Fiddleheads are popular in Eastern Canada. They are okay, certainly better than dulse. Hadn’t heard of them being used in the West.
Harissa is absolutely associated with Africa. Makes a nice fry sauce mixed with mayonnaise. Not sure it’s French as such, but no doubt they have a sizeable African or Algerian population.
I would also take the CIA cookbook with a little bit of grain of salt when it comes to ethnic cooking. I haven’t read through them, and maybe they are better, but one of my favorite Youtube cooking channels did an in-depth, informative appraisal that took into context what audience the CIA cookbooks are written for, but still showed how vastly different a traditional dish cooked to local style is versus the CIA version:
In the second recipe, it looks like he kept the flame too hot to get the undesirable result he was shooting for. He said the cooking times were too long, so why didn’t he just turn down the heat?
I don’t think it matters. He adjusted the other way and that works too. The result of the recipe looks spot on to the cookbook, but it also doesn’t look like anything resembling mapo tofu.
It is called glutinous (Latin: glūtinōsus )[1] in the sense of being glue-like or sticky, and not in the sense of containing gluten (which it does not).
In fairness, lots of dishes can turn out differently. There must be ten thousand types of curry. The actual recipes in the book are pretty good, and I would say generally reflect a mainstream version of the original recipe. If I compare the recipes in the book to my Szechuan, Punjabi or Mexican cookbooks written by noteworthy chefs - they are worse but rely on most of the same ingredients. The biggest audience effect is recipes cooked for 5 or 500 people tend to differ in simplicity.
I thought the review was very fair. Chris and Steph are very much dedicated to putting things into context and not being didactic about “there’s only one way to do it” or anything like that – quite the opposite. He very much praises the CIA in general in the video, but is a bit bemused by their interpretation here. He does say that there are regional variations, of course – they’re both very well aware of that. And they are happy to be wrong and correct it. But that CIA mapo tofu really is a head scratcher. They both write a lot about their videos on Reddit, and you can see the style and care they put into explaining recipes here. They would totally fit in on a board like this one.
Sure. But most every cookbook contains clunkers, the occasional recipe that is subjectively subpar. (Exceptions to this, in my view, include Julia Child, Joy of Cooking, Bobby Flay and Cooks Illustrated - I’d be interested in others views on this). I do not disclaim what they say about this one dish, not a personal favourite. But it does not seem to apply to most of them in the specific book I mentioned.