Every St. Patrick's Day, millions of Irish-Americans celebrate with green beer, "Kiss me, I'm Irish" buttons, and corned beef and cabbage, the traditional fare of their Irish kinfolk. Right? Wrong. In fact, traveling around Ireland, locals may balk if you insist this American-Irish meal is a true representation of Irish culture. Until the 20th century, most Irish couldn't afford corned beef -- it's more likely that people enjoyed Colcannon, a dish of boiled potatoes and cabbage mixed with butter, milk and garlic. Corned beef and cabbage is not the only seemingly traditional ethnic dish that got its start in a totally different place than the culture most people associate it with.
How does this happen? Lynne Olver, a reference librarian who manages and contributes to The Food Timeline, a web site that tracks the history of food and its origins, has some answers. "Food morphing is as old as human kind," she says. "The glorious table is set by explorers, invaders, crusaders, travelers, missionaries, settlers, immigrants, outcasts, returning GIs, savvy restaurateurs and visionary chefs."
It's not news to anyone that Americans can take a cuisine, turn it on its head, and pretend like it's always been that way. You find hard-shell tacos at Taco Bell -- filled with some controversial beef -- but not in Mexico. The nation may be the great melting pot, but every culture borrows from other cultures to make something its own. Tempura, now a Japanese staple, more likely originated in medieval Portugal with some influence from 17-century China. Indian menu favorite chicken tikka masala, whose origin was once up for British Parliamentary debate, may actually have been invented in Glasgow, Scotland.
After some eye-opening research (et tu, apple pie?) and feedback from Olver, it turns out the number of nontraditional traditional dishes are probably countless! Now more than ever, cultures the world over share, add, subtract, and change eating habits and traditions until an extraordinary hybrid like gyros, French toast and smoothies emerge. Fusion food isn't a new, trendy way to describe obvious cross-cultural dishes. It's as old as humanity.
- Peggy Bourjaily, The Daily Meal
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He would puts sacks of seed into a canoe and go off and plant a nursery with the seed. He would hire locals to run the nursery and go off to start another.
Apple trees are not true to type which means the seed will grow a different tree than the parent. Most of the trees produced sour apples and so were used for cider. Occasionally a tree would have sweet fruit and those trees were valued for eating apples.
When you find a good sweet apple you must graft cuttings to a root stock in order reproduce the fruit of the parent tree. Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) didn't do that and so would only produce sweet apples by chance.
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And probably every culture on earth has some disgusting dish involving offal that once saved people from starving and now is some sort of local delicacy.
Ironically, corned beef was produced in abundance in Ireland-- by British landowners, for export. This is why native Irish (subsisting as tenant farmers) couldn't afford it.
Spoiler alert though...
http://www.slashfood.com/2009/09/21/restaurant-that-invented-caesar-salad-closes/
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, if you didn't already know.
Pizza is one of America's all-time favorite "Italian" foods, yet few Italians would recognize barbecued chicken or "bacon cheeseburger" as pizza toppings, and would be amazed at the paucity of vegetables, as well as our gigantic portion sizes. Domino's operates in over 60 countries. Italy is not one of them.
Culinary adaptation is universal. One of Japan's favorite pizza toppings is squid. Tuna and corn are two of the most popular toppings in the UK and Ireland. Paneer cheese is a popular one in India, where Domino's vegetarian menu is longer than its non-vegetarian one, and where the world's #1 burger chain, McDonald's, virtually a symbol of American food, features a variety of items, not one of which is an actual hamburger! One of America's favorite "German" foods, the frankfurter, is practically unrecognizable in its American form to an actual German as part of their cuisine. And when I was in Copenhagen I stopped by a bakery for a danish, pointed to what I wanted, and they said, "Oh - here we call that an american"!
"Both are yummie" - I didn't mean to imply that culinary adaptation necessarily means a loss of quality, although we Americans in particular do seem to have a knack for downgrading the quality - and healthiness - of cuisines we adapt, and for turning sit-down food into on-the-go food. The cuisine of Italy itself, for example, focuses very heavily on vegetables and fish (in addition to pasta, etc.), and Italians typically eat MUCH smaller portions than Americans, but when we think of "Italian food", usually what we mean are huge helpings of meat, cheese, pasta, bread, and tomato sauce. Italians, like anyone else, will pig out on occasion, but it is very much the exception rather the rule.
My main point was that is that when we Americans think we're eating Italian food or Chinese food, what we're usually eating is American food that is at least notionally akin to the cuisines of those cultures.
But in terms of bastardizing foreign cuisine, turning sit-down food into fast food, AND bulking up the national waistline, I can think of no American trend that can out-do the introduction of the “Lasagna Sandwich” in Britain by Tesco last year - layers of pasta sandwiched between thick slices of bread, and, with not only cheddar cheese and ricotta, but – for heaven’s sake – mayonnaise as well, as many grams of fat as in two McDonald’s cheeseburgers, and get this: although weighing in at a hefty 565 calories, it was (at least initially) marketed by Tesco as a “snack between meals”. With trends like these, I hope that Britain is prepared to start supersizing its ambulances and caskets the way we’ve had to do in the States.
That is one fantastic-looking apple pie!
American-style gyro meat is different from Turkish-style gyro meat, but it can be just as good. However, like many things American, the market is dominated by low-quality prefabbed and often pre-sliced gyro meat that certainly does not compare to the street food in Turkey, Greece, or Israel.
she is an incredible cook.
(I love you M.!)
delicious and very healthy.
Thank you.
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