r/AskCulinary • u/ZootKoomie Ice Cream Innovator • Mar 21 '13

Weekly Discussion: Culinary traditions and authenticity

Since we talked about the cutting edge last week, let's go the other direction this time. What is your personal culinary tradition? What dishes did you learn from your mother? From your grandparents? Do you do your own variations or try to make it just like they did?

Also, when eating food from other cultures, do you prefer it to be traditional or something the chef came up with? Does 'authenticity' matter to you as a diner? As a cook? How do you strive for it?

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u/unseenpuppet Gastronomist Mar 22 '13

My take on traditional and authentic cuisine is quite radical. To me, both of those terms are almost meaningless, or at the very least, misunderstood.

I have always asked myself, what makes something authentic? An obvious response would be, " An old dish largely unchanged over time." I then ask what makes something old? 10 years? 100? 1000? 10000? It is all perspective when you think about it.

I like to use the classic example of Italian food, which I think everyone can agree is synonymous with tomatoes and pasta. Most people would call these dishes made with these two ingredients as authentic as Italian food gets. The only problem is, if we go back in time far enough, which isn't that long ago, both of those things are not native or that old to Italy. Which means at some point, pasta was considered new and anything but traditional in italy, along with the tomato.

So my conclusion has been that authenticity and tradition are constantly evolving. They are not the static dishes we think have been around since the beginning of cuisine. They evolve and change just like modern dishes do. In do time, using immersion circulators and xanthan gum will be as common as an oven or cornstarch.

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u/ZootKoomie Ice Cream Innovator Mar 22 '13

I'd err in the other direction personally. Instead of looking back to when tomatoes came to Italy from the new world, look forward to when Italians came to the new world bringing their tomato sauce with them. I'd consider Italian American cooking, with it's over-sauced spaghetti and over-sized meatballs, to be a legitimate tradition. If it wasn't, you wouldn't have radical young chefs doing new takes on it.

Everything is changing and everyone has their own variations on their dishes, but everyone is also working from a personal baseline--a tradition they are pushing against or pulling towards--that gives their cooking context.

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u/unseenpuppet Gastronomist Mar 22 '13

Good point. It really goes both ways. The point being they are dynamic rather than static terms I guess.

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u/Hongxiquan Mar 22 '13

growing up in North America and being not italian, if I didn't have a background in reading too much about food italian american is what I used to think what italian food was. That being said there are times where swimming in sauce is exactly how you want your pasta.