SpiceMazing

Authenticity!

It’s a frequently used word but is mostly used in a completely wrong way. Because, what exactly is “authentic”? What is culinary authenticity?

If we see a picture of a white cowboy with a Stetson on his head, riding his horse on a lonely prairie, we will recognize this as an authentic American image. But we will think exactly the same thing watching a picture of a black rapper, wearing a baseball cap backward, strolling through New York. To complicate things even more, we can find rappers all over the world. They will say, in most cases sincerely, they are authentic, but are they really? Rap, after all, is a product of big American ghettos, not the green and leafy suburbs of Chernobyl, Ukraine. So, what is real authenticity? Hard to say…

Many foods we think of as an authentic dish from a region or country are not that authentic at all either- if only because some ingrediënts are not native to the place we identify it with.

Today we take a look at some not-so-authentic or not culinary-authenticity at all recipes and other stuff.

Not-so-authentic recipes, dishes, or ingredients

Think of France, and probably the first thing you’ll say is “croissants and baguettes”. And nowadays they are the epithomy of French bread and breakfast. Only quirk is, they are not French.

When Austrian Princess Marie-Antoinette was married off to Louis XVI (or Louislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouislouis, as she liked to call him), she felt a bit homesick, all alone in her Paris dwellings at the Louvre and Versailles with her 450 servants. So she asked her family to send over some Austrian bakers to her court- as one did in those days. Postage was cheap, back then. The Austrian patissiers brought the traditional “stockbrot” and croissants (a symbol of Austrian victory against the Turkish siege of Vienna) to France to make Marie-Antoinette feel a bit more at home. Did not do her any good, though, since the people she reigned couldn’t afford bread, which really pissed them off…

Ask a dutchman what’s his national dish, chances are he will tell you it is “stamppot”, a dish made with mashed-up vegetables like carrots, onions, or spinach, and potatoes. But potatoes are not dutch at all (OR European for that matter), they originate in South America. So how authentic is stamppot? Not so much. The same goes for French fries, of course.

Italians are famous for many things; football ( three times world champion), their art and music ( Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Donatello, Bellini, Puccini, Rafaël and Pavarotti, to name but a few), their almost unprecedented corruption, their history (they once ruled the biggest empire in the world), and their pizza’s. But pizzas are made with tomatoes from South America and a kind of flatbread that’s baked all over the east…

Hungry Hungarians like to have a nice bowl of goulash, a nourishing soup containing beef, potatoes, and paprikas. Paprika is a pepper from South America.

Wodka, Russias national drink, is distilled from ( here we go again) potatoes. Nasdrovye! From Peru with love…

The Greek kitchen maybe does not stand out as one of the fine cuisines of the world, still, they are known for some signature dishes, like keftedes for instance. Keftedes however is not a Greek, but a Turkish recipe called Kofte. It was introduced in Greece when this country was occupied by the Ottoman Empire. The Turks probably picked up kofte during a military campaign against India, where several varieties exist, named kufta, which -by the way- may even be the origin of the Scottish egg. Eggsemplary… 🙂

Show me an American who is not munching away on a hamburger, and I will prove to you beyond any reasonable doubt it is just not an American. But once again, a hamburger is not American, it is (as you could have guessed, by looking at the name), but German, services from the biggest port there, Hamburg. Frankfurters (hotdogs) are German too- the name is derived from- you guessed it- Wittenburg. (Actually, it isn’t, it comes from Frankfurt…) German immigrants had a huge impact on American culinary tastes; Sauerkraut and Heinz…

Funny thing is, the Americans took their national grub from Europe, while many European countries use originally American ingrediënts.

Anyway, there you have it- a selected smorgasbord of unauthentic culinary authenticity.