the opposite side of the country, so I don't care so much what you put on it as long as you follow a few basic principles and don't commit the great heresy of using chorizo xD
I cannot wait for a cultural shift away from respecting "authenticity" and "tradition" in food. It's fine to remember and recognize how things were often done. But the ridiculousness of saying New York style pizza is not pizza or that you have to make things the "right way" needs to go.
> But the ridiculousness of saying New York style pizza is not pizza or that you have to make things the "right way" needs to go.
Suppose people say it; why shouldn't they be entitled to their opinion? How does it harm anyone? People who like New York style pizza are equally free to just disagree, and keep making it.
Pizza is one of those things that is multi-polar, with different canons. New York pizza is not Neapolitan pizza for sure. Neither of those are the al taglio from Rome, i.e. even in the original country there's regionalism.
For me it's mostly about knowing what you're getting when craving the flavour of a particular dish. Carbonara is perhaps an example of a recipe that's turned too rigid, but I've also ordered it and been served diced boiled ham in bechamel - an affront to anyone with their sights set on pan-fried pork and a rich, fatty mouthfeel.
Everyone has their own personal limit and variations are allowed within certain unwritten boundaries. Swedish meatballs, for example, can be varied in many ways - but if you put garlic in them, I think you should call them something else.
Food authenticity should only mean DOP or geographic identity (GI) regulation. Everything else is gatekeeping and power struggle. Im glad this discussion comes up every year with a hard hitting blogger recycling the same points for clicks because at least it makes a new batch of people think about it and the second order implications about identity in general.
Like "prosecco" retrospectively applying for DOP because they can under EU rules, and so fuck over the Australian Prosecco GRAPE GROWERS because thats what it is folks: a varietal.
Like "feta" which is a style of cheese across the balkans, if you look in Melbourne Qeen Vic markets you can find Greek, Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Danish Feta, fighting it out when the lights are off... But no, now it's DOC/PDO and so we're going to have to change its name.
DOP/GI is a scam unless it's policed. People try to retconn things into it (prosecco)
Champagne, I can get behind. I don't mind Aus bubbles being sold as -style because they're bloody good.
> Food authenticity should only mean DOP or geographic identity (GI) regulation.
It shouldn't even mean this much, frankly, as those things are merely protectionist trade policies meant to artificially drive up the price of certain goods without regard for quality. People on the Internet give too much deference to politicized trade regulations.
I don't think snooty rules about how to make carbonara or alla gricia are actually driving up prices. In the case of cacio e pepe, the snooty recipe is also the cheapest (it's just trickier to pull off.)
Maybe in some cases. There's a pretty clear distinction in quality from some "gruyere" made in say Wisconsin and a AOP gruyere like 1655. Meanwhile there's a stupid amount of good alpine cheese in the US that aren't named gruyere, like alpha tolman that are happy just saying it's gruyere like.
I can, but what annoys me is people saying "Well that technically isn't champagne because it isn't from the right region of the right country" and acting like being able to quote obscure regulations makes them "technically correct" in any context outside of a courtroom.
Authenticity basically revolves around waves of immigrants. The authentic food comes from the time and place the immigrants came from. 20 years later things have changed. Food prices in both places have changed and so the cuisines split. Then another wave comes and the food is all new.
If I ordered a chicken burger and got a chicken sandwich, I would be a bit miffed.
I think there's an element of expectation-setting when we're talking about authenticity. Personally, I wouldn't sweat authenticity too much. There's excellent food to be had by mixing and remixing dishes.
Just asking - in your mind what is the difference between a chicken burger and a chicken sandwich? We Aussies argue with yanks that a burger is made by the bun and a sandwich is made by the two slices of bread.
American here, minced/ground chicken and I breaded would make it a burger. Otherwise it’s a sandwich. Provided it is not the traditional recipe from Chickenburg of course
I think this is what makes Asian food more exciting and innovative. No whiff of elitism. No status-signaling or having to appeal to the taste of King Louis the 14th. Just cook stuff and make it taste good for as many people as possible; let the market decide what's good and let cuisines intermingle and evolve organically.
Striving for authenticity is essentially a pause button. While we should absolutely preserve culturally important recipes[1], we also need to move forward and invent the stuff that people in 2080 will call 'authentic.'
Bring on the durian pizza, the strawberry Mapo tofu, and the Kraft singles in Korean army stews. Food is meant to be enjoyed. Don't gatekeep and keep the performative taste-signaling to wine and coffee please.
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[1] As a side note, a lot of culturally important recipes are actually imports. Tomatoes weren't even available in Italy until the 1600s, Neither did Ireland have potatoes until they were brought over from the New World. Most contemporary Chinese dishes were created in the last century; fish and chip was brought over to the UK by Jewish immigrants; the famous red peppers of Sichuan didn't make its way to China until like the 1600s; Japanese tempura was brought over by Portuguese Catholic missionaries; banh mi has its origin in Vietnam during French colonial rule; national dish of UK is chicken tikka masala; al pastor tacos was brought over by Lebanese immigrants; pad thai was literally invented by the government of Thailand to foster Thai identify. List goes on.
If we view carbonara through Asian cooking theory, then the recipe from Il Piccolo Talismano Della Felicita (1964) is probably the best, because the wine and onion adds acidity and sweetness for balance.
Most loud voices get obsessed with a specific definition of a dish and I think for the sake of creativity we should/would shift to using creative names to accommodate preferences.
"If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike" is a bowdlerization of a much older phrase. As my Great-Grandfather, born in 1890 in Widz, Belaruz would say it "ווען די באָבע וואָלט געהאַט בײצִים, װאָלט זי געװען מײַן זײדע" (If my grandmother had balls, she would have been my grandfather.)
The same point as the "meme" quoted in the article, but a little more raw/cheekier. More like "it's a waste of time to speuclate on what might have been."
Part of this is definitely cultural and class snobbery. Europeans are seen as being high class. So if you put cream in your Alfredo you are seen as being as ignorant and not knowing any better. Yet any sort of fusion with cultural foods that are viewed as lower class only serves to “elevate” the dishes.
I believe that us, Americans are pretty good at bending international food to our limited ingredients, our own favorite chemicals, sweeteners (corn syrup in everything), our flour and butter (good luck to make pastries like in Europe, with our poor flour and butter).
So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.
You are silly. In the US, if you choose to do so, you can get the same ingredient or higher quality ingredient or food stuff that you can get anywhere else in the world, barring a few banned items like the various European maggot cheeses.
While it's true that you won't find published Carbonara recipes pre dating 1952, the Lazio region has had for centuries pasta dishes based on the same ingredients. And they are thoroughly documented.
Both gricia and amatriciana, too other famous pasta dishes from the same region use the same cheese (pecorino) and guanciale. In fact carbonara is nothing more than a gricia with egg yolks.
It just makes no sense to have parmiggiano or french cheese in a recipe coming from a region that did not have these ingredients in the first place and are not part of its culinary history.
And thus the point of authenticity is into rooting where the recipe originated with local ingredients.
Anybody's free to change the recipe all they want, but to call it carbonara when ingredients don't match is misleading the customer expecting a roman dish with roman ingredients.
The point of a word is to convey meaning with a short string of sounds. The meaning of a word referring to a dish would normally describe the taste of the dish and what it's made of in general terms, because as you've pointed out, recipes are subject to individual variation. To say that a restaurant should not serve a dish called "carbonara" made with French cheese to me sounds similar to saying that an Italian carpenter should not sell a mahogany table and call it "tavolo in legno", because they don't grow mahogany in Italy. Who cares where the ingredients come from if the dish tastes good?
Great analogy. Why is it only food that gets this treatment? Are Italian clothes only made from Italian fabrics, grown from Italian plants? Is every part of an Italian car sourced and made completely within Italy?
But people have an irrational desire treat food as some sacred, immutable artifact.
But pasta alla gricia only gets you back to the 1920s; I think the one Roman pasta that goes back centuries (and is in the same clade as carbonara) is cacio e pepe.
Ironically Italians criticize Americans for non-authentic "Alfredo sauce" but that has its origins in Rome in roughly the same early 20th century time period.
My answer to every food authenticity Nazi is the same: "call a cop." I will do whatever I want and call it whatever I want. I will call sandwiches "European tacos" and there is nothing you can do to stop me. I will call polenta "grits" just to piss you off. Yes, I know it's a different kind of corn. I prefer making you angry over such an inconsequential difference than I care about being precise, and I usually care quite a lot about precision.
Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like
* precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century
* cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century
* discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century
* exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)
Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.
What era of history are we talking about here? Would it have been transported as flour, or ground locally?
I don’t think it’s true that most food sucked at any point, except for people in exceptional circumstances.
In the context of food, I laugh at notions of authenticity and tradition - unless the time scale is over 1000 years there's not much interesting to talk about.
Attaching that to your identity is bullshit, though. Neapolitan pizza makers might have some set of principles and practices and you might have an authentic neapolitan pizza that reflects those principles. But that doesn’t give Italians in Naples any authority to gatekeep pizza or even neapolitan-style pizza.
Anyway, obviously cultural identity isn’t inherent: you know what you grew up with. And it can easily turn toxic when we move from appreciating our own culture to putting down others’. But my life would be a lot poorer without it.
Nowadays, it is very difficult to find someone who makes brigadeiro or milk pudding without condensed milk, almost always using that ingredient plus sugar, which often produces a sickly sweet mush.
In fact, the whole history of how sugar, or sucrose, entered the human diet is fascinating. It brings together slavery, the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, plantation agriculture in Spanish America and Brazil, and the interests of kings, merchants, and so on. And Nestlé. :)
I suspect if people just said pasta with pork egg and cheese no one is going to make a big deal out of authenticity.
In other words, this is about words more than anything. They do matter, in the sense that most people would be upset to order a pizza and get a sandwich or order a sandwich and get a taco.
You don't need to leave italian (American) food to see the same phenomenon the author describes. Pizza is also endlessly re-interpreted and adapted. There's value in protecting and exploring. So while I share some of the author's opinions, I think the whole locking recipes into imaginary vaults thing is a bit overblown.
Asian restaurant cuisine is judged by partly by how different (technique, taste, looks) the dish is from what they can make from home.
You go to a Chinese restaurant to eat something that cannot be made at home, almost by definition. The only exception might be breakfast food.
What's even more interesting is no one actually makes butter or tikka chicken at home, or has a tandoor to do so, but Indians also don't eat it outside generally, instead it's mainly foreigners who like those dishes.
Myself, I am not from Valencia, actually my home town is on the opposite side of the country, so I don't care so much what you put on it as long as you follow a few basic principles and don't commit the great heresy of using chorizo xD
Suppose people say it; why shouldn't they be entitled to their opinion? How does it harm anyone? People who like New York style pizza are equally free to just disagree, and keep making it.
Everyone has their own personal limit and variations are allowed within certain unwritten boundaries. Swedish meatballs, for example, can be varied in many ways - but if you put garlic in them, I think you should call them something else.
Like "feta" which is a style of cheese across the balkans, if you look in Melbourne Qeen Vic markets you can find Greek, Turkish, Albanian, Bulgarian, Danish Feta, fighting it out when the lights are off... But no, now it's DOC/PDO and so we're going to have to change its name.
DOP/GI is a scam unless it's policed. People try to retconn things into it (prosecco)
Champagne, I can get behind. I don't mind Aus bubbles being sold as -style because they're bloody good.
It shouldn't even mean this much, frankly, as those things are merely protectionist trade policies meant to artificially drive up the price of certain goods without regard for quality. People on the Internet give too much deference to politicized trade regulations.
I think there's an element of expectation-setting when we're talking about authenticity. Personally, I wouldn't sweat authenticity too much. There's excellent food to be had by mixing and remixing dishes.
(actually I am a brisbaneite so this is fake but you know what I mean)
Striving for authenticity is essentially a pause button. While we should absolutely preserve culturally important recipes[1], we also need to move forward and invent the stuff that people in 2080 will call 'authentic.'
Bring on the durian pizza, the strawberry Mapo tofu, and the Kraft singles in Korean army stews. Food is meant to be enjoyed. Don't gatekeep and keep the performative taste-signaling to wine and coffee please.
---
[1] As a side note, a lot of culturally important recipes are actually imports. Tomatoes weren't even available in Italy until the 1600s, Neither did Ireland have potatoes until they were brought over from the New World. Most contemporary Chinese dishes were created in the last century; fish and chip was brought over to the UK by Jewish immigrants; the famous red peppers of Sichuan didn't make its way to China until like the 1600s; Japanese tempura was brought over by Portuguese Catholic missionaries; banh mi has its origin in Vietnam during French colonial rule; national dish of UK is chicken tikka masala; al pastor tacos was brought over by Lebanese immigrants; pad thai was literally invented by the government of Thailand to foster Thai identify. List goes on.
So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.
Both gricia and amatriciana, too other famous pasta dishes from the same region use the same cheese (pecorino) and guanciale. In fact carbonara is nothing more than a gricia with egg yolks.
It just makes no sense to have parmiggiano or french cheese in a recipe coming from a region that did not have these ingredients in the first place and are not part of its culinary history.
And thus the point of authenticity is into rooting where the recipe originated with local ingredients.
Anybody's free to change the recipe all they want, but to call it carbonara when ingredients don't match is misleading the customer expecting a roman dish with roman ingredients.
But people have an irrational desire treat food as some sacred, immutable artifact.