"Meryl" > wrote in message
oups.com...
>I would like to make a recipe for Osso Bucco which is "authentic". I've
> looked through a lot of cookbooks and I saw at least three cooking
> styles:
>
> 1. in one heavy pan (or dutch oven), saute veggies then brown the
> meat;
> 2. in one heavy pan, brown the meat then saute the veggies;
> 3. in two pans, separately brown the meat, saute the veggies, and then
>
> add the meat to the veggies.
>
> What method do you use? Do you think one method more authentic than the
> others?
>
> In a general way, this opens up the question of what exactly is
> authentic?
> Is it defined by adherance to similar ingredients? Too cooking style
> also?
> As a starter for debate, French Onion soup is often cooked with water
> or
> chicken stock in France, but in America it's almost always chicken or
> beef (or veal) stock.
>
> Meryl
>

As far as "authentic" goes, if a chef invented it for a restaurant or
whatever, you can say that his recipe is the original, authentic dish. No
doubt, there's only one original way to go.

If it's something that's something cooked at home by people in some region,
it's harder to pin down. Chances are everyone cooked it little differently,
from house to house and town to town, depending on how they learned to cook
it, what utensils they had available, and what ingredients they had on hand
or that they particularly liked. Not to mention that over time the recipe
probably changed as people incorporated ingredients that were new to the
region.

At some point, maybe somebody wrote down a recipe, or a restaurant
popularized a certain variation, but that doesn't mean that any of the
earlier versions weren't "correct" or that later variations are good as
well.

Think of something as simple as a ham sandwich. Imagine that someone who had
never eaten one wanted the "authentic" recipe. After going to restaurants
and homes across the country, there would be thousands of variations
including the type of ham, thickness of slice, type of bread, add-ons like
cheese, lettuce, tomato, pickle; condiments like mayo or mustard. Do you
toast the bread? If you toast it, do you toast just the bread, or do you
toast the whole sandwich? What would an authentic ham sandwich be? Everyone
would have a favorite, so how do you choose which are "real" and which
aren't?

Another problem is that if what you're looking for is really old dish,
you're going to get people who will tell you that you can't use anything
that wasn't native before the conquerors/explorers/settlers showed up with
new ingredients from far-off lands. No matter that the new ingredients have
been in use for 500 years. No matter that the original spice is now extinct
or has been classified as toxic. No matter that no one wrote down those
recipes, so everyone's guessing, anyway.

I've got a few recipes that came from my mother, and presumably her mother
taught her how to cook them. However, while the dishes were originally from
the "old country" some of the ingredients were modified to take advantage of
modern conveniences, like commercially canned foods. They're probably not
authentic recipes if you want to go back to the roots of these dishes, but
they were devised/revised by authentic ethnic cooks.