Food Grammar: Unspoken rules of cuisine
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
My favorite was the mashed potato sub, which was room temperature mashed potatoes mixed with bits of chopped vegan ham and carrots, served in a hot dog roll, topped with ketchup and mustard. It was really good, though it cracked me up that this was what they might think we eat in the US.
I've also noticed that many of the vegan Western food places serve dishes that they call "risotto" which are basically just cooked rice with sauce on top. I understand how they settled on risotto, but it can be a bit of disappointment if you're expecting actual risotto.
Overall, I have a lot of fun trying the Taiwanese interpretations of American food. The food quality there is just really high in general. Even if it's weird, it's weird with good ingredients and flavors, so you never end up with something inedible, just surprising in a fun way.
https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+wins+best+pizza
Yes there is also bad pizza in Japan but, for example, there are around 90 "certified" neapolitan pizza restaurants in Tokyo.
https://www.pizzanapoletana.org/en/
Whether or not you believe the certification means anything, the point is there's lots of good pizza.
There's also lots of bad too ...
In France croissants are available everywhere but you have a very high range coming from high artisan standards to very low industrial products with very basic places in the middle mostly heating stuff rather than doing the whole process.
In Japan i guess there's less available bakeries specialized in things like croissants and they sell it as a high quality product. There's also highly qualified bakers from France that are working in foreign countries.
Too much possibles biases to really judge.
[0] Maison Landemaine 03-5797-7387 https://goo.gl/maps/KsWoBvWk6dcyUfkq8
That's simply a Hamburg steak, which is not Japanese but rather German in origin. The Salisbury steak is a relative of the Hamburg steak, with the additional of fillers such as eggs and breadcrumbs.
I frankly find it great: instead of a copy, you get something new, and hopefully tasty!
The British versions of "Chinese" and "Indian" work incredibly well at this. There was also a big fusion food boom recently, a few years before the pandemic.
And my taiwanese hosts said the name was .. yea.
As far as adapting food goes vs traditional recipes. Personally, I think there's room for both. I really enjoy getting to try food done 'traditonally' but I also enjoy fusions of food, or new rakes on old things or just finding a recipe myself somewhere and changing it up in some way.
Food's great and it's great people keep experimenting, adapting food from other cultures and combining things.
It drives me crazy when I see people concerned about "appropriation" when one culture adopts the cuisine of another (appropriation exists, but the usages I've seen apply it far too broadly). People want others to enjoy what they enjoy. It's great to share recipes! I know that ordering American food in another country will not get me what I expect... and that's totally fine. The adaptation might not appeal to my tastes, but that doesn't make it bad. It doesn't mean they're not allowed to call it American food.
Korean marinades use pears for kalbi iirc.
PB on a hot dog isn't crazy tho the addition of banana is slightly more odd.
But my god. Strawberry and shrimp. Especially that very rich full bodied shrimp would be awful with strawberry! Gross!
And yet the brain is ticking, if you chose sweeter prawns that were very fresh and steamed them, I could see them going with milder raw strawberries. At least not contradicting them. Maybe some balsamic can bridge the two.
Well met, friend! After writing that, I started reconsidering how it could be done. I arrived at a sibling comment's observation, that ceviche could be a better approach. Not so far from the balsamic! Onion in the ceviche may help (on second thought, it might be another strike against the strawberries). But no, the original incident was a grilled skewer -- yikes.
One flavor that I've found to be a a very flexible "strange bridge" is mustard. But... ye gods... that'd only turn the retch up to 11.
I do enjoy this side of cooking, it's basically a form of problem solving where the pay off is delicious food!
Happy I'm not the only one out there that enjoys pushing the limits. Although I am also at other times the staunchest of traditionalists...
yeah I'd definitely try balsamic, or maybe sour apples, or orange marmalade? Shrimp, mayo, apple is definitely a thing right? Is the cream part required? What about a citrusy balsamic shrimp banana crepe, with a light sugar dusting? ok weird but I'd love to try it
you're on the right track, using a sweeter shrimp, in this case a langoustine, small red shrimps would work too. lightly cooked or seared. salt, fat and depth comes from the pork belly to provide a base layer. and instead of balsamic as an acid to bind, they used a lemon beurre blanc with lemon thyme oil to add even more zing.
balsamic glaze should work too, strawberry and balsamic vinegar is amazing combination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flavour_Thesaurus?wprov=sf...
I genuinely can't find the book (it's not modernist cuisine) but he recommended a book which is sort of part chemistry textbook part cookbook.
Pot may have been involved.
I've watched that show way too much...
The cultural differences between the UK and US versions are really something
Though I haven't seen either. I have seen both original UK & US The Office, which after the first few episodes of the latter (which just uncomfortably rip off the former, making the same jokes but poorly IMO) are each good in their own right, and definitely highlight differences between the respective television cultures, even if not actual society too.
Just to pick up the point about the office - the office US is really good, but the office is UK is an order of magnitude deeper. The US version hits it's stride long after they ran out of UK-material.
They do serve as analogues of the countries they're set in, but ultimately the office UK is much more of character study of Brent and is generally really uniquely shot and directed. Michael Scott is funny, Brent is truly tragic.
Also one thing that really annoys me about US television, is that they clearly assume their audience is too stupid to get many gags, i.e. the office UK is full of clever little gags that don't really make you laugh but really sell the format and location of the show, even if you don't notice them.
To prove "British" can be shit too -> Afterlife is rubbish.
After twenty-five years of thinking about this problem I decided to write a web page about it. Here is the problem:
Can you find three foods such that all three do not go together (by any reasonable definition of foods "going together") but every pair of them does go together?
The page is extremely funny, but also serious - my favourite combination.
Loved the page, myself.
One day I decided to make a cobbler with thanksgiving leftovers... turning it into a "shepherds pie" thing but as a turkey cobbler.. that thing was delicious.
I love taking and combining familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways... it's at least one way to pass time during the pandemic...
Marvelous. I did an "all-in-one" dish for a winter potluck one year. Ham, cranberries, and (a few) brussels sprouts, in a base of potatos au gratin. It got a few weird looks, but there were no leftovers.
I also got the peanut-butter-and-mozzarella-on-english-muffin sandwich from him, which I legitimately enjoy.
fried prawns in mango puree and sweet mayo is a fairly popular dish in parts of china. prawns in honey wasabi is another sweet variant.
flatbreads. a wide range of cultures/cuisines use a flatbread as a starch structural vehicle (tortilla, dumpling wrappers) combined with a protein/fat interior (cheese, dumplings, whatever). This pattern shows up over and over and suggests a wide range of new fusion approaches ("world wrapps" is an example of prior art).
Once you've cooked across enough cuisines you'll see people have rediscovered a number of techniques (quick fermentation, drying, evaporating) to get rich flavors quickly.
There's a side comment in one my cookbooks (Sauces) which dives into salsa- which means "sauce" but most people think of it as a condiment. It points out that if you think of salsa as fresh sauces it opens up a whole new world of saucing opportunities.
Building the latent space for recipes would mean taking every recipe in the world, encoding it, and generating an embedding; with the result, you could easily create fusion food by casting vectors between two cuisines and sampling points between them.
When I'm exploring new cuisines, I want to learn the grammar of that culture and how they put food together. I find those traditional dishes that have evolved over a long period of time to have flavors that complement each other very well. And also like imagining the experience of people from that culture.
And I know others enjoy something new and innovative that hasn't been done before, and that's OK, too.
Japanese Ramen is my favorite example. Inspired by Chinese noodles, it is only about a century old, and it really took off during WW2. A sign of it not being of Japanese tradition is the fact it is most often written in katakana (ラーメン).
The fact it is not traditional is actually a strength. While more traditional Japanese food like sushi or tempura is highly codified, Ramen shops are free to do as they please, which result in a great deal of variety. There is no "one true Ramen".
Yes, my understanding is that the california rolls were an adaptation based on the fact that that americans at the time were not used to the idea of eating raw fish, and that avocados are much more readily available in the US.
I hear that the original style of sushi from Japan also carries with it a culture of training strictness/technique/meticulousness similar to french classical training culture, whereas the north american fusion sushi style puts a lot more emphasis on creativity.
What I think you're referring to is the idea of authenticity, which I think is illustrated well by looking at how different cultures barbecue. The "classic" american barbecue features harburgers and hotdog sausages in bread, brazilian barbecue offers a large variety of cuts of meats along with an extensive salad buffet, and chinese barbecue might get you duck to go with rice.
This is definitely not classic American barbecue. This is associated with going to “a barbeque”, which is slang for a summer picnic type gathering with food (sometimes pot luck style), hot dogs and hamburgers being cheap and easy food fair. American barbecue, the food, is defined by regions, with different parts of the country being known for the animal used (beef, pork, chicken), the preparation and cooking method (dry or wet rubbed, smoked with various wood types, grilled), and serving (sans sauce or with mustard, vinegar, mayonnaise, or tomato based bbq sauce). I personally am partial to Texas beef brisket and Memphis dry rub ribs.
If someone was taking me to a backyard neighborhood barbeque, I would expect hamburgers, hot dogs, potato salad, and some weird jello based side dish someone’s aunt made. If someone was taking me to an “authentic barbeque joint”, I would be insulted if they were primarily serving hamburgers and hotdogs.
As a comparison, in Brazil, the homely variety of barbecue will usually not feature things like cupim (beef hump), which it's a staple of barbecue restaurants. They're all considered barbecue regardless, though.
To go back to the idea of authenticity and grammar, I don't believe chicken hearts are part of american barbecue fare anywhere in the US, picnic-style or not, whereas in Brazil they are (though typically only in restaurants). Similarly, you'd pretty much never see hotdogs being associated w/ barbecue in Brazil, and they'd have vinaigrette and potato chip strips in them.
No. that was just me accidentally using them both as I typed.
> I thought it was all part of the same umbrella
I think the issue comes from the food barbecue became associated with the popular family and friends get together to eat that barbecue, and once it did, was and is used for gatherings that do not contain any “barbecued” food at all. Depending on where you are in the states, “a barbecue” could be used interchangeably with picnic or pot luck.
Now, it absolutely can be argued that hot dogs and burgers are barbecue, since they are meat that is cooked by grilling. But much like the Spanish barbacoa, from which the name derives, American barbecue is usually slow cooked (typically by smoking) meat. I guess that would be the core of what barbecue is. But then you have grilled meats like burgers, sides like baked beans and potato salad that would be eaten alongside barbecue, at a barbecue. So, I guess it depends on the umbrella. If Brazilian barbecue is “a large variety of cuts of meats” I would say American barbecue is “various smoked meats, usually cooked or served with barbecue sauce” but when I think of Brazilian barbecue, I think of “chunks of meat skewered and roasted”.
In Nordics, what would be truly traditional here? Hunter gatherer food, wild-meat, fish and berries, maybe turnips? Should anything non-archaeophyte be considered non-traditional?
Where's the cutoff point where before date X it's not fusion and after date X it is? There's a long list of foods that are common now but didn't exist until some culture started using ingredients and techniques they learned from another and fusing it with their own recipes.
"Jungli" means "person from the jungle" in many Indian languages, but the word "jungle," which in English connotes a dense forest, comes from a Sanskrit root that actually refers to an arid, undeveloped, semi-desert environment. So, the word means exactly what the author thinks -- a wild person from the jungle -- but because it was borrowed incorrectly, it's a completely different "jungle". So it remains a "linguistic false friend"!
Boiling roiling fungus and grasses (lemon, bamboo, some things entirely new)
A wordless meal, punctuated by satisfied sighs and appreciative noises
Plates of piled high greens. Mystery broth, mystery guests.
The live entertainment: torchlit, rhythmic caterwauling over a PA
Sometimes food rules are even encoded in religion. E.g. Halal and Kosher food rules are pretty strict about what you can and cannot eat and how things should be prepared. Or the Catholic habit of eating fish on a Friday or indeed serving wine during church.
Going against the rules can yield nice results. Fusion cooking is a thing. Also, Neil Stephenson wrote about a North American thing called recombinant cooking. I'm not sure if he invented that term but it refers to the practice of cooking food with store bought processed food (e.g. rice crispies) and recombining it with other ingredients. Basically, it's the notion that some people only know heavily processed food and use them as ingredients.
In botany, sure. So are Peppers, Beans, Peapods, Avocado, Squash, Zucchini, Cucumbers, Olives, Corn Kernels, Pumpkins & Nuts.
In culinary terms, though, most of these are vegetables - none of them are fruit. Mostly because none of these are sweet in the same way as fruit. I think tomatoes get brought up because their sweetness ranges between "vegetables" and "fruit".
Which is why taking sweet and salty things like pineapple and ham and putting them on a Pizza is completely normal to some and offensive to others even when using other, similarly salty and sweet ingredients is considered normal to them.
As Italian I confirm that this is The Horror, really. And yet I can have a Spanish paella with no problem.
So it's not the concept of spaghetti and meatballs, but rather the way ingredients are balanced and presented.
[1] https://www.bettycrocker.com/recipes/spaghetti-and-meatballs...
I guess my overall point is that I think the author is overstating the strictness of these rules, even in famously rigid traditions like Italy. Changing food around as it is shared and moves between cultures isn't a uniquely American or even modern thing, it's been happening for ages and a whole lot of traditional foods have been heavily influenced by other cultures.
Also super nitpicky but most folks in north america would incorporate the sauce in spaghetti and meatballs before serving, the whole sauce on top thing is mostly relegated to grandparents and betty crocker recipes - I'm sure a not small part of the reason for that is people rediscovering italian techniques though.
Highly recommended Youtube channel, by the way. It's just Italian grandmas making amazing food full of love, kneading pasta by hand and generally being delightful.
Plenty of dishes combining pasta and meat, also in the cookbook that was published in 2019. So I figure the article was trying to hint that the presentation of US-style spaghetti and meatballs is what would upset Italians. The meatballs should be marble-sized.
" ‘The peasants would cook the rice in a frying pan and accompany it with whatever they could find. This would normally be water rats and eels,’ explains respected Valencian chef Rafael Vidal in an interview with El País. ‘These were more like rabbits than the modern sewer rats found in cities’ "[0]
It seems these are actually water voles:
"Water vole meat was one of the main ingredients of early paellas, along with eel and butter beans. Novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez described the Valencia custom of eating water voles in Cañas y Barro (1902), a realistic novel about life among the fishermen and peasants near lake Albufera."[1]
[0] https://jbcrocket.medium.com/anyone-for-rat-and-eel-paella-t...
But I'm an American, and that immediately sounds pretty good to me. Like a little Japanese meatloaf. The only "grammar" problem I see there is that I suspect the word is hambagu.
But some of the things in the articles are like???
> TO an Italian, and they may question why pasta and meat are being served together.
Pasta and meat together are common in Italy.
https://www.google.it/search?q=ricetta+pasta+carne&source=ln...
> In China, explains Jennifer 8. Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, rice is served after the main and before the soup
Never heard of this. I'm Chinese. Spent lots of time in China. Never once had this experience.
> shokupan, a Japanese white bread that’s even sweeter and softer than American Wonder Bread
shokupan is not sweeter and softer than wonder bread. It is delicious though!
As you can see in the results of the search you linked, its all ragù or other tiny bits of sausage.
The reason why pasta and meat is considered dumb ("bad grammar") in most parts of Italy is that a big chunk of meat would off the pasta/meat ratio in a bite.
It doesn't matter if the individual dish itself is popular but that the paring it rare among the different types of dishes in American cuisine. Just because an irregular verb is commonly used doesn't mean it's not still irregular.
Ironically, irregular verbs get regularized over time as the language evolves (hell, I saw some paper the other day that attempted to compute half-life of irregular verbs in English; can't find it now) - but in case of food, I fully expect the opposite to happen; that is, cheese-on-fish will become normalized. McDonald's is the vanguard of the universal culture - whatever stuff it sells everywhere is here to stay.
* https://tasty.co/recipe/puff-pastry-salmon-salmon-wellington
Smoked salmon and cream cheese pair quite well, even per haute cuisine grammar.
When done well, it can result in some really interesting fusion cuisine and dining experiences. That's not always the case though, and I'm reminded of an experience I had in Rome ordering a cheese burger in a quasi-Irish pub, and getting a dry puck of ground beef with a cold thick slice of fresh mozzarella on top. Not really what I was hoping for.
Why invent new words for existing concepts? Most of the times, in my experience, it is done to either appear more intelligent or to stake a new ground and be the self-anointed expert.
What's wrong with eating habits?
Eating habits is a very general term. The first 3 google results I got[2][3][4] aren't really related to what the article refers to as food grammar. I'd say referring to habit stresses the individual preference, while referring to a grammar stresses the cultural preference.
I'll say that if the Google results for grammar inside the book are exhaustive, the concept isn't fully developed though. I'd have expected a longer, systematic list of food-grammatical rules.
[1] https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/7BF0AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/losing_weight/eating_habit...
[3] https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/health-topics/ad1169
[4] https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-and-nutrition-pictures/b...
Eating habits are, well, just habits. They're what you usually do. But they don't embody notions of right and wrong.
Grammars embody notions of right and wrong. Americans don't avoid eating horses and dogs because it's not part of their habit, they do it because they think it's wrong.
Habits are relatively easy to change. Grammars are not. I think food grammar is a great term.
They almost tasted right, until they didn't. There's something about falling into the uncanny valley with foods that makes them more unacceptable than something completely foreign. We both had a good laugh at the mayo-squash-clove patties, and how close, yet so very far away they ended up being from something acceptable for our palates.
However, one had to wonder how Icelanders came up with the rotten-shark-in-a-clay-pot, french with garlic and snails. It feels like survival tactics turned cuisine grammar.