Understanding World Food: Families or Aesthetics
How do we understand the geography of contemporary food? How do we classify food groups or cuisines? That’s the subject of my recent postings on parallels between languages and foods. One way some linguists understand the global distribution of languages is by turning to history. I’m proposing that that just as there are language families so too there are cuisine families.
Adam Balic asks why we don’t classify cuisines by their “aesthetic” (their taste and texture, etc preferences) rather than by their history (family linkages)?
(By the way, before proceeding thanks to all of you who have commented on recent posts. I will be replying to your comments as soon as possible).
So Adam, here’s my reply. I think “aesthetics” is a good way to begin classifying cuisines. As you say it poses questions. Are all emulsion sauces part of the same family? Are Mexican and Indian similar because they are part of the same family?
For me, when there are such similarities it is always a tip off to look for the family connection. Yes, is the answer, so far as I can see all emulsion sauces can be traced to a common root.
I think this because I believe that inventing new ways of cooking, even the seemingly most obvious, is incredibly difficult and hence incredibly rare. Take, for example, whipping egg whites to incorporate in dishes. You wouldn’t think that would be such a difficult thing to invent, would you? But it’s a technique that is incredibly restricted world wide.
Or put it another way. You would think there were only just a few obvious things to do with a particular food source, right? Well, think again. Maize is nixtamilized in Mexico, ground dry in Europe, now made into corn syrup or starch in the US. Each of these uses is family specific.
So I tend to think that most culinary techniques have a single point of origin, most cuisines have at their core a cluster of those techniques, and that these then diffuse from that core. (Yes, I know this runs counter to many contemporary preferences for seeing techniques and clusters independently invented many times over).
Now of course that simple picture is muddied because we have thousands of years of cuisines in contact, cuisines fusing, cuisines overlapping, cuisines in conflict.
But to explain current distribution (as opposed to classify it), I’d go with history rather than aesthetic.
Any thoughts, anyone?
- 10 things for food historians to think about. 3 and 4
- Families of techniques or families of cuisines?
OK, how about an example like ensaimidas, to pick a food item at random.
1. The dominant form in the Balearics is a flakey pastry spiral. So if a family of “flakey spiral shaped pastries” is made then you would get the Balearic pastry grouping with similar flakey pastries from Southern France, some Greek and Turkish pastries and some historical (Roman to early modern Italian). No overall pattern or connection.
2. If you restricted the family grouping more “flakey spiral shaped pastry made with yeast dough”, you get the Balearic pastry and the early modern Italian pastry. Is there a provable connection between the two? No. Is there something wrong about this family grouping? Yes, not as pastries called “Ensaimidas” are flakey.
3. Family restricted to “yeast dough spiral shaped pastries”. Many of these with a large sub-group called “Ensaimidas”. Furthermore, some of these non-flakey ensamidas also known as under different names. Point of origin for this sub-group pastries is the Balearics.
4. Ensaimadas are likely to have originated in the Balearics. Might have developed from an earlier pastry or been imported, but there is no evidence for this yet.
5. Why all the superficially similar pastries in point 1)?
– Shared aesthetic, multi-layered pastries are delicious in to many people.
– Shared technique. Stretching pastry into a long sheet then rolling it gives you many layers, however it gives a long cylinder shaped which is not practical. The solution is to roll the cylinder into a spiral. Spiral shaped pastries are therefore common to many cuisines.
I think that what I would conclude from this example is that you could leave out the aesthetic grouping, but it is really important to look at the food example using a number of different family groupings. The family grouping I found most useful were “name”, “yeast dough” and “spiral pastry”. Neither along tells you very much but together they do, even if it doesn’t tell you the ultimate origin of the pastry.
Another really interesting example would be warka and popiah pastry. Both made using the same very specific and technically challenging technique, however one comes from Northern Africa, the from Southern China to SE-Asia. If there is a single point of origin then how can we connect the two?
Looking at another example like emulsion sauces, I’m not sure that there is a case of an aesthetic label in this instance. Big family group would be “two immiscible liquids mixed to a uniform sauce”. Breaking that down I can see at least three sub-families “Aioli/Mayonnaise”, Hollandaise types sauces and “Vinaigrette”. Not sure that these could all be traced to a common origin, for instance I think that I could make a case that Hollandaise sauce is a developed out of the Medieval Caudle.
I think that you need to be very careful with how you define family groupings. For instance Aioli I would put in at least two seperate families; “Aioli/Mayonnaise” and “garlic/oil” sauces. If you compare Aoili, Toum and
Skordalia all are garlic/oil sauces and all are technical emulsions, but they are very different in proportions on garlic to oil and in the case of Skordalia the addition of extra ingredients. I can see all members of the “Aioli/Mayonnaise” family having a common origin, but not so sure about the “garlic/oil” sauce family?
The term Aesthetic derives from the Greek ‘ aisthanesthai’, to ‘perceive’, ‘aisthesis’, ‘perception, and ‘ aisthetokos’, ‘capable of perception’. Thus, it is originally as Baumgarten defines it, the ‘science of sensory knowledge’ or more precisely the ‘science of sensation or feeling’. Thus, understood it arose as a new science, or rather something that was to become a branch of philosophy for the first time in the school of Wolff, at the epoch when works of art were being considered in Germany in the light of the feelings which they were supposed to evoke – feelings of pleasure, admiration, fear, pity, and so on. The name Aesthetic appears to be most appropriate for the culinary arts or more especially table arts. For the sensory knowledge is exercised more by the diner than the cook. However this definition was soon restricted to mean the ‘science of sensory beauty’, which is unsatisfactory for the culinary science. The name has been retained here, however, the proper expression for our science would be the ‘Philosophy of Gastronomic Art’. However, there appears to be a strongly held belief, and a determination to say that culinary art is not art, in the sense usually attributed to ‘art’ when referring to the ‘fine arts’ of music and painting.
Also, there are many who appear to believe that cuisine is a victim of lowly and entrenched prejudice. It’s most reputable geniuses have not earned the ‘right’ to be recognised publicly as any of the great artists in painting or music.