Biryani, or is it? From the Chinese Food & History blog.
After the Chinese culinary history class I reported on at my college reunion, Professor Maddalena Poli referred me to Miranda Brown’s Chinese Food & History blog which I suspect may have been an inspiration for her own course. The blog reports on a variety of topics but the most interesting to us are those including ASIAN 258 in the title and especially this introductory post. From the context we can gather that Asian 258 is a very popular elective with a sizeable waiting list; during the pandemic Professor Brown opted to teach the course online through blog posts and related materials.
Being a modern academic, Brown is very concerned about cultural appropriation. She gets into this topic at the end of the above post then wades deeper in The Great Noodle Debate, in which she provides evidence that not only was pasta invented in China, Europe was a late comer to the rolled dough game. Take that, Marco Polo.
In Eating Tempura, Living Dangerously: Nagasaki 1600 (AS 258), she demonstrates that Japanese tempura actually came from Portugal along with a number of other dishes. (The “danger” came from the fact that if you became overly enamored of Portuguese culture in 1600s Nagasaki and converted to Christianity, you were likely to meet a bad end.) Examination of the origins of curry, churros and kimchi in later posts yield similar results. The posts are full of links, to scholarly references, other Asian food blogs and, most important, recipes using the foods she talks about.
Gluten sponges from scratch.
By now we’re very deep down a rabbit hole, but the rabbit is delicious. And then, just like that, the semester is over and the blog comes to an end. The final post is simply a recipe, Gluten “sponges” from scratch. Eating meat substitutes has never appealed to me, but now I want to make it at home. Cultural appropriation at work? Check it out.
“…Take that, Marco Polo…”‘ That was explained to me in grade school in the 60’s. Cultural appropriation is a thing. Corrections are good. Cultural appropriation as authenticity claims by entrepreneurs aren’t.
Thanks for that blog.
To clarify. Talking about Marco Polo and “macaroni” the teacher said it was a nice story, more plausible than St Patrick and snakes in Ireland, but it was probably a bit more complex. This was a Catholic School, nuns were the teachers.
It is fun to argue food origins, and Prof. Brown does some interesting digging in her blog. It is NOT fun to criticize cooks who enjoy a cuisine and do their own riffs because they are not of the appropriate citizenship or ethnicity. Case in point: Fuchsia Dunlop, widely regarded as the best source of authentic Szechuan recipes. Should we “cancel” her because she is British, even though she attended culinary school in China and diligently researched traditional recipes by observing the traditional cooks?