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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 6, 2009 5:15:21 GMT
Those of us who are cookbook browsers, site searchers, recipe clippers, in short, lovers of cooking at whatever level, are products of a multitude of influences. My age group -- those growing up in the fifties and sixties -- were aware of the family culinary roots, both national and regional, but probably ate a wide variety of “American” food at home, in school, or when visiting friends.
My mother’s grandparents came from Sicily, and certainly Mama and her mother paid kitchen homage to that background. That side of the family is from Louisiana, so the Louisiana and deep South way of eating and looking at food was also very pervasive. And, really, what most Americans consider ‘Louisiana cuisine’ owes a great deal to its Italian settlers.
We enjoyed fried chicken, great spaghetti sauce and meatballs, rice at every meal, and venerated fresh vegetables. However, we didn’t turn up our noses at Watergate salad, or at my dad’s Saturday favorite: sauerkraut and hot dogs. My paternal grandmother died very young, so except for Daddy’s reminiscences of her pie-making or his admiration of her ability as a Depression-era cook, we had no clear picture of his early food imprinting. What a shame -- his mother came from New England, but Daddy’s family spent years in Mississippi and Alabama. That would have been an insight into American cooking!
The food influences of which we may be unaware would be those learned by our mothers and grandmothers when they were young cooks. In other words, the same sorts of things that creep into our personal cooking repertoires, but from an earlier era. People who like to cook are always looking around for new recipes or ways of doing things. My grandmother once told me that dirty rice, that scrumptious Louisiana staple, was a relatively new dish -- it was only introduced after World War II. She got it from a newspaper recipe. Hearing this certainly alerted me to the fact that grandmothers aren’t born cooking, they had to seek and learn, just like we do. Her recipe collection included some items of her invention and some copied from other people, but also recipes and hints clipped from newspapers or from the backs of packages. She told me that her mother was indifferent to cooking, and that she herself learned by doing. However she managed it, she loved to cook, and her cooking and baking was varied and always delicious.
My mother said she didn’t cook until she got married, so also learned by doing. Mama’s kitchen talents encompass family favorites, American standards, exotica that crept in during her years as an Air Force wife, plus all the things she absorbed by listening, reading, and generally always wanting to know more and to grow as a cook. She has her specialties for which we all clamor, but can always come up with something new.
Both my grandmother and mother were quick to acknowledge my godmother's prowess as a cook. This was my grandmother's sister-in-law, from a French family in New Roads, Louisiana. To this day, I can almost smell her dark, cool house. When I was driving across half the continent to attend Nan-nan's funeral, I got a fresh wave of grief when I realized I'd never taste her crawfish bisque again.
Even though we now take “fusion cooking” for granted, we should acknowledge how much we’ve incorporated fusion all along. Whether we’re from a country like the United States, which grew from immigration, or from a country which developed its cuisine over centuries, absorbing invasions and shifting political boundaries alike, we all started out with a local cooking that was made up of all kinds of influences.
My baby sister grew up in Oklahoma, and has lived in California almost all her adult life. No way she’s not a fusion cook. My other sister has written a cooking column for her local paper, and is a fiend for cookbooks. She spent half her married life in Colorado and now lives in south Texas. Strangely, her cooking reminds me a great deal of my mother’s.
My own daily cooking is fusion by default. I like to think that I inherited some of the kitchen talent of my mother and grandmother, along with recipes and an interest in food and cooking. However, because I live in Oaxaca, how I cook is enormously influenced by my love of Mexican food and my access to superb local ingredients. Admittedly, at times those superb ingredients aren’t the exact ones I need, but I enjoy using my imagination to get the results I want. Rather immodestly, I can say that I have mastered some regional classics, plus I know how to turn out food that would be considered correctly Mexican using just what’s on hand. However, there’s always my six decades of knowledge of another cuisine and my personal tastes at work, too.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2009 7:39:58 GMT
I would want to believe that absolutely anybody from any sort of mixed ancestral background grows up with a certain amount of fusion food. Unfortunately, modern supermarkets and the incredible variety of ready-to-eat fare available in the developed world have eliminated the need (and in many cases the desire) for learning to cook, and this is just fine with a lot of people. Luckily people travel much more now, and also new immigrants arrive in the neighborhood, so that at least maintains a certain level of interest in making some items that can't be found microwavable in 4 minutes in the frozen food case at the store.
I do realize that some people, even from older generations, are unlucky enough to come from families where nobody knew how to cook for some reason. My paternal grandmother was an awful cook. I think my mother did everything in her power to avoid us being invited there for a meal (and she lived next door for the first 7 or 8 years of my life!), so I only have vague memories of eating there 2 or 3 times, but I recall that it was just out of cans. She seemed to have absorbed absolutely none of her Swiss ancestry (just one generation away), knew nothing about the world or anything about Swiss cooking. Without being raised in an orphanage, I don't know how it is possible to so completely lose every trace of one's heritage.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 6, 2009 8:09:47 GMT
I don't know about nowadays, but I think a generation or so ago many immigrant parents did everything they could to insure their children wouldn't be "foreigners". They often didn't teach their children the mother country language, for instance. We have to assume that some young women who emigrated didn't really know how to cook when they left the old country, because if they'd stayed there they would have had a support group of older women to teach them how. You can imagine them arriving in the new country bewildered and overwhelmed and maybe having to go right out to work. They latched on to convenience foods as a lifeline, but lost some treasure of their heritage in the process.
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Post by Don Cuevas on Mar 7, 2009 16:26:45 GMT
This is a great OP and thread. When I'm awake enough, I may add something about my own background and culinary culture.
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Post by hwinpp on Mar 18, 2009 7:21:45 GMT
Do you mean fusion as in the mixing of culinary traditions at a whole meal or do you mean things like say 'sauerkraut tempura'? My mother is half Hainanese and half Cantonese, she used to cook all kinds of stuff including dishes of our different host countries. But it was always 'either or', never mixed. My father on the other hand like to mix things. He especially like curries. He had no qualms at all adding fresh yoghurt to a coconut based southern Indian curry. He also liked Turkish food and would think nothing of adding Indian curry powder to marinating lamb waiting to become doener. It was always good though.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 18, 2009 8:21:36 GMT
Please report back on any experiments with sauerkraut tempura. Does that go well with mint jelly or is it preferable to use Mexican salsa?
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Post by hwinpp on Mar 18, 2009 9:00:13 GMT
I don't think I'd even try that, K2...
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 18, 2009 15:41:05 GMT
Do you mean fusion as in the mixing of culinary traditions at a whole meal or do you mean things like say 'sauerkraut tempura'? My mother is half Hainanese and half Cantonese, she used to cook all kinds of stuff including dishes of our different host countries. But it was always 'either or', never mixed. My father on the other hand like to mix things. He especially like curries. He had no qualms at all adding fresh yoghurt to a coconut based southern Indian curry. He also liked Turkish food and would think nothing of adding Indian curry powder to marinating lamb waiting to become doener. It was always good though. In what I wrote above about "fusion" food that we eat at home, I was mostly thinking about how changes are incorporated so gradually and naturally that they don't seem radical or foreign. We can tell from what people from different countries report on here in this forum that any given nation is no longer eating only its national food. And even that traditional national food was already full of outside influences. Both the paprika in goulash and the tomatoes spaghetti sauce are New World products, for instance. So your dads "outside" additions to classic recipes are probably the ways foods have always changed with time, availability and expediency. And I suspect if you watched your mother prepare a classic dish from a particular cuisine, you'd catch some extra dash or technique that came in from her cooking background. It wouldn't have to be as radical as sauerkraut tempura to qualify as fusionized, right? Another kind of fusion would be the way foods mutate once they get established on foreign ground. I doubt what's called pizza in the US is the same item found in Naples, for instance. And yes, of course the presenting of foods from different cultures at the same meal is a form of fusion. Probably the rice dish served with a curry on any given dinner table is not the same rice that would have been presented on that curry's home turf. The Pesto thread in On the Menu has become an interesting conversation about fusion forces in a supposedly classic recipe.
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Post by hwinpp on Mar 19, 2009 10:40:21 GMT
Do you mean fusion as in the mixing of culinary traditions at a whole meal or do you mean things like say 'sauerkraut tempura'? My mother is half Hainanese and half Cantonese, she used to cook all kinds of stuff including dishes of our different host countries. But it was always 'either or', never mixed. My father on the other hand like to mix things. He especially like curries. He had no qualms at all adding fresh yoghurt to a coconut based southern Indian curry. He also liked Turkish food and would think nothing of adding Indian curry powder to marinating lamb waiting to become doener. It was always good though. In what I wrote above about "fusion" food that we eat at home, I was mostly thinking about how changes are incorporated so gradually and naturally that they don't seem radical or foreign. We can tell from what people from different countries report on here in this forum that any given nation is no longer eating only its national food. And even that traditional national food was already full of outside influences. Both the paprika in goulash and the tomatoes spaghetti sauce are New World products, for instance. So your dads "outside" additions to classic recipes are probably the ways foods have always changed with time, availability and expediency. And I suspect if you watched your mother prepare a classic dish from a particular cuisine, you'd catch some extra dash or technique that came in from her cooking background. It wouldn't have to be as radical as sauerkraut tempura to qualify as fusionized, right? Another kind of fusion would be the way foods mutate once they get established on foreign ground. I doubt what's called pizza in the US is the same item found in Naples, for instance. And yes, of course the presenting of foods from different cultures at the same meal is a form of fusion. Probably the rice dish served with a curry on any given dinner table is not the same rice that would have been presented on that curry's home turf. The Pesto thread in On the Menu has become an interesting conversation about fusion forces in a supposedly classic recipe. Re the New World products, the people in most ofeastern Asia can hardly believe that tomatoes, chiles and potatoes aren't indigenous! Especially chiles.
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Post by gertie on Mar 8, 2010 19:24:20 GMT
Funny I should read this today, I just love Anthony Bourdain and I saw a show of his this morning where he ate at an Irish Asian fusion joint which is apparently the brainchild of the first I think they said 3 Michelin starred restaurant in all of that country or at least in that particular city. As best I could determine, what they meant in many cases was simply he used the common ingredients in the common fare there but cooked them in Asian styles an with Asian spices, so it wasn't really as odd as the idea at first sounds, in fact when I go to Ireland I plan to see if that place is still there to try.
As far as fusion in the home, I don't know, does Tex-Mex count? My cousin claimed once the menus I cook are fusion because I will serve things like "Yankee" mustard potato salad with bbq brisket, but any more things like mustard potato salad have got more common around here. Seems like half the midwest moved here back during the rusting of the rust belt and on through the 80's, not that I can afford to be persnickety seeing as we moved here very early in the rusting.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2010 19:58:33 GMT
Anybody who has traveled to faraway places and liked what they ate there is "condemned" to fix a certain amount of fusion food for the rest of their life.
That little dash of curry powder in a normal stew or the addition of ginger to a totally ordinary dish are among the telltale signs that travel has affected your cooking forever.
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Post by gertie on Mar 11, 2010 10:09:17 GMT
K2 I like your way of thinking. I myself love a dash of garam masala in my beef stew or just a sprinkle on the roast chicken, seems like it helps the flavors develop rather than shining out to me. I picked that up when I started trying to make Indian dishes. Also, I love their paneer. I have recently started adding it to a lot of meals as I find you can mix in some fresh herbs and put it on some lightly buttered toast under the broiler and yum. Great in salads, too. Makes it much easier on me in that it is so easy to make and helps keep us from wasting milk. Our family is bad about consuming first a lot, so then you go to the shop and buy more only to have it sit in the fridge. Now I just make a batch of paneer before it goes bad and it gets eaten up in a flash.
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Post by Don Cuevas on Mar 14, 2010 16:56:43 GMT
I only now caught this statement in the OP: "We enjoyed fried chicken, great spaghetti sauce and meatballs, rice at every meal,"
Rice? With a spaghetti meal? Oy, my mother would plotz if she read that. She wouldn't let us have bread with a spaghetti meal, "because you don't have two starches at the same meal." (The word "carbohydrates" was not yet popular.) Now, she wouldn't think of having her favorite linguine with white clam sauce without some Italian bread to soak up the sauce.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 15, 2010 7:58:52 GMT
Um -- poor writing on my part. It seemed we had rice at every meal, but no, not with spaghetti, nor with potatoes. There was always bread on the table.
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Post by Don Cuevas on Mar 15, 2010 14:14:49 GMT
Um -- poor writing on my part. It seemed we had rice at every meal, but no, not with spaghetti, nor with potatoes. There was always bread on the table. I was just teasing.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 15, 2010 18:40:18 GMT
Well, you should learn not to mess with the head of a literal-minded person. ;D
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Post by lagatta on Mar 17, 2010 1:28:47 GMT
hwinpp, your dad was a so-called "normal", "indigenous", etc German?
(I'd almost written "ethnic German", but that term usually referred to German settlements in Central and Eastern Europe. I have a friend of ethnic-German Roumanian origin).
Don, was your mum "leniently kosher"? As in, would she allow spaghetti and meatballs with a bit of parmesan?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 17, 2010 8:21:51 GMT
I have just decreed that for the rest of this week, I am going to experiment with ginger.
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Post by lagatta on Mar 17, 2010 13:32:13 GMT
Fresh ginger is wonderful; it also counteracts nausea and settles the stomach. A boon for travellers. I suppose a pregnant woman with morning sickness should ask her doctor first, but it should be something she could take that might help.
I like ginger with pasta. I also put it in porridge - I make porridge with a mixture of grains, but one must strive to make it less boring. I like it with some aromatic spices, and fresh ginger.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 17, 2010 14:01:57 GMT
Porridge = oatmeal/rolled oats? I do the same with the aromatic spices and fresh ginger when I have it, LaGatta. I don't use a mixture of grains, but I do frequently put in sesame seeds and always raisins. My method is to put the spices and raisins in the water, then bring it to the boil. When it's boiling, I add the oats until they're right up to the level of the water, then simmer. This makes it come out with each oat flake separate and a nice beige color, rather than all glutinous and gray, which I think is why people reject porridge.
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Post by Don Cuevas on Mar 17, 2010 15:29:40 GMT
LaGatta wrote: "Don, was your mum "leniently kosher"? As in, would she allow spaghetti and meatballs with a bit of parmesan?" Yes; lenient.
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Post by lagatta on Mar 18, 2010 13:31:25 GMT
Yes, most "Western" porridge is made from oatmeal - rolled oats or steel-cut oats, as in the Irish style, and oatmeal is often used as a synonym for porridge, especially in the US. But many other grains are used for porridge, one of the oldest and humblest of cooked foods. And pease porridge is even made of dry yellow peas (Pease Porridge Hot) and was a cheap source of both protein and starch. Other common porridges are - of course - corn in the Americas and spread to elsewhere (everything from Atole and grits to polenta/mamaglia etc), the rice congees of Asia, wheat semolina (Cream of Wheat, farinata). I like to add some rolled rye and other grains. Indeed, this is a good use for my simple old crockpot as the heat element is around the sides so it isn't necessary to stir it, making the glue which indeed turns people off porridge. The way maize was introduced to Northeastern Italy (Veneto, Friuili), Romania etc was problematic as the grain wasn't nixtamilized so pellegra was endemic among poor villagers who ate it as their staple food. This site recounts that the same occurred in African countries, and in the Southern US. However the article doesn't go into the development of hominy grits in the US South, a similar process: www.thenourishinggourmet.com/2009/03/wisdom-from-the-past-nixtamalization-of-corn.html Looks like an interestng site for the resources.
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 18, 2010 15:59:14 GMT
Oh - thanks for that link! I try to spread the information about nixtamilization everywhere I go on the internet. It's not only interesting, it's of great historical importance. LaGatta, go to the thread I did about my bee visitors ( here) and you can see one of the kinds of grindstones in daily use around here. People take their nixtamal, ingredients for chocolate tablets or mole, and dried corn to one of the myriads of mechanized mills to have them ground. But mechanized or not, it's all stone grinding.
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Post by hwinpp on Mar 20, 2010 8:13:17 GMT
hwinpp, your dad was a so-called "normal", "indigenous", etc German? (I'd almost written "ethnic German", but that term usually referred to German settlements in Central and Eastern Europe. I have a friend of ethnic-German Roumanian origin). Don, was your mum "leniently kosher"? As in, would she allow spaghetti and meatballs with a bit of parmesan? Yes, from Westphalia, Hagen to be precise. But he was raised in Eastern Westphalia when the war began and the children were evacuated to the countryside.
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