Culinary contributions
Its been something of a busy weekend for me so far beginning on Friday night with a chinese meal and drinks with some of my lab - a final hoo-haa for the summer students that have been there the past few weeks and are now heading back to their respective campuses (campusi?) for the coming academic year (its shifted a few weeks in further forward to that in the UK). The restaurant - the Red Orchid - is one that i'd visited once before and is absolutely fantastic - it's widely held to be the best Chinese restaurant in the area by most of the people i know - including two Chinese so it must be good. Only thing is, of course, is that it's not chinese chinese - as you'd expect to find in Manchester's chinatown - but Americanised chinese. That doesn't matter, though, as it's still fabulous.
This got me to thinking (I feel like Carrie Bradshaw in "Sex and the City" when i say that) about cuisine in general. There are particular genres of food that we're all familiar with - Italian, French, Greek, Thai, Chinese and so on. There is also an American category but i wonder what most people would consider this to be. Certainly here in Charleston there are distinctive Southern foods - but as a whole, what is an American dish? Most people, I guess, would go for hamburgers or something along those lines - and the US certainly gave us the Fast Food revolution - for better or worse. On asking a few people round the lab, one of the summer students summed it up as follows: "The American contribution to world cuisine is to steal ideas off everyone else and then use it a few decades later pretending we came up with it ourselves". I think that maybe an overly harsh way of looking at thing (even though it did come from an American). What do you think?
posted by Chris Clarke @ 7:20 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
I think that there are multiple factors that would lead to such a perspective. First and possibly foremost is that the US is made up of by and large an immigrant population. Each culture brings it's own cuisine and influences those of others. "American Italian" is substantially different than "real" Italian, but you can definitely still find the influences of southern Italy in it. I don't think that this is so much of a theft of the other ideas but reflects the type of growth the country was built upon. There is significant crossover of Italian and French foods, particularly in certain sauces and techniques, etc. In a similar way, we see influences of African foods in the foods of the American southeast. We see influences of English food in the very same dishes. There is so much layering of the various cultural influences that I don't think many of these can hardly be called anything but American at this point, but that very thing makes it difficult to pick out anything specific as solely American.
Secondly, I think that while the US is indeed one country, it is an awfully large one and one finds a great deal of regional variation and regional cuisines. There is a distinctive cuisine in the American southeast. There is Southwestern and even New England stews and seafood. California even has its certain distinctive cuisine. One wouldn't expect the foods served in Russia near China to be terribly similar to that near Ukraine. It is easy to call the lowest common denominator of food in the US (e.g., burgers, etc.) American, but I think the US is simply too large and too varied in local ingredients and culture to really have a singular cuisine.
Wow, thank you. Wasn't expecting an essay on the subject but it certainly raises a few fair points.
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