What I find most interesting about this is just what a difference there is between cooking at that time and today in terms of what is 'plain', 'spicy', 'savory', etc.
I had a conversation with my dad (currently in his late 60s) about what eating was like growing up and he said: "Well, we didn't have any spicy food." and I asked: "Like what? Mexican? Schezuwan? Thai?" and his answer was: "Any food with garlic".
Ha! Great story. And to think I was disappointed the other night because I couldn't find the exact type of hot pepper I was after and had to settle for habaneros. We are living in a golden age of food. Yet wars were fought over access to black pepper.
It's difficult to believe, but just 100 years ago a food as commonplace as spaghetti with tomato sauce was considered somewhat exotic; at the least predominately an ethnic Italian dish.
Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat. Cornell university is famous for a basting sauce, as a result of an effort to encourage more domestic consumption of chicken.
I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
On one hand, global shipping has made this a golden age of food. On the other, we're living through a food apocalypse, where local ingredients, styles, and recipes are being obliterated by processed ingredients, factory food, and fast food.
In Minneapolis, there's a chef who calls himself the "Sioux Chef", who is dedicated to preserving pre-colonial Native American foods. A big part of this is the ingredients... no flour, no cooking oil, no refined sugar, no beef or pork, etc. The "frybread" that we think of as "Indian food" today is totally a product of conquest... when the only ingredients available were flour, cooking oil, and cheap ground beef.
I hate to even imagine what's happening to the Kentucky bbq tradition I grew up on.
> I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
I'll have to try stretchy Turkish ice-cream sometime (where do you find that?) but Pad Thai and bulgogi are already everyday foods you can find on every corner of every strip mall in the part of America where I live.
By the way, since ‘Stretchy Turkish Ice Cream’ is a handful, it is called ‘Dondurma’. It is a form of gelato, but stretchier, and with a different flavour set. The city of Maraş is famous for it.
Important to note that native speakers would refer to the stretchy ice cream as "dovme dondurma", which roughly translates to "beaten ice cream".
The distinction seems to be:
> Two qualities distinguish Turkish ice cream: hard texture and resistance to melting, brought about by inclusion of the thickening agents salep, a flour made from the root of the early purple orchid, and mastic, a resin that imparts chewiness.[citation needed]
> The Kahramanmaraş region is known for maraş dondurması, a variety which contains distinctly more salep than usual. Tough and sticky, it is sometimes eaten with a knife and fork.[citation needed]
I'm a native speaker, I think it depends on the region. But yeah, "dövme dondurma" is more specific. The part I'm from did not make the distinction, however.
The requisite starch for dondurma (Turkish ice cream) is banned from export, due to the rarity of the orchids that produce it (also slow growth and very low yields). I'd be surprised if anyone regularly makes dondurma in the US.
I tried that in Turkey and it was really meh. Probably I was was way too deep in a touristy area and got the worst quality possible, but there is something about the taste of the things that make it chewy that covers the actual flavour: the pink, brown and white ones tasted all kinda the same. I'll ask for suggestions to some local friend and try again.
Yeah, and I've been seeing bulgogi marinade in mainstream Bay Area supermarkets. I use it for everything. Which reminds me that I need to call my grandparents...
See the BBC's legendary spaghetti tree hoax from April Fool's Day, 1957. A lot of viewers really were taken in by the idea that spaghetti grew on trees.
> Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat.
I remember going to my great-grandparents' house with KFC, because, to them (born circa 1900) fried chicken was food you ate on special occasions.
Which makes perfect sense: Frying anything is messy work (I know from personal experience aerosolized grease stings) and if chicken is expensive on top of that, fried chicken would be doubly uncommon for the average person, especially if they grew up poor, as my great-grandparents did.
Fried chicken is the perfect food to eat at a restaurant. Prep starts 24 hrs in advance with brining the chicken. Breading process is messy. Lots of oil required. Difficult to get the temperature and timing just right. None of these are issues for restaurants where they are making it constantly and have enough experience to dial in the cooking. Plus, since those restaurants are usually selling large volume, it's still cheap.
The best fried chicken in the Twin Cities, the prep starts on monday and it's only served on friday. Two-stage brining process, first in a very intense salt/sugar brine, and then in buttermilk. My daughter used to work the kitchen there and has the recipe, but it's like 40 ingredients and the breading is best made in buckets.
Sandcastle. It's the food stand at Lake Nokomis Park, which is run by Doug Flicker, who created the late great Piccolo (an internationally famous restaurant), and the Esker Grove restaurant at the Walker. Amazing just how good a food shack in a city park can get when you let a famous chef run it!
They are only open during the summer (April-ish to October-ish), and fried chicken is only served on fridays. And they only make 30 servings, so GET THERE if you want some, before it sells out. There will be a line.
If you want Doug Flicker fried chicken and don't want to wait, you can also get some at Bull's Horn, his new neighborhood tavern at 46th St and 34th Ave. It's a different recipe, but still very good.
Everyone else agrees that Revival has the best fried chicken. They're wrong. Revival's chicken is a bit underseasoned imho (but excellent). Victory 44 was right up there with those two, but closed recently. Sigh.
Yep. That's the stuff. We use it all the time on grilled chicken. Best made fresh (and it's quite easy) but there's a commercial brand called "Spidie's State Fair Sauce" or similar that gets very close for those who can't wait.
>> Even 50 years ago, chicken was considered an 'occasional' meat.
Hoover promised voters 'a chicken in every pot' almost 100 years ago. 50 years ago, yard bird was a very common meal for Americans of every income level.
> I wonder if Pad Thai, bulgogi, or stretchy Turkish ice-cream will be considered everyday foods in another 50 years.
I guess it would depend on the individual definition of "everyday." Personally, I eat more pad thai than I do cheeseburgers. I don't eat much Korean BBQ anymore but my wife and I do stop by a Korean place pretty often to have Galbi-tang and sometimes Dolsot Bibimbap. I haven't had In-N-Out in probably 7 or 8 weeks, though, which would make it more of a rarity in my own life than: Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai food.
Yeah, everyday food is a matter of where you live. I make a point of going out for banh mi every two weeks or so. I eat a remarkable amount of Somali food, thanks to a local restaurant I like (most Somali restaurants aren't that great, but this guy Gets It). If we had more western African food rather than just east African, I'd eat a LOT more of it... I love Nigerian and Ghana kinds of cooking.
It's interesting to see the dynamic of new ethnic food. Immigrants come and discover that their best hope of owning their own business is a restaurant where they work themselves to death to offer cheap interesting food. I'd love to see a history of ethnic food in America: Jewish, Chinese, Italian, Vietnamese, Mexican. There's a Somali restaurant near where I work, next door to a mosque, but the only thing I've been brave enough to try there is the Gyros which is quite generic. It's good food at a great value if you don't mind waiting forever while they prepare it.
Minneapolis is a sanctuary city and has a huge Somali population, so there are a lot of Somali restaurants. But Somalis haven't really "cracked the code" on how to run an American-style restaurant in terms of service, for the most part. And really, I don't think Somali food is a "great cuisine" food the way Ethiopian is (man, Ethiopians and Somalis are nothing alike!), or Vietnamese, or Thai, or Mexican, or Indian. It's more like, say, Polish food... something workmanlike that can be made excellent with effort, but lacks the ease of the great cuisines.
On the positive side, a couple of Somali places and a Kenyan place in town have cracked the code, and are offering slick, friendly Chipotle-style counter service experiences with really delicious food.
I'm not a native English speaker, so correct me if I'm wrong, but I think English needs a new word related to pepper spiciness, for me sometimes is difficult to translate it. In Spanish we have "picoso" to describe pepper's hot feeling.
Since spicy in English could describe a long variety of spices, flavors and sensations. Maybe 50 years ago it wasn't necessary since they were foreign flavors, but now that your food and taste has evolved and globalized it could be necessary.
Yes, very much so. Eating a curry and saying it's "hot" can equally mean it's very spicy ( phall etc ) or it is physically too hot to eat yet. We tend to say "it's hot-hot" for physically too hot or something like "it'll blow your face off" or "this curry is really hot".
It's a minefield of ambiguity which a new word could easily solve. It could well be, as you say, it's only recently that hot spices have become mainstream.
I grew up in the 1960s & 70s in northern England and as a kid my parents may put some very old pre-ground pepper on the table occasionally. Garlic didn't exist to us. I burst out and enjoy hot, bitter, gnarly flavours.
For "spiced" we also have the word "seasoned." It has a handful of meanings, but if you're using it to describe a flavor it should be clear that's the meaning you're using.
I've also heard foods described as having "bite" to indicate that they have a strong, spicy flavor, but not necessarily a "hot" one.
As a native English speaker, we have the same problem. Piquant is used to describe the heat although most people aren't familiar with it. "Capsaicin feeling" is often referred to as well.
Spicy for them was shake and baked bbq chicken. Otherwise, the main flavorings in use were salt, butter, yellow onion and microscopic quantities of pepper.
Health cookbooks are the worst for this. They'll call for 2 lbs of beans, 2 onions, a cubic foot of leafy greens, half a dozen carrots, and 1/8 of a tsp of salt. They seem to be ashamed of flavor like it's a naughty sin that they have to hide from the decent folk.
People think salt is bad for you... They don't understand the role of salt in cooking. Let them try eating unsalted bread. It will be an educational experience.
Yes, they're not afraid of "flavor" in general (at least the ones I've encountered call for plenty of chiles, herbs, etc.) but the perceived harms of salt in particular.
Boston/New England folk cuisine was (and is) still very bland. Pot roast, baked beans, mashed potatoes, brown bread, apples, etc. Very similar to the "English cooking" that used to be derided all over.
Even today, I have a friend from Boston who treats ketchup as a spicy condiment, almost like midwestern friends treat Tabasco.
Other parts of the US had a spicier food culture -- the Cajuns, the Southwest, African-Americans, etc. But the wealthy parts of America liked very bland, well-processed food.
I'm originally from the Southwest but I went to college in the Northeast. One of my roommates was from Maine and he introduced me to the concept of a "boiled dinner" which he raved about and I was quite skeptical of.
We have a strong tradition of boiling meat and vegetables in Northern Italy. You get a delicious stock where you can cook pasta into (either standard, or filled, such as tortellini) and also very delicate, yet tasty, boiled beef and chicken. These often come with additiomal mashed potatoes and sauces based on parsley, bell peppers or mustard, sometimes mayonnaise.
In Cremona they make something called "mostarda", which is candied fruit spiced with a shitload of mustard. It's absolutely weird and burns like hell, but boy how delicious it is.
That is rather interesting to hear. I will need to have the same conversation with my elders sometime. Coming from the south garlic is in the majority of the dishes I first learned to cook.
This fresh onion juice concept is thought provoking as well. Recently tried making latke and upon shredding my onions was left with onion juice but it did not occur to me that this liquid could be put to use.
An Armenian friend of mine marinades chicken in onion juice (obtained by crushing halved onions with his bare hands), salt, and black pepper, before grilling. Delicious
My dad hates spicy foods (any peppers, garlic, etc). Ok, people can like what they like. But then I noticed he eats spicy radishes like they're nothing...
Interesting that he'd say garlic because my dad (in his 70s now) lives in his hometown in Croatia. Where most people grow crops, it's a rural community.
And near the center most crops are just for personal consumption. Yet no one grows garlic. I was shocked by this.
He said he'd be the first to grow garlic in the whole village. He has of course lived many years in Sweden where I was born and raised before he moved back for his twilight years.
In Sweden garlic has been very common for my entire life, since at least 1985.
I can only speculate but it's likely that I had access to garlic due to global imports.
And it's also likely his fellow villagers, many in their 50s and older, aren't used to garlic because they didn't grow up with it.
Well, savory is one of the five basic tastes, so I don't think that would change a lot - it's just fat. However spicy can be any type of spice, so it would likely differ even between individual families within the same block today.
Wikipedia notwithstanding, they're not really synonyms. Savory is a broader term that is essentially intended to contrast with sweet. If I make an unsweetened herb bread with sage and thyme or whatever, it would be correct to call that a savory bread even though it's definitely not umami (i.e. meaty/brothy).
Fair enough. It's almost certainly more correct to list umami as one of the basic tastes, rather than savory. (I was more commenting on Wikipedia suggesting they're the same thing when they're really not.)
> It's almost certainly more correct to list umami as one of the basic tastes, rather than savory.
I really don't think so: 'savory' is an actual English word while 'umami' is a Japanese one. Writing 'umami' like writing 'arugula' instead of 'rocket' or 'cilantro' instead of 'coriander.'
And 'umami' isn't really any more accurate than 'savory': it's a 100-year-old neologism from the Japanese word for 'delicious.' Given a choice between two words which aren't necessarily perfect fits for the concept, why not stick with the native one?
Exactly. Essentially English co-opted umami as a stand-in for glutamate-y which, we can probably agree is an aesthetic improvement. It's at least arguably a subset of savory but as I commented earlier there are clearly meanings of savory in cooking/baking that have no relationship to umami as the term is used in English.
I had a conversation with my dad (currently in his late 60s) about what eating was like growing up and he said: "Well, we didn't have any spicy food." and I asked: "Like what? Mexican? Schezuwan? Thai?" and his answer was: "Any food with garlic".