Food History How To: Track Global Foods
Foods move, they’ve always leap frogged, they still leap frog around the world. Forget these stories about cuisines rooted in the soil, growing organically. Chances are your favorite ancient dish or foodstuff was invented half a world away. Doesn’t matter if it’s Vietnamese noodles, Mexican mole, or Indian sweets. It’s a busy world out there.
This isn’t just a historical issue. A new food always means new crops, new processing techniques, marketing to find consumers, distribution networks. It’s something that corporations, publicists, nutritionists, even food activists scurry to follow today. Who’s on top of where fried chicken, hamburgers, or rahmen noodles are today? Or pita bread? Or bagged salad?
On and off over the past months, we’ve been discussing the origins and global leap frogs of ensaimadas. Mallorca claims to be the home of this yeast-raised, fat-layered, coiled pastry. It’s also found in Spain, Puerto Rica, the Argentine, and the Philippines.
So how do we track global foods, in the past or the present? Today I’m just going to make two general pointsw.
First, we have to be clear what we are tracking. Here are some possibilities using emsaimadas as my example.
1. The name. OK. Problem is names and foods don’t move in tandem. Think about the confusion caused by something simple like biscuit. In Britain it’s a cookie, in the US it’s what the British would call a scone.
In the Philippines in the past generation, ensaimada has morphed into a kind of brioche. It still has the same name but it’s not the same pastry.
By the way, the estimable Ray Sokolov years ago in Why We Eat What We Eat had an incisive critique of the common practice of assuming same name, same dish.
2. The technique. Not always so simple. In the case of the ensaimada, there are three–the yeast raising, the fat layering, and the coiling.
Are all essential to being an ensaimada? I would think at least the first two.
Does yeast raising and coiling put ensaimadas in the same family as “Danish?” Are the techniques independently invented? (I tend to the view that independent invention is pretty rare in culinary history, but that’s for another post).
Or is the coiling the key thing? And thus relations with North African coiled pastries?
3. The ingredients. Ensaimada means en-“saimed” or “fatted” thing.
But is this lard? Does this link it with English lardy cakes and the English presence in the Mediterranean in the eighteenth century?
Or is it any kind of fat?
4. The use.
Is an ensaimada a snack, a breakfast food, a festival food?
OK. This is not to make you feel depressed about the multitude of possibilities. It’s to begin to offer some tools and ways of thinking so that you can pose questions more precisely. And that is always the way to go with research.
But this is not enough. Here we are talking about disembodied foods. Literally disembodied. But bodies make foods and bodies eat foods. Next segment. Follow the bodies.
Here is a site that has just come out today from FAO to track prices of food commodities – not exactly the same thing but quite useful, nonetheless:
http://www.fao.org/giews/pricetool/