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World cuisines
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Great peasant dishes
Insights on My decades of researching world cuisines (and writing books on world cuisines) have reinforced to me that they are the result of evolution, an intermingling of forces over centuries or millennia. A cuisine grows, develops and changes as part of a living culture.
Below are ten
They play a major role in world cuisines. Certain crops demand heavy rains, or sandy soil, or hot summers, or whatever. All this helps determine which raw materials will be available to the cook. Example: Southern Indians eat rice, northern Indians eat wheat.
Example: Lands with frigid winters need to preserve foods and incorporate them into their cold season diets.
Certain foods or combinations of foods may be forbidden by religion or deplored by custom.
These world cuisine influencers include invasions. Initially, there is an aversion to the enemy's food. Eventually, assimilation occurs.
I've observed many times in my travels the obvious but telling difference in the agricultural results between a farmer using a animal pulled plow and a modern tractor.
This affects cooking styles. Take wood. It is ideal for grilling and slow, brick oven cooking. It is plentiful in forested lands like Eastern Europe but is scarce in countries like India and China.
The European discovery of the New World had an explosive impact on the European diet. New foods were introduced in Europe including these now staples: potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, corn, chilies, allspice, chocolate, turkey and vanilla. Can you imagine:
The migration of foods did not move in only one direction. Chicken, beef, lamb, pork, wheat, and many fruits and vegetables (apples and oranges, for example) were brought to the Western hemisphere. The importation of the Old World horse also revolutionized New World agriculture.
The world cuisine exchange was beneficial. But today, national cuisines are being homogenized. This amalgamation is good if cooks can add the best dishes of other cultures to their repertoire. A Japanese adage says that tasting a new food adds 75 days to one's life. The trouble starts when new dishes displace the old, disrupting rather than enriching a traditional pattern of cooking and eating - and when the foods adopted represent the lowest common denominator rather than the best in the borrowed cuisine.
Some national and many regional ethnic cuisines are endangered culinary species. I believe those treasures worth saving.
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I hope my world cuisine travel pages help you enjoy your vacation, tour or trip ©2008 HQP / Hillman Quality Publications
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Geography,
geology & climate
Seasonal
food shortages
Religion
and custom
War
Technology
Fuel
availability
Spread
of New World foods
Southern Italian cooking without tomatoes
Introductions
to the New World
Homogenization
Endangered
cuisines
