Evolving Recipes
I was sharing happy hour last night with a couple of friends, one of whom was from Serbia and the other with family in the Czech Republic. The latter was telling us about her family's kolaches, which she loved and how she and her beau looked for them while they were in teh Czech Republic, but could not find them made the same way that she had always known. Now, her family had moved across the ocean at the end of the 19th century, so she posited that in that time, the recipes and fillings had just naturally evolved, given time, distance from the source and preference/access to ingredients.
I then thought about how Irish Americans stereotypically (not always) eat corned beef and cabbage, which is a dish that I learned while living in Ireland is just not normal at all (at least in Cork, where I lived). I wanted to know if any of you have had simliar experiences, where you have discovered that a traditional food that you know/love has been changed over time from the original, "back in the old country"? Do you like the newer or the traditional versions better? What changes have you made to one, if any?
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4 Comments:
I think that even "back in the old country" things have changed. Just like in the US, I'm sure there are plenty of people taking advantage of canned goods, frozen foods, and spice mixes, among other things. At the same time, "foreign" foods are imported and integrated into the old cuisines. Sure, there are still traditional foods and recipes, but recipes and techniques evolve over time, whether they're in the original location or transported elsewhere.
When I was a kid, I thought my mother's ethnic cooking was "from the old country" and authentic. Now I know that my grandmother died when my mother was young, and mom grew up in an orphanage. I don't know if she learned to cook at all in the orphanage, but I'm sure she learned a lot of her cooking after she got out and got married, and she wasn't learning old family recipes then. She may, however, have learned from my father's mother, who was from the same "old country," but I don't know that for a fact. So the link to the old country is pretty slim, even though she had immigrant parents.
Now, I'm going back to old cookbooks and other people's old family recipes, and it's hard to get all the way back to anything original, since family recipes are unique and sometimes rely on local ingredients. Or they've been adapted to use easier commericially available ingredients. Just think about recipes that require cheese. Sure, some products are exported, but when you're faced with an old recipe that asks for fresh cheese, farmer's cheese or white cheese, it's anyone's guess what the recipe writer was using at the time.
dbcurrie at 1:24PM on 11/04/09
My dad is from Argentina and generations of my moms side have lived in Texas so my "old country" recipes focus heavily on various grilled meats with dry rubs. I spent a lot of my childhood in Brazil which has a large focus on the same.
Those don't ever seem to change. I add spices occasionally that wouldn't be used in South America but they cook with local spices, I have the luxury of grocery stores (and excess money to spend in them.)
I like to keep it traditional. My wife who's from Mexico does the same. However I can see an element of change when I see her using canned corn, and store bought tortillas, things that her grandmother and aunts and uncles wouldn't do in the old country, but at the same time when we're cooking something if she's unsure of an ingredient or two she calls mom, who learned from grandma, who learned from great-grandma, etc.
AyeEat at 3:48PM on 11/04/09
A personal experience is that in the US food is so much cheaper today than it was when are grandparents came, we use more of certain expensive ingredients. My grandmother's potica recipe calls for 1/3 the amount of nuts and filling than we like and currently use. The Kolaches my wife makes have more filling than her mother's. We use cream cheese instead of a dry farmers cheese etc. Americanized food is sweeter and richer than the originals quite often. We use all purpose flour instead of pastry flour in our cookies and bakery so out texture is often different. We short cut and modernize, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worst.
Meat guy at 4:00PM on 11/04/09
There's no difference between the Filipino food I've eaten in America or in Quezon City and Manila. Bibinka, puto, leche flan, pancit, lumpia, adobo and anything else--eating any of that at Aunt Paulina's house here is exactly like eating at Aunt Luming's house there.
Japanese food, on the other hand, suffers during the trip overseas. I don't know what makes it different--it's like it's missing 10% of the flavor here in the states.
Meat guy: I have an aunt-in-law who's Bohemian. She taught me how to stretch a batch of potica dough until it covered the entire top of the kitchen table like a tablecloth and to roll it up real tight. Out of all the versions I've tried, hers is the best because it has lots and lots of flaky layers in the spiral slices. No one else takes the time to do that--they roll out the dough instead of stretching it, and the result is little different than a cinnamon roll.
Traveller: I have four recipes for kolache. My mother's recipe is for "kolacky" and it calls for cornstarch in the sugar-cookie-like dough, which is rolled into a log, refrigerated, sliced, topped with a spoonful of Solo filling and baked. My Filipino mother got the recipe from my German dad's German sister-in-law.
The second recipe is also a cookie; it's the one on the back of the can of Solo filling. The third recipe is from an Italian sister-in-law--it's the Solo recipe with a half-cup of ground walnuts thrown into the dough, and it's the one we love most.
The fourth recipe is from a Czech friend. This one is more like a pastry. It's a yeast dough that is formed into small balls, which are allowed to rise, poked with a thumb, filled with fruit filling, baked, the dusted with powdered sugar. I'd guess that this is the most authentic recipe.
betteirene at 2:40AM on 11/05/09