I think that, plus “foreigners are distasteful, so their food must be too.”
Not quite on the same topic, but: Before my grandmother died, my mom surveyed all of the extended family and asked us what our favorite foods were that Gramma made, got the recipes from her, and put them all together in a cookbook with a copy for each of us. One of the foods that made it in was molasses cookies (technically they have a little bit of ginger in them, but realistically, they’re molasses). Which Gramma had herself only learned to make two years before that, having learned the recipe from the newlywed bride of one of my cousins.
In other words, it doesn’t take long at all for a recipe to become “traditional” and “just like Gramma made”.
(as an aside, she presumably had much the same traditional-food background as the other grandmothers mentioned in this thread, but she was always open to trying new things and adding to her repertoire of recipes, no matter the source)
No, no, no, no, no, NO!
Filbert, you can’t just drop a grenade like ‘pineapple rental industry’ and walk away.
Tell all.
I have my card ready. Are the operators waiting for my call?
Before the advent of modern shipping, pineapples used to be really expensive (like the equivalent of $8000 for a pineapple expensive) and having one as a centerpiece or as a possession demonstrated wealth. If you were too poor to outright buy a pineapple, businesses would rent you one for the night so you could show it off.
Hell I grew up in a family of Hungarian descent. Imagine my suprise when I found out what we called goulash had about jack to do with the traditional dish (hint it was actually from a 1950’s is cookbook) Don’t even get me started on the Polish side of the family.
Hell I grew up with one side of my family 2nd generation off the boat Hungarian. Imagine my surprise when what I was told was goulash wasn’t exactly what it was supposed to be (for a hint it actually came from a 1950"s recipe)
Don’t even get me started on the Polish side of the family. Food liars all around
Well, the fruitcake recipe my family makes comes from a newspaper article, from a Buffalo, NY paper in 1945 or so.
The candy recipe my family makes(maternal grandmother’s family) is at least as old as Grandma(was). She told me her family always made it, didn’t remember a time when it didn’t get worked up at Christmas. Grandma was born in 1904(died 2013), so that’s a pretty old candy recipe.
A friend who used to work for Kraft led a team about 15 years ago that collected thousands of “home-cooking” recipes from Americans and entered them into some kind of database. I’ve forgotten what they hoped or planned to do with this data set, but one of the things they discovered was that an enormous proportion of the recipes could easily be traced back to some 20th century packaged food label.
[quote=“leahcim, post:27, topic:822249”]
[/QUOTE]Tops, Pops!
For some countries, ordering food by post in 1910 would probably give you more options than ordering food by post today. The Royal Mail in London used to deliver as many as twelve times times per day, which would have made it easy to send and receive highly perishable goods.
My favourite in that series was ‘Back in Time for Tea’ which followed a working class northern family from the turn of the 20th century up to the 90s. Up to about 1940, it basically involved an awful lot of bread and tea. I remember the teenage daughters complaining about all the bread.
Food changed dramatically in the 60s, when ready meals, spaghetti and curry made an appearance. Up til then, they seemed to have an awful lot of meat/vegetable pies.
My suspicion is that a lot of the recipes that are written down are probably ones that they got from someone else outside the family, and that the “authentic” ones are the ones that women (usually) learned at their mother or grandmother’s side in the kitchen, and that have ingredient proportions, but not fixed measurements.
Something like a biscuit recipe would be a good candidate.
I don’t think the “Ten Mile Diet” is really accurate; people could get a lot of stuff from the country store that wasn’t produced within ten miles- flour, sugar, long shelf-life produce like potatoes and apples, etc… But if you wanted tomatoes, those were within that 10 mile radius. Same with peaches or squash, or whatever.
Plus, you have the confounding situation where an “authentic” recipe might have been jazzed up with recently available ingredients at some time in the past. For example, any Cajun/Creole recipe that has Tabasco in it might have experienced this, as Tabasco sauce wasn’t available until the late 1860s.
I’m no expert on Italian cuisine, but I’ve heard a number of stories of Italian-Americans who doted on their Mom’s “traditional and authentic” home-cooked food, but then went on a pilgrimage to the area of Italy their family came from, only to discover that the food there bore little resemblance to Mom’s. I’m sure the same thing happens with lots of people of different ethnicity.
I’ve always felt that claims of tradition and authenticity in cooking were of very little importance. If the food is good, who cares?
There is a fascinating book called Ten Restaurants that Changed America which has menus from famous 19th century restaurants. Things were very different back then, including meats you can’t get today.
A big difference is that truly traditional recipes (before Fanny Farmer) did not use precise measurements. Cooks were expected to know from maternal training how much spice or flour to use. We have some old Mennonite cookbooks, and recipes from my wife’s grandmother, which are hard to use today.
Oh, I’m sure it does. With Polish food, at least the way my mom made it and the way I’ve experienced it here in Chicago in restaurants, it really was pretty darn close to what I had every time I visited the Old Country. The one thing I do see when comparing ethnic cuisines as served in the US vs their country of origin is that often they are much heavier on the meat component, or maybe just in general being more filling. I do find some brands of pierogi to be more stuffed with fillings than I’m used to, and there’s a Polish filled donut called pączki that can be just ridiculous here with how much jelly they stuff in the thing. A teaspoon or two is traditional. Heck, there’s even plain ones without any filling. Here, there are some versions that are majority filling with no attention paid to the pastry itself, which is what a good paczki (or pączek in the Polish singular) is all about.
In the end, yes, I absolutely agree with this. That said, I do like to get to know foods as how they are prepared and experienced in their native cultures. To me, that is interesting, and informs me as to what culinarily is important and prized in those cultures. It gives me a little different perspective on foods and my appreciation of them. I don’t want everything tailored exactly to my tastes.
This comes back to the impact of more and more efficient farming. In the modern US, food is vastly cheaper and more abundant than it was in 19th century Poland and we like meat and jelly so the proportion of these will rise over time. Indeed, in the case of your paczki, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that providing a jelly filling is cheaper than providing a (quality) pastry.
In modern Poland the difference in farming efficiency probably isn’t quite so stark, but also the traditional links are much more direct (by which I mean not just that there are more people to remember just how it was done, but also that the nature of the immigrant experience is to force variation through necessity and to dilute memories of how it used to be).
For real traditional food, how it tasted was probably a pretty long way down the priority list, except for the rich.
I think a large part of the dietary change in the UK, as well as the changing cost, is simply from improved hygiene. My great-grandparents believed food should all be cooked, the idea of munching on raw vegetables was madness. But of course it made sense, back before available water was chlorinated and clean, before germ theory, a boiled slop probably would have been low risk for disease. Much safer than eating vegetables either unwashed or washed in water contaminated with who knows what. Sure, it might destroy half the vitamin content, but even possible future scurvy is better than cholera right now.
There’s also the expectation of convenience, who’s going to mess about peeling skirret roots when potato is so much simpler to prepare? Maybe the rich can pay someone to do it, but those working for a living are going to take the more convenient option when it’s available, even if the other does taste better. Also how we cook has changed, not just microwaves and things but stuff like having an oven that can be heated up in minutes, that’s going to make huge changes to practicality and probably recipes. No need to do the week’s baking in one day like those in pre-electric days did.
Pizza didn’t exist in the vast majority of the U.S. until the 1950’s or 1960’s or even later. It wasn’t common at all around my Louisiana home town even in the 1980’s. The closest pizza place was Pizza Hut 20 miles away and we only went there for special occasions.