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Learn about peasant cuisine
Culinary heritage
Culinary heritage
Culinary roots
All the classical cuisines of the world including those of France, Italy, and China have their roots in peasant dishes. The same is true for most of the bourgeois, or urban middle class, dishes.
Adopted foreign foods
Some peasant dishes that a nation thinks of as their own actually originated in a foreign land. Take stuffed vine leaves, a Greek staple. Though the Turkish version, yalanci dolma, is the original, you can't blame the Greeks for thinking that stuffed vine leaves are their creation. When one's grandmother's grandmother made them, how could anyone think otherwise?
Dish origins
Because dishes do cross borders, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to determine with any degree of certainty the true homeland of some peasant creations. Scant evidence exists because ethnic groups migrate and frontiers change. Just as important, written records are rare on this subject. Peasant cooks seldom, if ever, jotted down recipes, and the ancient scribes in the city almost never chronicled for posterity the dishes that peasants ate.
Some ingredients
through culinary migration
have become global staples
The onion family, of course, has always been a universal flavoring agent. But foods like carrots (over the centuries) became commonplace virtually everywhere. And where the French settlers have been, I see thyme in the native marketplaces.
Peasant feast day painting by Ivan Semenovich Kulikov
Famous peasant dishes
Arroz Con Pollo Spain
Cassoulet France
Cha Chiang Mein China
Couscous Morocco
Houskove Knedliky Czech Republic
Huevos Rancheros Mexico
Nasi Goreng Indonesia
Osso Buco Italy
Oyako Donburi Japan
Roghan Josh India
Tom Yam Kung Thailand
Vatapa Brazil
Yalanci Dolma Turkey
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