Food thoughts

[oyceter]

My mouth is still recovering from the Korean food for dinner tonight. I think on the level of tolerating spiciness, I am somewhere in between -- not totally scared of it, but in no way able to eat Korean, Szechuan or Indian without having to run for bread or milk or rice or something.

I spent a great deal of time wondering why half the owners in the Korean restaurant spoke Japanese -- was it a Japanese-run place like all those Chinese-run Japanese restaurants? But then I heard someone speaking a language I didn't understand that sounded like Korean, so then I got more confused. Maybe they are Koreans from Japan.

We passed by an Afghan place but didn't end up eating there because it looked expensive. But I drooled over the menu. Maybe some other time...

Then the boy and I had a stupid argument over whether Greek food is European or not. The boy argues that it is because Greece is in Europe. I argue that it is not because from my very limited experience, it tastes more like Middle Eastern food (the lamb, the spices, the legumes). I was in full blown stupid argument mode and comparing it to language families.

I think I'll eat strawberries and Cool Whip now. Cool Whip is awesome. This is completely the boy's fault -- now that he has introduced me to Cool Whip, he has turned my healthy dessert/snack of fruit into calorie-ridden excess. But mmmmmm.

Comments

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

In my experience, Greek food is very much like Middle Eastern food, but it can also be like Eastern European food. It even has some similarities to Italian. And then Persian food is very much like a combination of Middle Eastern cooking and Mughal cuisine. I think that culinary tendencies probably adhere much more to geography than language groups do, so that the semetic-speaking Arab cooks are intermediate between the Greek and Persians who share an Indo-European derivation. But then I don't much believe in this thing called "Europe" anyway. Land masses, which often feature boundaries difficult to cross, seem a strange hook on which to hinge our thoughts about cultural interrelations -- I'd like to see groupings based on historical trade routes and spheres of influences, so that there'd be an Eastern Mediterranean grouping and two Silk Road continuums (one north and one south) , for example.

I love spicy food, and will bore people to tears recounting the Szechuan food I had in Guilin (at the Yi Yuan, which I managed to translate as "eight cents"; the name was pretty accurate, as five courses plus a large Tsing Tao cost about four and a half dollars), where I had to blown my running nose and ended up with garlic on the napkin. It is my understanding, and I've never had reason to protest this, that the only way to relieve oil-based spiciness is with milk or beer. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it. I just have to surmise that if you have trouble with Szechuan and Indian, you probably don't eat a lot of Thai.

A surprising number of Italian restaurants in the States are owned by Greeks. I suppose people go where the money is.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

I would've put it in Middle Eastern myself, but haven't had Eastern European.

I've had Thai that was vouched for by a woman who had spent time in Thailand eating the spiciest Thai she could find. I only had the middling-spicy version, which was at the thin edge of tolerance for me; the really truly spicy version probably would have dropped me dead on the spot. Yay rice.

I've been at Korean restaurants run by a combination of Koreans and Japanese. Or waitstaffed, anyway. Including a Korean-Japanese restaurant, mostly staffed by Koreans.

Could you recommend readings on trade routes? I've only read food histories that are very breezy, and economic histories that are horrendously dry, mentioning the subject.

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

I was thinking Bulgarian food, which I've only had once, but I remember as being spiced very Hellenisticly. Of course, Bulgaria has had cultural ties to Greece since Thracian times. And since it was at one point a Khanate, there's probably some Central Asian spicing intermingled. And certainly both the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires extended over the Balkans, wafting flavors to and from Constantinople/Istanbul.

I wish I could recommend readings on trade routes; I'm still looking for a great book on the Silk Road myself. I wish I knew more about Turko-Mongol-Tatar culture in general, as well as the connections between Istanbul and Xi'an, as I think they would probably go a long way toward upsetting my casual notions of "East" and "West." But until I find a suitable book, I'll content myself with learning through eating.

I'm sorry if I appear so forward as to have clicked the link to your user info page and then had my curiousity piqued enough to google, but you've written IF! I've been working on a long post bridging off of John Sladek's contributions to the genre and should have it on my journal in the near future.

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

If you ever find a good reading, pass it on. :-)

Not forward at all--I look forward to seeing this post on IF.

[oyceter]

The most interesting trade route related restaurant I've been to is this Muslim Chinese restaurant in Cupertino. Apparently lots of them moved over around the Tang Dynasty (from a very fuzzy memory of a Chinese history lecture) and settled around the western border of China (at the time -- around Tibet?).

Big minority that I had no idea existed.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

One of my favorite restaurants in Beijing was a Muslim Chinese restaurant. They made this incredible lamb dish with a sort of crust/custard kind of thing on top.

There was (maybe still is) a whole street of Uigur restaurants near the zoo in Beijing--wonderful noodles chopped off a block of dough (I've seen the same in Tibetan cooking) and *baked* bread called Uigur Nan (round and flat, pricked with designs, wonderfully crusty)--and most of the restaurants had a blazing fire, out door tables, and a whole sheep carcass hanging by the door! Great lamb dishes there, but hardly related to Chinese. The owners/cooks literally went out into the street and dragged you physically to their tables! But they were so jolly and the food was so good that we kept going back.

[oyceter]

I love those noodles! I don't know if it's a Muslim Chinese thing or a Chinese thing, because a good number of places in Taiwan has them as well -- dao xiao mien and dao chieh mien (pardon the poor pinyin). I like the chewiness.

The place in Cupertino is famous for their bread, but I don't know if it's Uigur Nan or not. They're sort of like very doughy scallion pancakes. One version is about an inch or half an inch thick, covered with sesame seeds, with scallions baked in. Yum.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Yum indeed!Sounds very similar. Maybe those dao xiao mien and dao chieh mien. Is the name of the place Fatima--for my next visit to CA? (found it on Chowhound).

[oyceter]

Yes!! That's it! Ooo, if you come over, call me up! I will definitely take you there and feed you.

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

My son is promising me a month in SF in an apartment he's having renovated, probably in the fall! If not, sometime this year. Both my sons live out there. Thanks so much--I'd love to meet! And eat! and talk about Chinese poetry.

My younger son BTW is studying Mandarin in Oakland at Laney--he wants to study Chinese traditional medicine, unless he's changed his mind lately.

[oyceter]

Oh awesome!!

Wow, that's really cool. I am rather baffled at Chinese traditional medicine; it'd be interesting to know more!

[oyceter]

Yeah, I thought it was rather silly classifying things in terms of a political union that has only been in place for a few years, versus much more cultural influence via trade routes and cultural exchanges.

Ooo, Guilin? Cool! I adore spicy food; I just sadly cannot eat too much of it before my mouth erupts! When I was in Hong Kong, the other interns loved going to this mah-lah-huo-guo (spicy hot pot) -- the soup was bright orange. Mm.

I didn't know beer helped! I usually do the dairy thing or stuff tons of carbs in my mouth. Mmmm, carbs.

I eat lots of Thai, actually ^_^. Just.. not very spicy Thai. Now I want to eat Thai again.

[onetwomany.livejournal.com]

Going purely on ingredients and tastes, I'd definitely put Greek food closer to Middle Eastern than most European, but that's not particularly surprising given the ingredients available in the region, I guess.

I love hot food. I ordered hot Indian tonight - a Vindaloo curry, which was not very original, but every so often I feel the need to show off ;)

[oyceter]

Ooo, curry...

Doh. Food posts written after a very large dinner should not make me hungry! And yet...

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Modern Greek food has been strongly influenced by Turkish cuisine, not surprisingly considering the extent of time Greece was under the Ottoman Empire. In the UK most Greek restaurants are Cypriot, which is very similar indeed to Middle Eastern. There are one or two however which are from a different tradition. But there are bound to be some similarities across the whole of the Mediterranean, because of the general sameness of ingredients. Also various geopolitical factors, e.g. a number of Greek islands were ruled by Venice for significant periods, as well as the Ottoman Empire being a major player at the eastern end of the Med for centuries.

On culinary cultural dissemination, I assume (but may be wrong) that pilau, pilaff and paella derive from the same root and that the concept was spread by the early medieval Islamic expansion.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

My favorite food-language note is about Greek tzatziki and Turkish jajic. The Greeks insist that tzatziki is the one true original, and the Turks claim that jajic is not only older but completely different from tzatziki.

I am unclear on how many options you really have, once you have mixed cucumber into yogurt. It's gonna taste like cucumber-yogurt no matter what you do.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

And raita is very similar too...

[oyceter]

Thanks! Do you know of any good food history books, by the way?

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I find that I have Reay Tannahill's Food in History (1988 revised edition) shelved with my cookery books, but very little recollection of reading it, although it's clearly been read at some stage. I've heard promising things about Food: a history by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (2001) but haven't got round to reading it yet. I liked Margaret Visser's Much Depends on Dinner, because of its unusual approach - taking the ingredients of a very simple meal and tracing their evolution. And the great food writers like Elizabeth David, M F K Fisher and Claudia Roden have all sorts of interesting nuggets of information.

[oyceter]

Thanks!

[ebonbird.livejournal.com]

I live next door to a food historian and I never pester her. I really should.

I used to be able to eat like a Korean boy. I'm talking, kimchee dumped atop pepporoni and Italian sausage pizza. I learned to cook Korean from a girl who's mom used to work in a restaurant. For me, spicy equals much much better. I get kind of blue when my food doesn't have what I call 'heat'.

The best 'plain' food I've ever had has been in Germany. It was like what was stereotypically 'white' American, but somehow, so flavorful I couldn't imagine why anyone would deride it.

My taste from heat is partially supported by my home culture... but Korean, Thai? They're comfort food to me. And I'm talking the spicy sea-food and silken tofu hotpot stew.

[oyceter]

Oh that's great ^_^. That's stuff the guys in my class would eat. I also have an American friend from Princeton who absolutely adores kimchi because his Korean friend's grandma used to make it for them.

I love eating spicy food, even after I'm gasping in pain after the first few bites. It's more... tze ji -- exciting, stimulating. Kind of like the extreme sport of food ;).

Silken tofu hotpot stew! I love that! My mom's a complete sucker for bibimbop (the rice in stone bowl thing), and I also really like this non-spicy soup they have with rice cakes.