Highlights from Why We Eat What We Eat by Raymond Sokolov Last read on March 29, 2023
Highlights from this book
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My work on this book began in 1944 when my fahter was sent to El Paso, Texas, to stamp out VD among servicemen and their 'contacts' with a new wonder drug called penicillin... As a toddler, I am sure I did not anticipate the most amazing and long-lasting result of the Jewish family Sokolov's sojourn in El Paso. Our cuisine changed.
My mother, the assimilated American-born daughter of immigrants, began to cook Tex-Mex. To her repertory of East European and Midwestern dishes she added a very hot chili con carne. My father, who had spent part of his early youth on a Yiddish-speaking Zionist commune near Gunnison, Utah, acquired a taste for jalapeno peppers. Back home in Michigan after the war we kept on eating chili, and there was always a bottle of hot peppers in the refrigerator. As I grew up I learned to like the chili and eventually began to eat those peppers too.
When we took these foods into our diet, it was as if we had incorporated some Spanish into our speech. I make this comparison to casual bilingualism because it is such a familiar phenomenon, something that happens to those on both sides of the United States-Mexican border. These individual speech patterns are what linguists call idiolects. Everybody speaks an idiolect -- his own personal language that functions within the larger speech community. A full blown dialect is a set of idiolects so similar they form a recognizable minilanguage: the Spanglish of United States Chicanos, the nasal twang of the Great Lakes, Valley Girl talk in California.
The same thing happesn in the kitchen. Every family has it's own set of recipes and eating habits, its idiocuisine formed by foods being passed down from the previous generation and through contacts with new foods, flavors, and tastes. And if the similar experiences of many neighboring families evolve into a new 'dialect' of eating and cooking... then the world has a new regional cuisine. In the United States this happened over and over again as European colonists and their descendants moved westward and met indigeneous peoples, learned to eat indigeneous plants and animals, and mixed their Old World heritage with what they found in the New World.
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Make no mistake about it: The great preponderance of the evidence argues against permanence in anybody's food heritage. We have all grown up believing in the principle of culinary authenticity and tradition as an axiom of human civilization, but the norm around the world has been change, innovation. Mexican cuisine bears only a faint resemblence to the verminous, milkless, almost meatless food of the Aztecs. China has absorbed foreign foods for most of it's long recorded history, starting eons ago. To the chefs who pioneered the nouvelle cuisine in France, the ancienne cuisine they were rebelling against looked timeless, primordial, old as the hills. But the cookbook record proves that the haute cuisine codified early in this century by Escoffier barely goes back to Napoleon's time. Before that, French food is not recognizable as French to modern eyes. Europe's menu before 1700 was completely different from its menu after 1800, when national cuisines arose along with modern nations and national cuisines.
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The exchange of foodstuffs began as a deliberate policy of the Spanish crown. Old World crops and livestock were introduced to Mexico and Peru to support a civilized (that is, Spanish) way of life for the colonists, and New World exotica were sent to Spain as novelties and for agricultural exploitation. But once tomatoes had taken root in Italy, once cattle provided beef and gave milk in Mexico, then local cooks put these wonderful new foods to new uses. And the world changed.
In order to understand how overwhelming all this was, it is crucial to have a clear picture of the immensely different gastronomic status quo before 1492. From one end of Europe to the other people ate much the same food. This medieval menu bore almost no resemblance to the national cuisines that evolved in the various nation states of the continent in the eighteenth century. The French, Italian, and Spanish food 'traditions' we now think of as primeval all sprang up relatively recently and would be unrecognizable without the American foods sent across the water, mostly in Spanish boats.
Today the world feeds itself on a post-Columbian cuisine. Italians eat post-columbian pizza; Irish have post-Columbian shepherd's pie; the French wax chauvinistic about post-Columbian haricots verts. Meanwhile, West Africa survives in no small part on American manioc naturalized long ago . Sichuan food would not be Sichuanese without the hot chilies that arrived before 1700 from South America.
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During this time, I walked among the trees, which are the most beautiful I have ever seen. I saw as much greenery, in such density, as I would have seen in Andalusia in May. And all of the trees are as different from ours as day is from night, and so are the fruits, the herbage, the rocks, and everything.
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On his last day before sailing home, Columbus "discovers" the chili pepper, referring to it as aji, the indigeneous name still used in South America. "There is also much aji, which is their pepper and is worth more than our pepper; no one eats without it because it is very healthy. Fifty caravels can be loaded each year with it on this Isla Espanola.
Greedy Columbus, not yet having found the lucrative black pepper he was supposed to bring back from the Indies, hopes to compensate with chilies, so he calls them peppers and starts a worldwide nomenclatural confusion that complicated culinary communication in dozens of languages even today. Of course, chilies did not sweep Europe (except in Hungary); instead, they conquered Asia and Africa and countined to flourish in the warm parts of the Americas.
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These glowing reports were meant to drum up support for new expeditions. One of them, hyping sweet potatoes as it were, inadvertently describes the real beginning of transatlantic culinary cross-fertilization: "When eaten raw as in salads, they taste like parsnips; when roasted, like chestnuts; when cooked with pork you would think you were eating squash. You will never eat anything more delishes than asses (sweet potatoes) soaked in the milk of almonds." There it is: New World meets Old in this typically medieval Spanish use of almold milk. The voyages must have brought indispensable almonds with them. Soon they would return home and usher in the modern era in the Spanish kitchen. New World spices would supplant the antique, Oriental mixture called salsa fina. Similarly, the tomato would join the onion in that most typical of SPanish culinary preparations, the sofrito, a prefried flavoring combination added to countless dishes in Spain... If only Columbus could see what he started.
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Where the native population was large, ate a varied diet, and shared its traditions successfully with the Iberian newcomers (Mexico), a truly mixed, integrated cuisine came to be. An informed observer can detect major components of the indigeneous and the immigrant cuisines in the modern hybrid. Indeed, the essence of Mexican cuisine, as of Mexican culture, is the palpable mixture, the pervasive equipoise of Spanish and Indian traditions.
On the other hand, where the native population was small and perished almost completely from persecution and imported disease (Puerto Rico), the exotic foodstuffs brought in by the commerce of the Spanish empire produced an original cuisine in a tropical laboratory, with a Spanish gastronomic syntax inspiring new dishes made with ingredients never found all together in one place before.
Where, however, a sparse community of Spaniards - many of them serving only a hitch and not putting down roots - ruled a large and self-sustaining native population (the Philippines), the native cuisine survived largely intact, with Spanish names applied to its best known dishes and local food ideas imposed on ingredients brought in by the galleons from Mexico.
Where natives and conquerors lived side by side (Peru), indigeneous and imported foods both flourished and influenced each other without fundamentally altering the nature of either inherited culture.
In societies heavily repopulated with African slaves brought in to run plantations (the Carribean coast of Colombia, northeast Brazil), tribal West African dishes were either transplanted almost completely or acquired an Iberian flavor.
In other words, history, politics and demography determines the culinary outcome of colonialism.