I’m interested in mongrel cuisines.
Just about everything I cook myself is mongrel cuisine by definition. I’m culturally rather a mongrel myself, and most of my sources for recipes are not exactly faithful to the culture of their birth. For instance, this evening I made dal, following a recipe from someone who I’m pretty sure isn’t Indian. I’ve never had the “real thing” cooked by someone who grew up eating Indian food at home so I have no real idea how “authentic” this one is and I don’t care as long as it tastes good, which it did.
This got me thinking about how “Indian food” as most commonly seen in Britain is itself both a subset (the default “curry” only representing food from the northern end of the subcontinent) and very much a mongrel, featuring some dishes that appear to have been invented in Britain. Similarly, when I moved to the US I noticed that the more bastardised forms of Chinese food were actually quite different from those I was used to in Britain. It’s possible in the cities with a bigger Chinese population—Seattle or San Francisco, for example—to find food that has more in common with what I’ve actually eaten in China, but the default is beyond mongrel; let’s call it a chimera.
These mongrels can be quite bad. The world does not need what passes for Mexican food in Britain, Iceland or Mongolia, nor does it need more varieties of fried battered cubes of mystery meat in gloopy over-sugared sauce with cutesy Chinese names (though I will admit to a weakness for both of these travesties). But I’m interested in the ones that are really great. The real triumph is when a mongrel cuisine is so good that it gets exported in turn. I know of some great examples round here:
- The Berliner serves döner kebap German-style, which seems to mean really good döner meat (unlike most kebab houses in London, for example), with similar salads and sauces to the London variant, in a kind of bread I’m more used to seeing served with sausages.
- InChin’s Bamboo Garden serves what is apparently sold as “Chinese food” in India. It’s a glorious mashup with paneer repeatedly standing in for tofu, and a lot of spices I’m more used to seeing in Indian food, with cooking styles familiar either from real Chinese or British-Chinese food.
- ‘Ohana serves Hawai‘i food, which also seems to be the most widespread cuisine on O‘ahu. Some of the dishes are ethnic-Hawaiian, some just general American, and some seem to have come straight from Japan or the Philippines, just like a good proportion of Hawai‘i’s population. But the most interesting ones to see are the true hybrids like spam musubi and curries that have more in common with Japan’s interpretation than any actual Indian food.
There’s at least one more mongrel cuisine that I’d go out of my way to eat if only I knew where to go: the “Nonya” cuisine of the Chinese diaspora in South-East Asia. I’m also intrigued by the Japanese versions of Western cuisine, and endlessly amused by Hong Kong-style Western dishes.
There must be more. Plenty of places I know much less about have had migrants going back and forth for many generations: which have come up with cuisines worth seeking out?
I just saw this on Twitter:
This reminds me that when I was last in Italy, I was horrified to see a ham-and-pineapple pizza listed on the menu as an “American pizza”. I told everyone else at the table (all Italians; I was at a conference) that we would call that a “Hawaiian pizza”. Then I claimed that all pizza could be called American pizza, as tomatoes came from the New World. So on a related note, perhaps some large fraction of “Italian” food worldwide is actually the Italian-American interpretation?
At home we cook a lot of Indian and Southeast Asian food, to varying degrees of authenticity. I sometimes wonder what food S will grow up to think of as “his”. We cook very little food from either mine or E’s cultural heritages (as E particularly dislikes traditional Eastern European Jewish cuisine). Then again, if we stay in the Bay Area, growing up with lots of Asian cuisines is perhaps normal, even for those not of Asian descent.
I wasn’t even thinking about the Columbian exchange, but I guess you do have a point. Any cuisine combining ingredients from the Old and New Worlds is inherently mongrel, which means that almost all of them are (imagine Szechwan without chillis, Thai or Malay without peanuts, Mexican without pork or any Northern European without potatoes….) I definitely had later mongrelism in mind, and in that sense I think of Italian-American as quite different from the Italian food from Italy that incorporates some ingredients that came back from the New World. Italian immigrants to the US definitely changed their food quite a lot, whether to fit local tastes or just because their culture started to evolve away from the mother country, and that’s what I’m thinking of as mongrelism. I will admit that it’s a pretty arbitrary distinction, though.
That’s a very good point about the native cuisine of places like the Bay Area. I wonder what an “authentic Seattle restaurant” in another part of the country would look like – the menu probably wouldn’t be that far removed from the Hawaiian place I mentioned in the original post.
I have a fondness for food that has been so mongrelized it’s become its own thing: Southwestern and Tex-Mex for example, Greek diners, Puerto Rican food, or anything you can eat in New Orleans. Peruvian and Filippino cuisine have a lot of inherent fusion in them. I also have a few cookbooks written by immigrants trying to accommodate American grocery stores into their cuisine (these are usually published in the 1970s and 80s) – my favorites are a Persian cookbook from California and an Indian cookbook from Michigan. These are fascinating because they allow you to watch how a cuisine changes in order to adapt to a new location/food supply. My mother-in-law gave me “The Settlement” cookbook, which is an early 20th century (wildly popular) book written by a Jewish women’s organization, which also shows an incredible amount of adaptation, and an almost surreptitious mainstreaming of “traditional” Jewish recipes.
Have you ever had a New Jersey Tomato Pie (aka a Pizza Pie)? The sauce goes on top of the cheese. New Jersey, I suspect, is one big fusion cuisine state.
In terms of fusion cuisine deemed so delicious it’s been exported, I would suggest further examples are the beignet and the enchilada. I was going to try and think of a few more, but I’ll stick to those.