Debunking the Myth of the National Dish

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/national-dish-anya-von-bremzen

by prismatic • 3 years ago

27 61 3 years ago

Post 1550 as part of the Columbian interchange, the Old World owes these to the New: tomato, maize/corn, squash, peppers, chili pepper, cocoa, potato, sweet potato, avocado, vanilla, tobacco.[0]

It would seem that although most staples and dishes are hundreds-thousands of years old (bread c. 30k BCE), what would qualify as modern pizza couldn't exist before the 16th c., although it arrived c. 18th-19th c.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_World_crops

morkalork• 3 years ago

Irish food with no potatoes, Italian without tomatoes and Indian without chili peppers. Sort of breaks a lot of people's preconceptions doesn't it?

borroka• 3 years ago

Traditions must begin at some point in time. Clearly, "traditions" that started 5 years ago are not considered traditions in the common usage of the word and concept. But assuming that in Italy the tomato began to be used in 1550 or so, I, and surely many others, can certainly consider the tomato a traditional food for Italy.

czDRZ-akk3• 3 years ago

“Indian food” itself is a major generalization given its variety of regional cuisines. You can say the same thing about Italian food.

In this case, people’s preconceptions are typically just ill-informed.

lastofthemojito• 3 years ago

There are even more recent examples - the ancient age ended relatively recently in Hawaii, but even though they were not present prior to European contact, outsiders expect "Hawaiian food" to include pineapple or coconut or macadamia nuts.

causi2• 3 years ago

Pizza predates the use of the tomato. The oldest mention of pizza in text is from 997 C.E.

MostlyStable• 3 years ago

Millions of internet pedants will leap at you for calling various American styles of pizza "pizza", since only the "traditional" Neapolitan/Roman style is "real" pizza (or a different internet pedant might declaim that only NY pizza is pizza). That standard honestly applied would preclude anything much farther back than 100 years.

Now, I tend to think those internet pedants are boring and obnoxious, but the entire reason we have to have a discussion about the "myth of the national dish" is because of people like them.

Once you decide that these things don't matter and food should just be enjoyed without caring about "authenticity" and that every tradition is only traditional in a certain context and time period, the whole idea of fighting about it kind of gets silly.

katbyte• 3 years ago

older, at least 2000 years now

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/world/europe/pizza-mural-...

mcphage• 3 years ago

Pizza predates the use of the tomato.

What makes it pizza specifically at that point?

jterrys2• 3 years ago

Whats more interesting is how fish sauce or Garum fell out of favor.

adrian_b• 3 years ago

There are many others, e.g. the common beans, peanuts, sunflower, the cultivated strawberries and, more recently, the cultivated blueberries.

The European wild strawberries and wild bilberries are much tastier than the cultivated species brought from America, but unfortunately they are much less productive, being much smaller.

Also cotton. While different species of cotton have been independently domesticated in America and in the Old World, most of the modern production of cotton is based on American cotton species.

rex_gallorum23• 3 years ago

Wild strawberries and bilberries... I grew both for years. :) They are wonderful.

taeric2• 3 years ago

It is crazy to me how much our modern ideas on food and clothing are more modern than we realize. Always fun to point out that places that have what we call "spicy" food got there by import.

Even bread, I suspect, is probably a lot different than we realize. There is a wide range in what that can cover, with many of the types of bread that last longer being popular for their longevity in older times.

And that doesn't even get into the drastic shift in diet that came from rationing times. There are a lot of parts of the animal that we used to directly eat.

nerdponx• 3 years ago

This seems to be a common thread throughout history. It's hard to distinguish old traditions from very old traditions from ancient ones, so they all become a blurred jumble, and the traditions just are whatever they are at any given time.

submain• 3 years ago

Bread is indeed different nowadays, specially in the americas.

Modern wheat was "invented" by Norman Borlaug in the 60s. It was genetically modified (through breeding and other means) to provide higher yield.

Some places, like Italy and France, still use the old low yield "original" wheat.

I learned this painful lesson when I thought I had gluten allergy. I can't eat any kind of bread in the US. But when I went to France, I had no problems. Turns out (AFAIK), high yield wheat is also really hard to digest...

I only use French flour now.

scythe2• 3 years ago

The sweet potato is an extremely unusual case in that it was transported across the Pacific by Polynesians before the Colombian exchange! In fact, this is some of the most reliable evidence that the preindustrial Polynesians reached South America.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweet_potato_cultivation_in_Pol...

analog312• 3 years ago

Great. Now I can make pizza any way I damn well want. And chili.

CoastalCoder• 3 years ago

I believe it's spelled "Chile".

(This is a pun. At least in my corner of the U.S., people typically pronounce "chili" and "Chile" the same way.)

Mordisquitos3• 3 years ago

Going off on a tangent, but still related to national cuisines, a few years ago Spanish speakers in the UK would find it hilarious how many restaurants and pubs would call their vegetarian alternative to chile con carne... wait for it... veggie con carne.

I haven't seen that term in the wild recently. I guess they eventually realised.

neom• 3 years ago

Me: oh, I'm Canadian

Them: don't know much about Canada, it's a friendly country. What is Canadian food?

Me: uhm... French fries with cheese and gravy...

Them: O.o

Mordisquitos3• 3 years ago

Don't forget the hyperglycemic ent blood.

bdowling• 3 years ago

In her latest book …, Anya von Bremzen goes on a multi-year quest … In the process, she “crushes” bowls of noodles with a ramen otaku in Tokyo, learns to make pasta puttanesca in a former brothel in Naples, and drinks ceremonial cacao at her own wedding in Oaxaca.

The primary purpose of a book like this seems to be so that the author can go on a tour around the world and write the costs off as a business expense. If the book sells well, that’s just gravy (pun intended).

quesera• 3 years ago

Completely true. And the books never sell, so the losses just offset other income.

Brilliant, really.

MichaelRo2• 3 years ago

I also get the feeling that the whole thing is shoehorned for the obvious purpose of being contrarian for the obvious reason that being mainstream doesn't separate you enough from the pack to sell. So: arguing that national dish IS A REAL THING would require a much more elevated level of content and research. Claim the contrary with shallow arguments mixed with "I traveled The World to experience it myself" and easy peasy, must be true because.

Other than that, National Dish is as much a thing as National Language. Take Latin / Romance languages for instance. It's something of a trope that in the old days (before modern communication and standardization of "national language" with one dialect proclaimed "the reference" and evangelized through media), going from Rome to Paris to Madrid meant every two adjacent villages would understand each other but 100 villages away this would cease to be true. Language changed so it makes just as much sense that food recipes changed.

This is brilliantly illustrated for the Balkans region by Key & Peele's sketch "Macedonian Café": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1KiFON-GWg

There's "Ćevapi" as "national dish" of Bosnia, a country the size of a pea grain so sure, THEY invented it. In fact it's the exact same situation for Latin dialects. Go from Bosnia to Serbia to Romania and every two villages will make a ćevapi that's similar enough but 100 villages away the flavor and recipe would have changed enough to create the "Macedonian Café" situation :)

czDRZ-akk3• 3 years ago

This is nitpicking, but part of what makes the Key & Peele sketch funny is that the two recipes the cafe owner describes appear to be the exact same. I read it as poking fun at extreme nationalism creating artificial differences when there really are none.

That being said, it is a comedy sketch, so ultimately it’s up to interpretation.

kazinator• 3 years ago

Some national dishes were manufactured by their tourist ministries or other bodies connected to the government.

Pad Thai is like that; it was invented by a politician.

bashmelek• 3 years ago

The article is informative, even eye opening, but to be honest, I get wary of the iconoclastic affect that surrounds it. Truth is, I am attached to certain food traditions and would like to see them continued properly. I know culture evolves, but if anything, I want to look back, not forward, and see what past things we have been missing out on.

jaystraw• 3 years ago

The few OPs here are surprising -- if you read TFA, it's about how political perturbations (putting it lightly) affect not just what is eaten, but what ingredients are promoted. The interviewee -- I don't know her, but she has a wikipedia page. It doesn't have her date of birth, but (corrections welcome) seems to me, her first book came out circa ~1990 because she updated it after the USSR's respective republics regained their cultural identities.

Does this person get paid to fly around the world? It seems so. If she's providing insight -- who fucking cares? Powerful influences -- wait for it --

...influence! That concept's not novel but the details help a lot

Debunking the Myth of the National Dish

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