"Tea" > wrote in message
.. .
>
> "Frogleg" > wrote in message
> ...
> > On Thu, 11 Dec 2003 08:30:15 -0600, "Rona Yuthasastrakosol"
> > > wrote:
> >
> >
> > As Sturgeon's Law has it, "90% of science fiction is crap. Of course,
> > 90% of everything is crap."
> On this we can agree. I was not taking a swipe at American food, or the
US.
> What I was saying is that most food is crap.
I'm flabbergasted. Don't know what do say. This evening I had a yummy Big
Mac. Wasn't horrid or crap. The fries were soggy though...
[...]
> As for salt- yes, different salts can taste different because of mineral
> content. They can even taste differently because of how they are
harvested
> and how they are processed (my Welsh sea salt tastes differently from my
> French sea salt, which is different from my American table salt- just as
my
> Mexican and Italian oregano are different from each other). However- and
> this is important- great cooking has always been as much defined by the
> artfulness of the cook in bringing out the best in the ingredients at had,
> as it is by the quality of the ingredients. A Chinese cook on a tramp
> steamer in the 1920s would have had a different set of ingredients
available
> to him than his ancestor on a merchant ship during the 1820s, but both
would
> have made interesting adaptions to their favorite dishes. I'm not so sure
> that the roti found in Jamaica today is any less authentic in its own way
> than roti found in Mumbai. It's authentic in its own way. The same with
> curried goat, which differs from island to island and house to house in
the
> Caribbean. There is no such thing as a quintessential recipe for curried
> goat- unless your mother made it. And who your mother was, and how good
her
> skills were, and whether she had to adapt the recipe to life in New York
(as
> my Haitian neighbors did when I was growing up) where some ingredients
might
> be unobtainable, will determine your understanding of how curried goat
> should taste. Any arguments otherwise are nothing more than nostalgia and
> wishful thinking, not unless anyone actually believes there is only one
> curried goat recipe in the whole wide world. For me, authentic curried
goat
> tastes like the way my neighbor's mother made it. Jerk chicken is now
> supposed to taste the way it did a week ago when I was in Jamaica- or the
> way my 'Bajan neighbor made it when I was a teenager, which was very
> different. It's rather like finding the 'real' recipe for turducken or
> cheesecake- or that holy grail of American foods, the only good and proper
> recipe for barbequed spare ribs. If you don't believe me on the last one,
> just google 'barbequed ribs' and see what you get. People from St. Louis
> have burst blood vessels while trying to explain to lunkheads from Texas
and
> North Carolina that there is only one true way to barbeque ribs. They are
> wrong of course, since everyone knows that only North Carolinians have the
> right recipe- which is different in every household, and is passed down as
> sacred writ from father to son. All other recipes are just plain wrong,
> stupid and should never be printed as fact, so unless you know a North
> Carolinian, you can throw out all your barbeque recipes right now. Except
> for my father's recipe, of course. Even though he is from South Carolina,
> he has the one true recipe- and if I can get him drunk so that he will
give
> it to me, I may share it with the rest of the world. Of course, if I do
> that, you will all 'ruin' it by using the wrong hot sauce as the base
(which
> can only be bought in one small general store in a tiny town in South
> Carolina, but the town's name is a secret), even though it will taste
> perfectly fine to you. It shouldn't though. After, it won't be
authentic,
> will it? 
First you say Jamaican rotis are "authentic in its own way," then later you
talk about "real" recipes and you say things like "they are wrong." I can't
disagree more strongly. Your definition of "authentic" reeks way too much
of Plato, as if, as I wrote elsewhere, there is some Form for "Real BBQ
Ribs." Nonsense.
My definition of authentic is simply this: It is like what you find if you
went to the place of origin. Origin, not in the sense of back to the times
of Adam and Eve, but origin in the sense of Jamaican roti in Jamaica, Indian
rotis in India.
The Mexican chocolate (the tablets for the beverage) one finds in stores
here in the US are not from Oaxaca. Oaxacan chocolate is different and
distinct. Unless someone brings you back tablets from Oaxaca or unless you
go there, you can't experience it in the US -- unless you have a recipe and
ways to grind it properly. Well, I recently read an article by some silly
anthropologist (You're an anthropologist, right? I dunno, I have problems
with them, again and again.), where he stressed the fact that, well, Oaxacan
chocolate these days uses almonds from California and cinnamon from Africa,
or whereever. "So it's not authentic!" he proclaimed with apparent relish.
That's a bizarre and dogmatic use of the term "authentic," and from my
experience, only anthropologists seem to use the word that way. Quite
simply, Oaxacan chocolate is different from other chocolates in Mexico. I'm
sure way back when, when they used home-grown almonds and cinnamon, things
may have been better. But that doesn't mean that we can't talk about
authentic Oaxacan chocolate--it is authentic to the extent that it differs
noticeably from other Mexican chocolates.
I did like one of your other replies to froglady though.
Peter
[...]