Certainly one of my biggest pet peeves. If I had a nickel for everybody that got in my ear about "authentic" Mexican food and of course was talking about one particular regional cuisine: Tex-Mex, Southwest American, Californian Mexican, Mexico City, . . .
The search for authenticity in food is a weird obsession anyway since cuisine changes on contact with new ingredients.
People are always taken back about how much classic staples didn't exist prior to the discovery of America. On top of that realization is that the food wasn't adopted immediately. Meaning a lot of common dishes didn't exist until after 1700/1800s.
Things like tomato sauce and pasta in italian cuisine wasn't until almost 1800. Yet we talk about 'authentic' cuisine we usually use it in context way before 'America'. Yet most cuisine we eat didn't come into existence until AFTER America.
Another example is chilis in thai cuisine. Capsicum didn't make it over the ocean until america was discovered. So all the spicy peppers in so many dishes from Thai to Vietnamese food didn't exist in their cooking until it was brought over and eventually incorporated.
Potatoes is another one. Originated in Peru. Russian potato vodka? Irish Potatoes? Germans bangers and mash?
Nope, nada until America was discovered.
Chocolate, Vanilla. Staples of desserts of european cooking...except not until America was discovered.
These above ingredients alone are associated with so many traditional recipes but they didn't exist until recently. It really shows how quickly food and traditions change and the idea of 'authenticity' is over blown.
> People are always taken back about how much classic staples didn't exist prior to the discovery of America.
> Yet we talk about 'authentic' cuisine we usually use it in context way before 'America'.
I can pretty much guarantee that's not true of discussion of authentic cuisine of the Mexican or Tex-Mex varieties, since “Mexico” and “Texas” are both post-Millenial identities, and both identities of the Americas. Sure, it might apply to some views of authenticity of European, Asian, or African cuisines (and if by “America” you actually mean the “European colonization of America”, which some parts of your comment suggest, it might apply to similar views of authenticity of Native American, including Inuit, Aztec, Inca, etc. cuisine.
But, even where it might apply, I don't think that is what people usually mean by authenticity; they mostly mean before changes made to support mass commercial distribution or production, and without adaptation to ingredients they are locally cheaper or more popular in places outside of the place where the cuisine originates. (In America, that concern might often be phrased as “before Americanization”, but that's not “before any impacts of the discovery of America”.)
As someone from Texas I can definitely say from first hand the attitude I experience from people snubbing 'authenticity' in other cuisine is the same I hear towards 'Tex-Mex'.
I have gone to many local restaurants where local ingredients are used and not mass-produced and seen the same attitude from friends, colleague or acquaintances in my life.
I also extensively worked in the kitchen, in fact it was my first career, and i can say the attitude was prevlevant there too.
I've worked with plenty of people from mexico itself that had less of that attitude since they could actually see the influence of different dishes and spices in both foods.
So I can pretty much guarantee from actual experience this attitude stems from the same attitude that other people have that leads them to say things like 'italy doesn't have pepperoni pizza' or 'french wine will always be better than nappa' etc. It stems from the same place.
I will concede there are probably people like you describe, but the issue the article describes and the issue I am talking about is seen quite a bit against 'tex-mex'.
I would posit that mostly, what these people mean is that “French wine will always be more French than Napa.” And they have an aesthetic preference for the terroir of French wine.
To put that another way: a lot of culinary aesthetics—and aesthetics generally—is just a rationalization of nostalgia. People want food that tastes like food they remember enjoying (even if that memory has more to do with their mood at the time, or the ambiance, or any other thing that can colour a memory), rather than particularly caring about food being good in the same way as food they remember enjoying. People would prefer a food that recaptures their youth, to a food that’s an optimized, culinarily “better” version of that food, every time. (Unless they’re chefs, or professional food critics.)
> As someone from Texas I can definitely say from first hand the attitude I experience from people snubbing 'authenticity' in other cuisine is the same I hear towards 'Tex-Mex'.
I never said that people in general have a different attitude about authenticity toward Tex-Mex food than most other food, I said that it is impossible for the source of that attitude to be a desire to get to what the cuisine was like before the discovery of America.
> I said that it is impossible for the source of that attitude to be a desire to get to what the cuisine was like before the discovery of America.
I didn't gather that from your reply. I apologise for misunderstanding.
I agree with that point. But I also don't think people are 'wanting' what it was like before in either attitude.
I think it something else, maybe a way to seem more 'culture' or a way to seperate themselves from common 'americans'? I mean i don't really know where it stems from.
Example is we have quite a few people that complains how all these 'chemicals' and stuff in our food is killing us and how they only buy organic and they won't eat this or that cause of the 'processing' and then they light a cigarette and crack open a can of PBR.
A lot of times we identify with something on a different level then is logical, I believe the same is happening with a lot of these people and 'authenticity'. I could be wrong though, but I believe we are all susceptible to this kind of behavior.
> A lot of times we identify with something on a different level then is logical, I believe the same is happening with a lot of these people and 'authenticity'.
I'm reading The Elephant in the Brain. Its shocking how much we do as humans that we delude ourselves into believing.
There is substantial evidence suggesting highly processed foods are bad for your health. Sure, people might have other vices but I don't see the harm in realizing that the products that make food cheap and shelf stable may not be the most compatible with a healthful diet.
I just made "viking" bread with my son as part of his homework, and I have no illusion that the recipe I found is authentic either, but the first recipe I found had potato flour in it...
"Authentic" viking bread would have been made with hand-milled oat and rye, with some wheat; to date you can see much more oat and rye harvest in most parts of Scandinavia; but just as you point out, potatoes are today also seen as an essential part of an "authentic" Norwegian diet and is a part of most dishes considered traditionally Norwegian.
Even more amusing to me is that while porridge is authentic in that respect, the most common modern types are not: rice porridge is certainly quite modern, yet it's pretty much considered as authentically Norwegian as you can get to have rice porridge served with butter, sugar and cinnamon, with both sugar and cinnamon being "modern" introductions.
And it was first a few years ago I learned that most of the Christmas cookie traditions we have are less than a century old, with ironic ones like "fattigmann" (literally "poor man") being introduced in the 1930's in a cook book where the recipe including more eggs than the average 1930's family consumed in a year, and so not actually spreading until much later.
Christmas traditions in particular, now that I have a kid of my own, has driven how that "authentic" and "tradition" usually really for the most part stays consistent only a generation or two. What my son is growing up with certainly has some parts in common with the Christmas celebrations of my childhood, but it has already morphed drastically, both in terms of traditions and even the food we insist is very authentic.
Being discovered in the New World by European explorers (and then taken back to Europe and cultivated there); vs. being a cultural invention of people living in the Americas and having to deal with its local climate and growing conditions; vs. being discovered by European explorers but found to only grow in the local climate and so farmed there, are all pretty different things, and it’s weird to conflate them like this.
Tomatoes and potatoes, and the vanilla bean, were cultivated in Europe, by Europeans.
Chilies were cultivated in the Americas (over 6000 years ago), and then traded to European explorers who took them back home and grew them there, too.
The cocoa bean was cultivated in the Americas, by the Olmec; and then traded to European explorers who tried to grow it, failed, and ended up invading the area to farm it.
Of these, the first is European cuisine, through-and-through. The second is aboriginal Mesoamerican cuisine. And the third is what you might call “American” cuisine, insofar as—like most of the historical cuisines in America itself—it was a cuisine invented by farmers from Europe (and the slaves they brought from everywhere else) learning to live in the Americas.
Er, none of those are cuisine, just ingredients. They all feature in post-contact cuisine in both the Americas and elsewhere, and pre-contact cuisine in the Americas. (And, contrary to your description, potatoes and tomatoes were cultivated in the Americas before contact; the former for 6000+ years, the latter for 2000+.)
I think the claim was that the cuisine in question that uses them is European, not that no one used them in South America but rather that the use of them in Europe is specifically European.
Saying America was discovered is correct terminology from the colonial perspective hundreds of years ago, but I think today the proper term would be when America was colonized. It had been discovered a long time before then, and it might strike native Americans and others as a eurocentric way of speaking about history.
Saying it is because of the discovery of America (apart from the unfortunate choice of words wrt "discovery"; it was already discovered) completely discredits and discounts all the importing of e.g. spice from Asia.
Example: Dutch speculaas cookies [1].
"Speculaas dough does not rise much. Dutch and Belgian versions are baked with light brown (sometimes beet) sugar and baking powder. German Spekulatius uses baker's ammonia as leavening agent. Indian, Indonesian, and Mediterranean spices used in speculaas are cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, cardamom and white pepper; these were common in the 1600-1700s due to the Dutch East Indies spice trade. Family recipes may also include other small amounts of spices like anise, etc." [emphasis mine]
I don't know what's been more important for which cuisine, but not mentioning say VOC's imports and only WIC (which was smaller and came a good ~20 years later) is inaccurate. The WIC was more into slave trade, especially after conquering of Angola and Brasil from the Portuguese.
I'd love to read an article about what people actually ate before those staples arrived.
An amusing side note: I read about an analysis showing that Stradivarius used a red pigment from America in some of his violins. I doubt it had an effect on the tone, but it's just interesting to see what kind of trade was occurring.
The Americas were never "discovered" -- the myriad people living across the Americas certainly knew it existed. The land, and the people inhabiting them, were conquered.
There are plenty of examples of the word 'discover' being used to describe finding out things someone else already knows. eg the cops discovering who a murderer is, or the legal process of 'discovery' etc etc.
It isn't wrong to describe Europeans discovering America as long as you aren't claiming they were the first to discover it.
As a previously commentator mentioned, "colonized" is a much more fitting word than "discovery." The deeper problem, I think, with "discovery" is that it obscures the violence of the European settlement process -- the meta-genocides of the North American peoples and the transatlantic Slave Trade.
The discovery of America by Europeans is not the same as the colonization and settlement, although the discovery led to colonization. They are not synonyms.
Coming from NorCal, everyone seems to think they are an expert on what 'authentic' Mexican food is, even if they've never been there or only to a resort. There's also a strong tendency toward fetishism of truly crappy food, which people cutely term 'simple' or 'rustic' but which often is in fact poorly prepared and overly salted and made from the cheapest of ingredients.
It's a shame, because these people seem to be unaware of how large a country Mexico is, with myriad cultural influences and traditions, regional variations, and a vibrant modern food culture, especially in regards to Mexico City.
The taco truck under the BART tracks in Oakland with the $6 heart-attack (and heart-burn) burritos doesn't serve traditional/authentic Mexican food, it serves traditional Cali/NorCal Taco Truck food. If you love it, that's great, but honor it by celebrating what it really is, which is a separate food tradition that is wonderful in it's own way.
> which often is in fact poorly prepared and overly salted and made from the cheapest of ingredients.
Like Chico's Tacos!
> It's a shame, because these people seem to be unaware of how large a country Mexico is, with myriad cultural influences and traditions, regional variations, and a vibrant modern food culture, especially in regards to Mexico City.
Fact! I prefer the style of cuisine that comes from the Chihuahuan desert.
There are tons of examples of this in Japanese food. A friend who spent most of a year in Japan said that they love sauerkraut over there because it has the sour, fermented taste that's emblematic of some of their fine cuisine. Corn (native to North America) is a common topper for ramen. Many Japanese broths and sauces now integrate peanuts (also native to North America).
I am from Brazil, we have largest amount of Japanese when not counting Japan itself. One of the most popular "Japanese" dishes is Tempura that is actually a Portuguese dish seemly introduced in Japan in 1600s or so...
Theory is that Tempura is just corruption of word "Tempero"
Another likely theory is that it's from "tempora", a Latin reference to Lent (Tempo da Quaresma) because that was a time when Catholics ate more vegetables and fish.
According to that Wikipedia article, the word originates from Tamil, and:
"Archaeological evidence dating to 2600 BCE from Mohenjo-daro suggests the use of mortar and pestle to pound spices including mustard, fennel, cumin, and tamarind pods with which they flavoured food."
Super easy to make - look for "Golden Curry" in most Asian groceries. You will likely see more kinds in a Japanese grocery. Get some good rice while you are at it.
My daughter remarked that you can apparently put any random vegetables in Japanese curry and it still tastes awesome.
Second the recommendation for Golden Curry, it's a staple of my cabinet. And it's not just Asian food stores, I've found it in the "International" sections of small-name grocers, chain grocers, and even in the Wal-Mart of the podunk Appalachian town where I went to college. I also buy it in bulk from Amazon when I need to pad out my order to get the free shipping. Highly recommend.
The Japanese "golden curry" being talked about here is also based on a roux and more closely resembles an English gravy that has been juiced up with some warm spices, e.g. flavors like cinnamon, allspice, and cloves. The Japanese preparation includes chunks of meat and vegetables and is usually served over rice, but you could include root vegetables and skip the rice if you prefer...
Because of the warm spices, my first taste of it actually gave me a nostalgic memory of my long gone grandfather who liked to cook "old world" German food. Germany was also influenced by the spice roads and incorporated a lot of these same spices into its cuisine.
Puebla had a large influx of Lebanese, so recipes there are influenced by those who settled there, like skirt steak on a rotisserie was inspired by schwarma.
It's also an emoji. Not just that, but it's a version 1.0 emoji and is set with the more Japanese dishes, i.e., between Bento Box and Steaming Bowl, and not the more Americanized ones.
Just to echo on the search for authenticity, many places in the US will serve food at a higher level of quality than many places in the country of origin. Abroad, the food comes under the same economic pressure as anything else, and most of what is available cheaply will be mass-produced somewhere and sold out to people who are eking out a living reselling it to consumers. The difference in the country of the origin is that the local industrialized production of the ingredients will make the product cheaper compared to US restaurant prices, and it will be available more widely than the one or two restaurants in the US city who make the food, but it's definitely not as high quality as the US restauranteurs who need to make more of the ingredients from scratch.
It's one thing to object to food being sold as a certain style when that style would never include some of the ingredients that are being included, but it's well more important to just make delicious food.
> Just to echo on the search for authenticity, many places in the US will serve food at a higher level of quality than many places in the country of origin.
Pretty sure it applies neither for French or Italian cuisine.
In his biography, Jacque Pepin (famous French chef) talked about how much better the food quality was in the US compared to his native France. He found American supermarket had amazing produce quality compared to the markets in France, where most of the good produce was reserved for elite chefs, leaving the rest of the people to settle for the scraps.
> In his biography, Jacque Pepin (famous French chef) talked about how much better the food quality was in the US compared to his native France. He found American supermarket had amazing produce quality compared to the markets in France, where most of the good produce was reserved for elite chefs, leaving the rest of the people to settle for the scraps.
You mean the food quality at Walmart is superior to the the quality of the food you can find in a french organic market? the quality of milks? cheeses? wheat and meats is automatically superior in US? I know Jacque Pepin. I also know the food you can find in US markets is disgusting and low quality when compared to foods for the same price in France. There is a reason why US has an obesity crisis as sever as it is.
Growing up Italian-American, with relatives who came off the boat cooking things for me, then having a 'merican who did a semester abroad in a single city in Italy tell me the way I cook isn't "authentic."
Ha! I've had the same experience many times as a Mexican American. Usually with Texans and Californians who visit NYC, try say, some actually authentic mexican tacos, and pronounce them lame and "inauthentic" because they do not resemble americanized texmex they grew up on.
Like, what? I'd understand the complaint if we'd gone to a place advertised as texmex.
I guess the annoying thing is they misleadingly refer to texmex food as "mexican" which it is not. It is a separate (and also tasty) cuisine that relies on different traditions and ingredients, eg flour instead of corn tortillas. Food is all great, but lets not use confusing terms
Most people who speak of “authenticity” don’t really want “authentic” Mexican food”; what they’re really after is food with a clear regional provenance. They want food with a cultural narrative behind it, where that narrative doesn’t feature their own culture as one of the characters.
Having grown up in Costa Rica, and having worked as a tour guide in Mexico - this is extremely true. People love the idea of authentic Costa Rican food, but for me growing up that meant beans and rice 5 dinners a week. It sounds fun and authentic - for meal one...
No one wants "real" food, that is for sure. We always try to stay and shop in residential neighborhoods when we travel, and if you look at what people have in their baskets, it is pretty boring. I would have gone insane in Puerto Rico eating mofongo (fried plantains, but very starchy) every day of the week, or beans and rice with plain tortillas in Mexico. Or dal (lentils) in India. But a lot of that is relative income, so I think it's more what people would eat if they could afford it. I just heard from a southern Indian colleague of mine that basmati rice is considered "too heavy" for daily consumption and is saved for special occasions. Most of the real highlight dishes in any cuisine are for feast meals, it seems.
> The search for authenticity in food is a weird obsession anyway since cuisine changes on contact with new ingredients.
I strongly disagree; it can be pretty useful in certain contexts. Namely, on contact with US/Western market demand, a lot of cuisines get blander, sweeter, less complex, and sometimes heavier. (The history behind this is pretty interesting, and if you'd like i can pull up a source on this). For those whose palate is used to more flavor and complexity than the Western palate, the difference between the Americanized form of a cuisine and the "authentic" version can be pretty substantial. The latter can be preferred for either reasons of taste or reasons of variety (the difference between American Chinese and American Thai is far tinier than the difference between a given regional Chinese cuisine and a given regional Thai cuisine). Note that this is probably the case in every country: I was born and raised in the US, and I remember finding McDonald's to be pretty bizarre when I'd visit India, because the flavors had been modified to fit the local palate so heavily (this was about 20yrs ago; I gather that the menu has changed a lot since).
This isn't a search for authenticity per se, which as you say, is pretty much meaningless. It's just an attempt to avoid the flattening of every cuisine into a similar spectrum of flavors. Unfortunately, restaurants only exist if there's enough demand for them, so food with flavors outside of the country's palate are hard to sustain unless there's an ethnic enclave nearby that can support an "authentic" place.
I get what you're saying but the same is true of any transplanted cuisine. Thai food in Australia is different than in the US is different from wherever but in most cases it's a lot closer than you're giving credit for—which is neither here nor there since a cuisine being a "lot closer" is arbitrary, closer to where? Isan? The south? And of course you get some places like Uncle Boon's in NY that do a tremendous job of recreating Thai street food but wrap it up in a lot of cuisine. I can promise that Uncle Boon's is not frequented by FOB Thai immigrants, but I doubt the menu will lose its flavor profile.
As an aside, the "more flavor and complexity than the western palate" stuff is another of those things I have a bit of a problem with. Yeah, American food in some (most) parts of the country is bland but Mexican food (for example) is American, at least if California, Texas, New Mexico are still part of the country. Add BBQ, Cajun, and other regional cuisines and American food has its own complexity. Standard diner fare is pretty bleak but so is street cart pad thai after the thousandth time you've had it.
Besides if we're talking about the western palate we're including all of Europe in that, with an incredible diversity of cuisines and tastes.
> which is neither here nor there since a cuisine being a "lot closer" is arbitrary, closer to where? Isan? The south?
This isn't remotely relevant. Picking a given regional cuisine and just calling it "Thai food" when transplanted is a completely separate axis from how closely the transplanted cuisine adheres to the dishes from its original country.
> As an aside, the "more flavor and complexity than the western palate" stuff is another of those things I have a bit of a problem with. Yeah, American food in some (most) parts of the country is bland but Mexican food (for example) is American, at least if California, Texas, New Mexico are still part of the country. Add BBQ, Cajun, and other regional cuisines and American food has its own complexity. Standard diner fare is pretty bleak but so is street cart pad thai after the thousandth time you've had it.
I'm not going off of some random intuition of my own: food chemistry is literally an entire field of science that focuses (in part) on the molecules that produce flavor, and how they interact with each other. They've built taxonomies of these flavors, and Western cuisine tends to use the same flavors in the different components of a dish or meal. By contrast, cuisines like Indian food do the opposite: using multiple flavors which contrast with each other. I'm not using complexity as a value judgment, but as an objective, measurable fact. (The history behind this divergence is really interesting; I can go into it if you'd like).
I was using Western in the generally-accepted sense: of European (cultural) ancestry. Obviously American cuisine is less European than Europe, and the parts that are heavily influenced by (e.g.) Mexican cuisine are less subject to the uncontroversially lower level of flavor/complexity in European cuisines overall. The sum of these things still shifts the Western palate towards the direction I'm talking about relative to many other cuisines. Also, I'm talking about the food preferences of the people, and how that shapes cuisine. The obvious example is spicy heat: the fact that "American spicy" and "Thai spicy" is a thing indicates a recognition on the part of the proprietors that the average American palate is calibrated for a different level of heat than the Thai palate. As I said, moving every cuisine towards the American palate to suit it better has the effect of flattening them out a little. A dish from some part of Mexico tweaked to cater to the American palate will be closer to a Thai dish tweaked to cater to the American palate than the original dishes are to each other. Which brings me back to my original point: if you find places with dishes closer to their cuisines of origin than their Americanized version, you'll enjoy a greater variety of flavor, since the flattening process is somewhat mitigated.
It might just be a slightly mislabeled desire for new/good food. People probably say "authentic" when what they mean is "something different from what I've been getting in my hometown for the last 20 years". And they probably say "authentic" when they really just want quality preparation and ingredients. Quick, cheap American interpretations of ethnic food has become synonymous with inauthenticity, but obviously that's not always the case.
idk, I get what you are saying, it's a bit of an empty cliche, but at the same time, I think there are interesting things people are trying to ask for, just using the wrong words
It depends on your definition but FWIW Flour tortillas, which burritos require, were only invented very recently, after Europeans brought wheat to the americas. Wheat tortillas have caught on in some parts of mezixo, primarily near the UsA border but are barely seen in other parts. Corn tortillas are the older more universal staple and have a revered place in mexican history and culture that wheat products do not.
Time marches on and maybe burritos are a regional cuisine but they are surely not a general national cuisine.
As a comparison, pizza is a USA national dish. Scrapple on the other hand is more of a Philadelphia area regional dish, even if Philadelphia is indeed inside the USA.
What makes you think people from a country know everything about every part of their own country, especially one as large and culturally diverse as Mexico? Sometimes outsiders can know something they don't.
Many Americans might not have heard of "crawfish étouffé" and therefore assume it's not American food. A foreign tourist who has visited New Orleans could (quite authoritatively) correct them.
Btw, I'd be willing to bet that I have more contact with people from Sonora than the typical person from Puebla has.
The foreign tourist might happen to be correct this one time, but "I'm a tourist who has been there" is not anything I have ever heard gives one power to be quite authoritative. Visiting one or more times is not remotely on par with "I have a PhD in the subject."
I'm not sure I'd say "one or more times" really sums up going dozens of times, as umanwizard said they have. While I'll give you that we don't know if they have a PhD (which, sure, would be more definite authority), evidently they have the means to travel extensively, which could well put them in more diverse areas than someone from Mexico would go.
I already acknowledged they may be correct. I will further formally acknowledge they may even be highly knowledgeable.
The problem is that citing "I'm a habitual tourist" is not really a credential anyone can verify. Maybe "I'm a travel blogger as well and here is a link to my 10 year long blog and here are the posts about the many times I went to this place, so you can check the depth of my knowledge if you desire." would work.
The phrase quite authoritative suggests credentialing. I am extremely knowledgeable about a number of subjects. I even have 6 years of college. But I have a serious problem with trying to get taken seriously in part because a lot of my credentials are akin to "I'm a habitual tourist."
Maybe you really are a habitual tourist. Maybe you are more knowledgeable on the subject than the world's foremost expert with two PhDs. The problem is that "I'm a habitual tourist" simply fails as a verifiable credential as a stand alone thing without something to back up your claim of depth of accurate knowledge.
I get the feeling that you misunderstood what they were trying to communicate and prioritized literal word usage over context. They should not have said "quite authoritatively". Using "quite correctly" would have been better. "Authoritatively" was a sloppy substitute for emphatic correctness.
I acknowledged upfront that the tourist could well be correct. That addresses the possibility that it was merely sloppy wording with that intended meaning.
Looking again at what you'd put earlier, your acknowledgement very much seems to have the not-total-impossibility of them being correct as a throwaway caveat, not as a real consideration of the situation in any sense. I suspect that it being used now to address that they were using sloppy wording is a retroactive understanding after I pointed it out, and by luck is a plausible explanation.
Agreed. Whenever I hear people use authenticity as a litmus test for good food, it always comes across as being snobby for the sake of being snobby. Not only is authenticity in food a very fuzzy concept, but it really has nothing to do with quality (it may even suggest lower quality).
It's like saying that something that's popular must be bad, or that something that's expensive must be good. I mean, if you're a connoisseur of something, then you inevitably end up learning about the more authentic, less well-known, more exclusive versions of that thing. But saying that those are defining qualities of anything is BS, and only reveals the degree to which someone is a connoisseur because they actually appreciate something, vs. it's just part of the personal image they want to project to other people.
I had a nickel for everybody that got in my ear about "authentic" Mexican food
I liken this obsession with simulacra[0]. People looking for an original of something that never existed. “Greek” or “Mediterranean” food in the US is like this too.
Seriously, when is the last time you ate at a good restaurant serving Canadian food. :-)
On a more serious note, one of the interesting things about the IBM Watson Cookbook was looking at food not by region but by k-means clustering around a set of spice vectors. It really drove home for me the notion that 'regional' food really was more about the reliable availability of certain flavors and spices than it was around culture or people.
I moved to northern Minnesota and found that the Mexican food was generally low quality. Not only the recipes and style, but especially preparation, ingredients, presentation, quality standards and just about everything. However when I mentioned this to people there they would immediately say something like “I know it’s not -authentic-, but...”. However my point was that average sit-down family restaurants served food that more resembled a TV dinner or fast food place’s meals, which is not really related to authenticity.
Agreed. Moved to Phoenix from Portland, Oregon and I love Mexican and Tex-Mex. But all the Mexican I've tried here is just good, not great, family style mexican.
The closest place to great food is the TeePee, which is about as unassuming as a restaurant can get. The fancier places just crank up the spiciness to uncomfortable levels.
The best mexican?/tex-mex? I've ever had is still Chez Jose in Portland, Oregon. I'm really not sure how it's classified, other than awesome. Every trip back we eat there almost every day.
Or could it be that you just prefer what you got at home?
I grew up in Phoenix and love going back for the amazing Mexican food. From more established places like Los Dos Molinos to the little out of the way dives, there is no way you can convince me that Phoenix doesn't have good Mexican food. Tex-Mex I don't care about but I've spent plenty of time in Mexico too and Phoenix has great Mexican.
Also note that Los Dos bills itself as New Mexican cuisine (meaning from New Mexico, not Neo-Mexican). At least they used to. I haven't been there in years, though I love it.
> The closest place to great food is the TeePee, which is about as unassuming as a restaurant can get.
This is a principle that I've often found applicable to Mexican/Mexican-American food: the more impressive the decor, the less impressive the food. The Chicago area has lots of unassuming taquerias that knock the socks off of fancy, nationally-advertised chains.
Also, chains seldom can keep their good quality, there is always someone that starts optimizing profit before quality. The small places lives by their quality and wants to be proud about their food.
Completely agreed on the weird obsession that this is. I get wanting to have something you know, but I don't get dismissing the things you don't. Especially on some pseudo ranking based on "authenticity".
Not always. I'd wager it's more often elite signaling.
Sometimes, though, is is just comfort. As an example, the donuts from New Orleans are easy to make at home. Ish. I have yet to have them elsewhere be the same. I'll probably call the ones I do authentic, but I confess it is just to my tastes.
i think it's the crap-ton of processed cheese and beans in many tex-mex dishes that tarnishes it's authenticity. (the long and rambling article mentions this, but i didn't have the patience to figure out what they really thought it was.)
i like a good breakfast taco but i'm not generally a fan of most tex-mex. it hits you over the head with lard, carbs and over-cooked meats with no balance to it at all.
Beans tarnish the authenticity? It's all about beans. My father was a migrant worker, they came from Mexico to Texas and then whatever state they could find work in. All they ate was beans and tortillas, that's all they could afford.
Shortened version of processed cheese and processed beans.
The adjective processed applies to both of the nouns, though it is easy to interpret it otherwise. It's like saying "The problem is the junk food versions of these foods."
Hey! Don't knock canned refried beans. They are low in saturated fats, have good quality protein. And tasty! Its too easy to use the word 'processed' when it just means 'cooked'.
There was a good John Steinbeck novel in which beans were often mentioned, probably tortillas too. It might have been Cannery Row or another title. Enjoyed reading it.
Yes, I read somewhere (Wikipedia probably) that they are called the Three Sisters. They are symbiotic to some extent. The beans, being legumes, do nitrogen fixation in the soil, which benefits the other plants, and the beans grow up and twine around the maize stalks (at least for the creeper kinds of beans).
The search for authenticity in food is a weird obsession anyway since cuisine changes on contact with new ingredients.