Preface: I am not even remotely an expert on this
subject, and am happy to be corrected or given more information on any point
where what I wrote is inaccurate or incomplete. I just love eating, love trying
new flavors, and am writing a thing related to that, based on the limited
knowledge and experience I have plus a few brief Google searches.
Today I got involved in a discussion about how American Mexican
food isn’t real Mexican food, and what a travesty it is to put cheddar and sour
cream on tacos.
And, I mean, they’re not wrong about Tex-Mex being very different
than authentic Mexican food. Where they’re wrong is in saying that the fact
that it’s not authentically Mexican means that it’s bad.
Just because an Americanized dish would be unrecognizable in the old country doesn't mean it's bad.
Entire books have been written about how Chinese American food is vastly different from authentic Chinese food. Crab Rangoon, chow mein, beef and broccoli, most of the dishes that we would order at an American Chinese restaurant... were invented by Chinese-American cooks using the ingredients that were readily available in America. But both cuisines are delicious.
I grew up with Italian New Yorkers. I learned how to make spaghetti and meatballs from my mom, who learned it from her dad... but he didn't learn it from his parents, because they came from Italy and the recipe didn't. It was invented here.
Furthermore, the authentic dishes of Italy today are radically different from the dishes that would have existed just a few centuries ago, before the tomato was introduced to Europe from the Americas. Or a couple centuries before that, when Marco Polo came back from China and said "Hey guys, guess what you can do with grains? You can grind them into flour, sure, but then you can make the flour INTO EDIBLE SHAPES."
And millennia before that, the stuff that the ancient Romans cooked was its own unique cuisine that was NOTHING like modern Italian food - whether your experience makes you think of "Italian food" as the kind you can get in a Tuscan ristorante or the kind you can get in a New Jersey diner.
And the Polish food that everyone, including native Poles, would consider most archetypal - pierogis - also didn't (and couldn't) exist a few centuries ago because the potato was busy being part of South American cuisine.
But you know what WASN'T part of South American cuisine at that time? Carne asada, pollo con mole, carnitas, or any other dish that involved chicken, beef, or pork. Those animals were introduced to the Americas by the colonizers. Same with pretty much any crop that relies on bees for pollination - no bees till the Europeans brought them. (They also brought rats and smallpox of course, along with guns and inventive new ways of being evil oppressors, but that's another blog for another, more knowledgable, person to write).
As for curry: It's such a mishmash of influences from British, Indian, and Portuguese cooks and ingredients that no one can really say what an "authentic" curry is.
Thai food - the current version owes its existence to chile peppers that were never native to Thailand.
Ethiopian food *cue heavenly choir descending to sing of its glory* - I think it quite possibly uses every spice that has ever existed anywhere, and that wasn't possible until people from everywhere started bringing spices to Ethiopia. Though injera is 100% Ethiopian - it's where teff originated, and where the technique was perfected thousands of years ago - a lot of the ingredients in the foods served over injera originated elsewhere.
Every cuisine developed, and evolved, and continues to evolve, based on one thing: What ingredients, fuels, and cooking methods are cheap and abundant and easily available to the cook?
Rice grows well in Eastern Asia. Wheat grows well in Western Europe. Tomatoes grow well in warm places. Potatoes grow well in cool places. Spicy food generally comes from countries where those spices grow well. Wine tends to show up where grapes grow, beer where wheat and barley and hops grow, sake where rice grows. Where you get chickpeas you get hummus. Where you get soybeans you get soy sauce. So of course you found rice noodles in China, baguettes in France, and so forth.
But when people move around, and bring their foods with them, you get new combinations. Where you got Italian chefs who suddenly lived in a place where there was cheap beef, you got spaghetti and meatballs. Where you got Chinese chefs who couldn't find any gai lan but had discovered broccoli from their Italian neighbors, you got beef and broccoli. Where you got Indian chefs using Portuguese ingredients and techniques along with their own, you got vindaloo. Where you got indigenous chefs who already had chocolate and chiles being introduced to chicken, you got pollo con mole.
No cuisine is "authentic" anymore, and hasn't been since the technology for world-wide trade and conquest began to exist. Go back far enough in time, and the only truly "authentic" food idea any culture came up with on its own was "Hey, maybe instead of eating it as soon as it stops wriggling we could hold it over the fire first - but not long enough to burn it." Anything more complicated than that required someone saying, at a minimum, "Hey, that plant that grows in the next valley would taste good with this, and maybe the people there would trade some for this plant that grows here". And all kinds of awesome foods have arisen from that blending of ideas and ingredients from all over the world. There's all kinds of horrible reasons those cultures got blended, of course - colonialism, slavery, wars, exploitation of immigrant labor, etc. And nothing can make those things not have been horrible. But that's all the more reason to celebrate the good things that ordinary people salvaged from those horrors, as ordinary people used what was available (usually under brutalizing circumstances) to do the most basic human thing possible: make something nice for their families to eat.
So by all means use cotija and crema if you can get them, rather than cheddar and sour cream. The more authentic ingredients are delicious, and if you're lucky enough to live in a city where lots of Latinos live and therefore the ingredients are available at the local stores, you should take the opportunity to try those ingredients. Get real Italian olive oil if you can afford it, and for God's sake don't waste it by cooking with it - dip your bread in it instead. If you can get bok choy instead of cabbage to go into your stir-fry, you will not regret doing so. Go find the one place in town that sells Ćwikła to have with your pierogies and kielbasa, if your town has a place that sells it.
But there's no need to be mad at other people for using what's easily and cheaply available to them instead of the original ingredients. That’s how people do food, and always have done food. And that’s where the exciting new ideas happen.
