what if i told you that a lot of “Americanized” versions of foods were actually the product of immigrant experiences and are not “bastardized versions”
That’s actually fascinating, does anyone have any examples?
Chinese-American food is a really good example of this and this article provides a good intro to the history http://firstwefeast.com/eat/2015/03/illustrated-history-of-americanized-chinese-food
I took an entire class about Italian American immigrant cuisine and how it’s a product of their unique immigrant experience. The TL;DR is that many Italian immigrants came from the south (the poor) part of Italy, and were used to a mostly vegetable-based diet. However, when they came to the US they found foods that rich northern Italians were depicted as eating, such as sugar, coffee, wine, and meat, available for prices they could afford for the very first time. This is why Italian Americans were the first to combine meatballs with pasta, and why a lot of Italian American food is sugary and/or fattening. Italian American cuisine is a celebration of Italian immigrants’ newfound access to foods they hadn’t been able to access back home.
(Source: Cinotto, Simone. The Italian American Table: Food, Family, and Community in New York City. Chicago: U of Illinois, 2013. Print.)
Stuff you Missed in History Class has a really good podcast overview of “Foreign Food” in the US.
I LOVE learning about stuff like this :D
that corned beef and cabbage thing you hear abou irish americans is actually from a similar situation but because they weren’t allowed to eat that stuff due to that artificial famine
<3 FOOD HISTORY <3
Everyone knows Korean barbecue, right? It looks like this, right?
Well, this is called a “flanken cut” and was actually unheard of in traditional Korean cooking. In traditional galbi, the bone is cut about two inches long, separated into individual bones, and the meat is butterflied into a long, thin ribbon, like this:
In fact, the style of galbi with the bones cut short across the length is called “LA Galbi,” as in “Los Angeles-style.” So the “traditional Korean barbecue” is actually a Korean-American dish.
Now, here’s where things get interesting. You see, flanken-cut ribs aren’t actually all that popular in American cooking either. Where they are often used however, is in Mexican cooking, for tablitas.
So you have to imagine these Korean-American immigrants in 1970s Los Angeles getting a hankering for their traditional barbecue. Perhaps they end up going to a corner butcher shop to buy short ribs. Perhaps that butcher shop is owned by a Mexican family. Perhaps they end up buying flanken-cut short ribs for tablitas because that’s what’s available. Perhaps they get slightly weirded out by the way the bones are cut so short, but give it a chance anyway. “Holy crap this is delicious, and you can use the bones as a little handle too, so now galbi is finger food!” Soon, they actually come to prefer the flanken cut over the traditional cut: it’s easier to cook, easier to serve, and delicious, to boot!
Time goes on, Asian fusion becomes popular, and suddenly the flanken cut short rib becomes better known as “Korean BBQ,” when it actually originated as a Korean-Mexican fusion dish!
I don’t know that it actually happened this way, but I like to think it did.
Corned beef and cabbage as we know it today? That came to the Irish immigrants via their Jewish neighbors at kosher delis.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/is-corned-beef-really-irish-2839144/
The Irish immigrants almost solely bought their meat from kosher butchers. And what we think of today as Irish corned beef is actually Jewish corned beef thrown into a pot with cabbage and potatoes. The Jewish population in New York City at the time were relatively new immigrants from Eastern and Central Europe. The corned beef they made was from brisket, a kosher cut of meat from the front of the cow. Since brisket is a tougher cut, the salting and cooking processes transformed the meat into the extremely tender, flavorful corned beef we know of today.
The Irish may have been drawn to settling near Jewish neighborhoods and shopping at Jewish butchers because their cultures had many parallels. Both groups were scattered across the globe to escape oppression, had a sacred lost homeland, discriminated against in the US, and had a love for the arts. There was an understanding between the two groups, which was a comfort to the newly arriving immigrants. This relationship can be seen in Irish, Irish-American and Jewish-American folklore. It is not a coincidence that James Joyce made the main character of his masterpiece Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, a man born to Jewish and Irish parents.
Ahh, similar origin to fish and chips in the UK then.
That meal came about either in London or the North of England where Jewish immigrant fried fish venders decided to team up with the Irish cooked potato sellers to produce the meal everyone associates with the UK.
Because while a bunch of stuff from the UK was lifted and adapted from folks we colonised (Mulligatawny soup for example, was an adaptation of a soup recipe found in India and which British chefs tried to approximate back home), some of it was made by folks who actively moved here (like tikka masala, that originated in a restaurant up in Scotland).
I knew about tikka masala but had no idea about mulligatawny soup or the origins of fish and chips! :D
Food is the best way of learning about another culture.
I mention this, because one of the best things that came out of the Celtic Tiger economy that I was a teenager and student in, was Ireland developing a proper food culture and, through immigration happening for the first time in centuries, more varied foods.
Raw produce in Ireland was always good - the butter, in particular, is heavenly - but the end results were pretty terrible. And the one that always stuck out to me as the greatest insult against cuisine was the “curry” you used to be able to buy in chip shops (for curried chips).
The only adequate way I have of describing it is…it tasted of brown. (Or, it was like a really, really distant and infinitely less appealing version of a katsu curry). I could not, for the life of me, understand why people in British tv shows always talked about going out for a curry (insofar as I ever thought about it).
But then a proper Indian takeaway opened up close to my parents’ house when I was about sixteen. I couldn’t actually tell you now if it was a particularly good or accurate representation of Indian foods - I can say that it was eye-opening, for me at least.
And yeah, the corned beef thing is exclusively Irish American - though the classic Dublin dish will have at least two of cabbage, bacon and potatoes in it somewhere (a combo that I will happily go the rest of my life without ever eating again).
