10 things for food historians to think about. 3 and 4
3. Organize Cuisines into Families and sub-Families
Linguists group languages into families and subfamilies. Is it possible to do the same with cuisines? What would those families and subfamilies be? For a linguist, language families are related in just the same way that the human families are: they have a common ancestry. It seems entirely plausible that groups of cuisines have developed from a common ancestry.
Take a simple example, the cuisines of the Pacific Islands. These cuisines depend on one cooking method (the underground oven), half a dozen ingredients (taro, breadfruit, yam, coconut, fish), have little in the way of storage or fermentation techniques, and have a meal that consists of cooked pounded starchy stuff with a relish of fish or coconut. They are found from New Guinea to Easter Island, from the South Pacific to the Hawaiian Islands in the North Pacific.
In recent years, linguists and geneticists have established that the peoples who settled this vast stretch of the earth’s surface set out from (probably) New Guinea as early as 1000 BC and that settlement was essentially complete by 500 AD.[i] Since almost none of the islands they settled has anything edible except fish, the only reasonable assumption to make is that the cuisines have a common origin in New Guinea and owe their similarities not to similar resources given by the environment but to a common heritage spread by human migration.
It seems highly probable that one could establish other such family groupings: the maize cuisines that started in Mesoamerica; or the rice-fish-coconut-tamarind cuisines that depends heavily on processing coconut and sugar palms, drying or fermenting fish, using tamarind as the souring agents and so on that ring the Indian Ocean, or the cuisines of modern western Europe. Is it possible that we can see traces of an Indo-European Cuisine by the otherwise curious distribution of milk drinkers in India, parts of the Middle East, and Europe and its colonies?
4. Work out What it Means to be Bi-Cuisinal
Most people in the world are bilingual, though famously not English speakers. The incentives for being so, including growing up or marrying into mixed communities, seeking an edge in employment, and migration, are very strong.
Is it possible to be bicuisinal? How many people in the world are bicuisinal? Do they have the same incentives? How does one become bicuisinal?
Speaking from personal experience, I know that after living, say, for twelve years in Mexico and learning a good bit about the cuisine, I am not as fluent in Mexican Cuisine as in English Cuisine. When I am tired, I do not reach for a comal and a couple of dried chiles to make a salsa roja. When I am planning meals for visitors, I still don’t have a good enough grasp of exactly what would be served to whom and when to feel comfortable preparing a Mexican meal for Mexicans. Instead I serve some version of English.
On the other hand, I would say that many Mexicans are bicuisinal. For centuries the maize cuisine has co-existed side by side with the wheat cuisine and for all the talk of mestizaje, they remain largely distinct. True, “salsa gravy” can give Mexicans a good bit of trouble. I have heard women relate how they create it by simmering beef bones and then thickening with mashed potato. But by and large they are more bicuisinal than women of my generation in England are.
Clearly it is much easier to learn a cuisine that is simply a different dialect than a cuisine that is in a different family altogether. As someone who grew up with English as my first cuisine, it was easy to learn American (and it would have been easy to learn Canadian or Australian or New Zealand). It was not particularly difficult to learn French since English and French Cuisine have common roots and have been interacting for centuries. It is slightly more difficult to learn Spanish or Italian which are a little further away from English. And it is enormously much more difficult to learn Mexican,
[i] Geoffrey Irwin, “Human Colonization and Change in the Remote Pacific,” Current Anthropology 31 (1990), 90-94; Peter Bellwood, “The Austronesian Dispersal and the Origin of Languages,” Scientific American (July, 1991), 88-93; Patrick Vinton Kirch, On the Road of the Winds: An Archaeological History of the Pacific Islands before European Contact (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2000). For cuisine, see Nancy Pollock, These Roots Remain (Laie, Hawaii: Institute for Polynesian Studies, 1992).
I’m very interested in the comparisons you’re making. I’m applying them personally to my own family and to my thoughts about North African and Mediterranean cuisines.
I’ll be really interested to hear your reflections when you’ve mulled the ideas over.
I never thought of dialect of cuisines until I read ” Clearly it is much easier to learn a cuisine that is simply a different dialect than a cuisine that is in a different family altogether”. As an Indian I am more inclined to cook Mexican and Italian. The combining and layering of flavors in these cuisines is probably the dialect I felt comfortable with.
Ammini, I’m always interested in which cuisines people pick up when they move. And why. In your case it seems that it’s the final taste that matters. But doesn’t Mexican technique seem different? Perhaps not because it’s also a grinding rather than a chopping cuisine.
But I’d put your home cuisine in a quite different family from Italian and Italian in a quite different family from Mexican. More on families soon.
I guess when I think about food groupings I frame the term as “Shared Aesthetic”, so irrespective of any shared history another relationship that Mexican and Indian (in general, rather then regional cuisines) is that they have a shared aesthetic. In both cases I have heard people talking about making dishes in these cuisines and saying something like “If you can taste the individual elements, then it isn’t ready”. In this case they both cuisines the view that a synergy of flavour elements is the prime concern. This is a different to Italian cuisine (and Western European cuisines) in general (although there are lots of contra examples).
I think that is might be a parallel to families groupings. If the cuisines of Spain and Mexico are compared then there are a lot of similar elements, but much of the food in Spain is much more similar to the rest of Western Europe in emphasis on the “Aesthetic of individual flavours”. To use the linguistic examples, its like the same words of phrases in Spanish mean different things.
I’ve had trouble with these Aesthetic groupings as I would like them to reflect relationships other then shared or common descent. If two countries on different sides of the planet with no contact use the same technology (grinding stone, cast iron range oven, whatever) then this will result in parallels in cuisine development. But more often similarities in cuisine reflect shared development or a common origin.
I think that combining the two systems of classification Aesthetic and Family groupings might be very productive.
Are all emulsion sauces part of the same Family or do they reflect a shared Aesthetic?
Mexican and Indian cuisines both reflect an aesthetic of synergy of flavour, is this because they are from the same family as it reflects common descent?
Many East Asian cuisines have an Aestethic of emphasis in food texture. Ditto al dente pasta preference in Italy. Any family relationship here?
Adam, I have so much to say in reply to this but just to get us started. I tend to shy away from aesthetics in cuisine (taste in the subjective sense, not in the objective sense of salt, sweet sour etc) because I do not think this is a primary reason for people’s choices. I think aesthetics or taste follows, is learned, is the result of other ideological preferences. So I want to stick with families.
Maybe I shouldn’t use a word that is loaded with meaning as “Aesthetic”, but I think that subjectivity is going to be an important part of what defines a particular cuisine and relates it to others?
An objective sense of salt, sweet, sour doesn’t really give as much information about a why an individual or culture eats in a particular way. But being able to say that they prefer sweet/sour flavours to sweet/salt means that you can evaluate sensory, emotional and intellectual judgements.
The issue I would have with families is that it may not reflect all relationships of commonality as two cusines could be similar because of a shared history or they could be similar because of the independent development of similar technology (querns, ovens, cooking pots), sensoral choices (sweet-sour v salt-sour, flavour v texture), taboo choices…etc.
However, maybe this is getting ahead of the game as the familial groupings haven’t even been established yet, or indeed how to do this.
For example with your example when you say:
“It was not particularly difficult to learn French since English and French Cuisine have common roots and have been interacting for centuries. It is slightly more difficult to learn Spanish or Italian which are a little further away from English. ”
In 2009 Melbourne I think that may people I know would say that it is much easier for them to learn Italian/Spanish cuisines, rather then French at the present time.
Interesting discussion and I need to think more about this.
Just going down the Nile River (Egypt, then the White Nile, after Khartoum), cuisine is grain-, primarily wheat-based. Then, with drier climes, sorghum become key.
Moving down into the Tropics, grains are replaced by root crops, with maize being a recent introduction together with banana cultivars (i.e., both being introduced within the last several hundred years).
That divide between grains and root crops is basic.
Fascinating discussion.
Regarding how one becomes bi-cuisinal, I’m twirling around your comment that even though you live in Mexico, your comfort cuisine is English. What inhibits you from total immersion in your adopted country’s cuisine? Social status? Kitchen skills? Fear?
I suppose I’m tri-cuisinal, American by birth, Sephardic MiddleEastern by marriage and Italian by choice. The Sephardic part is the most problematic because I’m a ‘shkisa’ (non-Jewish woman), but some how I’ve become the keeper of the traditional recipes. My mother-in-law gave me some marvelous hand written and mimeographed recipes and after she was gone, I asked some other Sephardic women to clarify some of the details, and they refused to share with the shiksa. Putting that in context with why someone might or might not be bi-cuisinal, or welcomed into a tribe of families who are mono-cuisinal is something to ponder into the wee hours.
So glad you are back blogging Rachel! Bentornati!
Judith
I feel another post coming on. Fast. Wait and see.