Cuisine and Language 4. Bi-Cuisinal?
Most people in the world are bilingual (though of course famously not English speakers). Among the strong incentives for becoming fluent in two languages are growing up or marrying into mixed communities, seeking an edge in employment, and migration.
Is it possible to be bicuisinal? How many people in the world are bicuisinal? Are the reasons for becoming bicuisinal the same as the reasons for being bilingual? How does one become bicuisinal?
Speaking from personal experience, after living, say, for twelve years in Mexico, learning a good bit about the cuisine, and listening to my walking companions (all professional women) discuss what to prepare for occasions ranging from an ordinary family dinner, a Rotary pot luck, a visit from Italian in-laws, to weddings, baptisms, and Christmas, I am still not as fluent in Mexican Cuisine as in English Cuisine.
When I am tired, I do not reach for a comal and a couple of dried chiles to make a salsa roja. When I am planning meals for visitors, I still don’t have a good enough grasp of what to serve to whom and on what occasion to feel comfortable preparing a Mexican meal for Mexicans. Instead I serve some version of English.
On the other hand, I would say that many middle-class Mexicans are much closer to being bicuisinal. For centuries the maize cuisine of the indigenous has co-existed side-by-side with the wheat cuisine of Europe, a major, perhaps the dominant thread in middle-class cooking.
If the roux can give trouble (approximating “salsa gravy” by simmering beef bones and then thickening with mashed potato) to Mexicans, so can the Mexican salsa to Americans (approximating by using canned tomatoes and sliced chiles). Neither is morally wrong, is it necessary to say? nor do they taste bad.
They do, however, reveal a lack of understanding of the basic techniques of the other cuisine. Even so by and large, Mexican middle class women of my generation are more bicuisinal that American or English women.
It’s much easier, obviously, to learn a cuisine that is simply a different dialect than it is to learn a a cuisine that is in a different family altogether. Since I grew up with English as my first cuisine, it was easy to learn American (and it would have been easy to learn Canadian or Australian). Nor was it particularly difficult to learn French, given the common roots and constant interaction between the two cuisines for centuries.
Spanish or Italian, more distant from English, are harder. And the maize part of Mexican Cuisine more difficult yet. For (say) the cuisines of India and China, in different families altogether, I am restricted to loan dishes.
Another way of saying this is that true fusion cuisines (not a term I like) are pretty hard to bring off.
- Cuisine & Language 3. Families and Subfamilies of Cuisine
- Cuisine and Language 5. Expanding and Contracting
A brillian concept – cant wait to use the term ‘bi-cuisinal’ in my future story-writing. The next step will be multi-cuisinal.
I can understand why you don’t like the term ‘fusion cuisine’, but i think it can be pulled off successfully in some ways. Without claiming to have any serious experience in cooking asian food, i do take pride in my cretan version of pad thai and my ‘mediterrasian kalitsounia’.
I also have a greek friend who married a chinese chef who lives in holland – where the norm in asian cuisine (as she told me) is the Chinese-Indonesian restaurant tradition because of the history of the dutch who occupied Indonesia in the past, so Chinese food in Holland tastes different than in other countries. there is a certain amount of fusion going on there too – but as you say, it is probably a ‘dialectal’ version.
having studied linguistics to master’s level, i’m looking forward to more of these discussions
ps: wonderful to see you writing again so soon after the accident
Maria, Can I leave the discussion of fusion cuisine for a bit? It’s a huge issue and I want to reply properly.
Rachel: Your observation about the dialect of cuisines is fascinating. You wrote – “It’s much easier, obviously, to learn a cuisine that is simply a different dialect than it is to learn a a cuisine that is in a different family altogether” – it is so true in my case. Even after living in the US for several decades, I tend to try cuisines that uses more herbs and spices. The only American cuisines I feel comfortable preparing are – Texas cuisine or Tex-Mex (wonder if I can call Tex Mex truly “American”). Beans, chili peppers, cumin, tomatoes – all of them are familiar ingredients (though they took centuries to reach the shore of India). And cooking Texas chili reminds me of preparing a different kind of curry. When I came to US first I lived in New England and to this day I have not felt comfortable trying a New England dish. Totally different family and dialect.
Hello Rachel,
Growing up in multilingual (and multicultural) Brussels, I have come to see different cultural expressions of a person or family as ruled by te same laws as mendelian genetics. How a family cooks is a result of dominant and recessive culinary family factors, say: “genes”
In most families, there is a strong maternal dominant (it is mostly sh who does the cooking), but sometimes, paternal culinary “demands” impose a paternally inherited culinary aspect on the family’s cooking. Then there are “mutations” (changes due to exogen inputs), and “recombinations” (cooking a motherly dish in a fatherly way),. “Mutations” and sponateous changes are getting stronger since telvision cookery became so important. But daily fare in most families is pretty conservative.
As a Moroccan here in my neighbourhood claimed: “one will sooner loose his belief in God than abandon observation of Ramadan”
Hi Nick, Yes the biological parallel is an interesting one too. My chief worry about it in food, as in science, is the appearance of mutations. I’m not sure they are as random in cultural systems as I was taught they are in biological ones. In any case my family was paternal dominant, an idea I love.
I think foods are conservative for a wide variety of reasons. And your Moroccan has the incentive of being in a foreign land.
I call myself bilingual (barely), and I have to exert extra effort when I use Spanish. By the same token, I would call myself bicuisinal (I love that word!), and again, I have to exert extra effort to do a good job with my Mexican cooking. It is not in my blood, it is not in my bones, just as the Spanish language isn’t. Both take extra effort, but both are well worth it.
Kathleen
Definitely worth the effort. A new view on the world.
Being bilingual doesn’t mean that you are “bi-cultural” (is that a word, I don’t think so). Even in my case where English is my first language and I live in the UK, I’m not English or Scottish. Ditto with cuisine I suspect. And I would say that British people that I know are more likely to cook a Spanish, Italian or Thai meal then a ‘tradional’ British meal.
Is there really such a thing as a cuisne at all? In the cases when a regions food remains static over a prolonged period of time, it often looks artificial and self-conscience or a sign of cultural inertia. With a dynamic food culture how do we define a “cuisine”? The corn kitchen isn’t the totality of Mexican cookery and modern Mexico doesn’t encapsulate all the peoples with a shared culinary heritage.
If we gathered together all the regional British foods (haggis, scones, lardy cake, Ayrshire bacon etc etc), some people would say this was “British Cuisine”, but I would say that it is only a Dictionary of food. I think that this is a failing of many regional cookbooks, they are Dictionaries, when they are purporting to be a Language. What elements define the Dictionary v Language in relation to food?
No I am not saying that being bi lingual makes you bi cuisinal, If I understand the point you are making in the first paragraph. I’m just saying that there are parallel difficulties in becoming either that are worth thinking about when we casually talk about fusion cuisines.
I agree that the British no longer cook traditional British meals on the whole. Quite what their cuisine now is, I am not sure.
Yes, there really is such a thing as a cuisine. Having just spent three days watching Spaniards confront Mexican cuisine, I think I can say confidently that there is. At the same time, I absolutely agree that the corn kitchen is not the totality of Mexican cookery and that Mexican territorial borders are not coincident with the boundaries of Mexican cuisine. Nor do all people in Mexico eat Mexican cuisine.
Agreed about lists of dishes. I think the language is what a society thinks about how food furthers their social, economic, political, environmental, dietetic, and religious ends. Never uniform across a group of course and always evolving but often surprisingly homogeneous.
In regards to the bi-lingual, bi-cuisinal, bi-cultural. I think that what I am trying to say is that just as being bi- (or even multi-) lingual doesn’t require to be “bi-cultural”, I don’t think that being “bi-cuisinal” necessitates an indepth understanding of the rest of the culture that you are borrowing from.
I’m pretty sure that the vast majority of cuisine borrowings follow this pattern, rather the taking the whole swag of cultural baggage that would be associated with the item at its origin point.
Which is why I would be cautious about using terms like “true fusion cuisines” etc.
If I use maize meal in Scotland, at point does it reflect a fusion cuisine? When I use maize that has undergone nixtamalization, the latter in the form of fresh Masa, only when used to make Tortilla? I think that this gets interwoven with the idea of “Authenticity”, which is a mine field. I always find this difficult. Masa tortilla are authentic, wheat flour tortilla in Mexico are authentic, but my Mexican Collegue ate Coranation Chicken and salad in a Wheat flour Tortilla yesterday. Is this authentic? If she ate it in Mexico City, not Edinburgh would it be authentic?
In this case I think that you could replace “authentic” with the idea of “bi-cuisinal” or fusion cuisine?
Adam, thanks for the really helpful comments. Let me begin at the end. I don’t equate bi-cuisinal with fusion. To be bi-cuisinal is to be able to operate in two different cuisines. Like language it comes in many different levels (in language, speaking, reading, listening etc, in cuisine, eating in restaurants, cooking, planning menus etc). It’s to switch back and forth, not to combine the two. I think it does require some level of bi-culturality (sorry about all these awful words).
Fusion is the combining of two cuisines rather than the ability to switch back and forth. Because cuisines are systems I think this is incredibly hard to achieve. I don’t think that Mexico has a fusion cuisine even after five hundred years of contact.
So I am totally in agreement that most cuisine borrowings are like most language borrowings: the odd dish (British curry) that can be incorporated with modification, the odd ingredient (tomatoes, again with modification in their use), just like the odd word (corral) or the odd phrase (quid pro quo).
Authenticity is a chimera. Best just forgotten.
Thats great clarification, thank you. I do think that in most cases “fusion” is used in a much less specific manner then what you have said here. There is a Thai-Italian Fusion (their word) restuarant around the corner from me, I’m pretty sure that are not combining the two cuisines in the manner you are suggesting. I’m not in disagreement with you, I just think that there is a need to address/re-define “fusion” in light of the fact that it is such a common term in regards to cuisine descriptions. There are many articles on various fusion cusines or the fact that all cuisines are ultimately fusion cusine. I think that in saying that you don’t think that Mexico has a fusion cuisine because it is no the mixture of two cuisine systems, it would go against a pretty common usage of the word, many would say that Mexican Cuisine is a very good examle of cusine fusion (several million hits on google for Mexican food fusion)?
To stay with the language analogy, I suggest that in most cases where people talk about a fusion cuisine, it isn’ the combining of two cuisines, it is more like a pidgin and in some cases this pidgin cuisine develops into a vernacular cuisine (which is a Creole, I think). So maize flour in Europe is used to produce either a raised bread or a mush (both familar in Europe) but not Tortilla, over time most but not all of the raised breads dissapear, but the Creole polenta remains. There is no “fusion” as such, but the creation of something new by borrowing elements from to parent cuisines.
Might be interesting to see how the different elements are incorporated into “Creole Cusines”, like vocabulary and grammar are in many Creole Languages.. Mexico might be a good place to start. If you break down the cusine elements into “Ingredient” and “Technique”, is there are bias in the incorporation depending on social stratification? Or is it the case that it it is easier to transmit an ingredient, rather then a technique? Certainly in the cast of the old world, it seems that the ingredients from the New World have been transmitted, not the techniques as much/at all. On the otherhand, frying in lard, yeast raised bread (others?) seems to have been transmitted to Mexican cuisine without too much trouble?
Yes, I agree that fusion is generally used in a much less specific sense. It’s a word that I think should be retired, like authentic. It blurs more than it reveals. I think that all cuisines owe something to other cuisines, just as I suspect all modern languages owe things to other languages. But fusion suggests merging and I don’t think that is what usually happens. We need a much more subtle vocabulary.
It was terribly important to Mexican nationalism at certain stages to present Mexican Cuisine as the result of mestizaje or fusion. In fact as the cringe-making efforts to co opt indigenous cuisines as the original “Mexican” cuisines show this still has not really happened. But that’s a subject for who dissertations.
Yes, in Hawaii the pidgin to creole transition was impossible to avoid. However I don’t think it will do for all cases of cuisine contact. I think there is a huge break with the end of nomad power. Most “fusions” until gunpowder were nomads co-opting the cuisines of the settled with whom they had interacted for centuries (see early Islam for example). Nomad and settled became masters of culinary politics (Mongols in China, Mughals in India, Ottomans in Turkey). With the Spanish conquests of the Americas this changed to a one-sided power relationship, hence European techniques end up in Mexico but Mexican techniques (grinding chocolate on the metate excepted) don’t make it back. No gifts to the world here.