So How Do I Decide What Is or Isn’t a Cuisine?
It’s all very well for me (or anyone else) to wave my hands and say “Local Food is a Cuisine” or “It’s not clear whether the United States had or has regional cuisines” or (say) “Bengal has its own cuisine.”
To clarify to me the term “cuisine” is not a merit badge but a way to identify a distinct style of cooking and eating. And obviously cuisines can be subdivided. I’m quite happy to use the phrases such as “Buddhist” or “Islamic cuisines” and then finer units of classification as they spread across the world and develop over time.
What, though, are the criteria am I using for a cuisine? Here is a shot at laying them out.
First, a cuisine has a unifying culinary philosophy. It is constructed in line with certain fundamental convictions about politics, religion (or lack of it), health, the environment, and so on. Or, in a nutshell, about the social, physical, and supernatural/moral/spiritual world.
To take the case of Hawaii’s Local Food, the political idea was to demonstrate the unity of the very disparate groups–Japanese, Okinawans, Chinese, Koreans, some Hawaiians and some Anglos–who had come to power after Statehood in 1959. The emphasis was on affordability and shared tastes such as raw fish.
This meant playing down religious differences, so no great emphasis on, say, the long tradition of meat avoidance among the Japanese Buddhists. Health, too, although still interpreted differently by, say, Chinese (hot and cold), Hawaiians (traditional herbal), and Anglos (calories, proteins, etc) took a second place.
Second, a cuisine has a preferred set of dishes, meals, and ways of eating.
Back to Local Food. The key meal was the plate lunch, a main meal primarily but not exclusively at midday, with lots of rice, meaty sides, Anglo-style gravy, macaroni salad, and soy available to add zest.
Lunch trucks, small store front restaurants, gas station saimin stands, okazuya, small local chains (Zippy’s), shave ice stands, and the beach were preferred places for eating. Pot lucks, including importantly at the opening of the Legislature, were common.
Meals were eaten with chopsticks not the hands (Hawaiian) or knives and forks (Anglo).
Third, a cuisine has a supporting system of preparing and processing raw materials, agriculture, and distribution.
Local Food, once more. Stove top cooking prevailed over underground pit cooking (Hawaiian) and oven baking (Anglo).
Most of the ingredients needed on a large scale (rice, for example) came from the mainland though carefully chosen for Local tastes (Japanese rice).
They were supported by a small army of local producers (mochi, Chinese noodles, malasadas, crack seed, picklers), growers (watercress), and retailers (mom and pop stores for every group).
All this neatly geographically bounded by the Pacific Ocean and that’s why I think Local Food merits the term cuisine.
Next up. Why do we need criteria for defining cuisines?
- What are regional cuisines? Reflections on Hawaii and other places
- It’s Not Just English Speakers: Culinary Newsletters and More in Spain and Mexico
What is a cuisine? I just read a book titled “Hoosh: Roast Penguin, Scurvy Day, and Other Stories of Antarctic Cuisine.” By the criteria in your fascinating post here, Antarctic cuisine is not a cuisine. But it’s still an intriguing idea. I used your list in my review of the book here:
https://maefood.blogspot.com/2018/08/seven-continents.html
best… mae at maefood.blogspot.com
Thanks, Mae. And how did I miss that book. It sounds fascinating even if Antarctic cuisine is not a “thing.”
If we apply your first your criterion, France has no cuisine!
Then, if there are criteria, the first will be the physical world around the eaters: geography and climate, availability of fuel and water, food security.
Hi Nick, Good to hear from you again. I’ll stand by my criteria! I’m hoping to do a follow up blog post in the next few days and will reply to your comment then.
Including “unifying philosophy” makes me think of religion- or ideology-influenced foods — for example, the reason most Indian food tastes at least a little similar is the Ayurvedic philosophy that associates health with combinations of spices.
That said, I do think cuisine is always evolving. Hard to imagine Ireland or Germany without potatoes, West Africa without cassava, India without chilies, Mexico without cheese and pork, Italy without tomatoes, and so on. So nothing stays the same — at least not completely the same.
The thing that currently is underscoring for me the variable nature of cuisine is trying to find places for dinner that my 92-year-old mother will recognize and enjoy. And then there is explaining the menu at the retirement home. Mom grew up in Chicago, so her food experience was wider than that of many people — but the dishes on the menu often look unfamiliar because the population of the retirement home is as diverse as the population of Chicago. (In fact, the cuisine of the Midwest is pretty hard to nail down, other than to point to the abundance of food and diversity of population.)
I’m kind of rambling — but this is a bit topic–and a moving target.
Yes, it is often religion. Or it may be politics. American cuisine through the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was strongly shaped by a republican aversion to aristocratic excess identified as French cuisine. Now health is driving a proliferation of cuisines in the US.
Yes, it is always evolving in techniques as much as in ingredients. But there are also rare but crucial periods of very rapid change.
On food for the elderly, I could go on and on. I shudder when I hear that retirement homes have hired chefs. My mother did not want chef-y food but the familiar dishes from earlier in life.
What I’m witnessing with my own mom is that the trick for retirement homes finding out what is familiar to whom. My mom often shows me the menu and demands, “who eats liver and onions” or “who has ever heard of something called country fried steak.” Mom great up with chef-y food (her mother had degrees in food science and home economics and, before marriage, had developed recipes for a major Canadian food company), so she’s hating the retirement home menu. And then there are all the special diets. So glad I don’t have to feed these folks.
Me too. In my Mother’s tiny retirement home there was a rather homogenous population, so it was just standard good English food. The cook, a lovely woman, tried serving boiled potatoes with the skin on. To the residents these were a sign of poverty, so there was a small revolution.