Synthesis: ethnic food is legitimately the best, but mostly because it's a crazy mishmash of influences, not because it's somehow "pure" or "foreign".
You can't do better for comfort food than a Mission burrito (invented by Mexican corner groceries in Sixties SF) with al pastor pork (adobo-style pineapple sauce, Lebanese cooking method), sour cream (Eastern European by way of the Northeastern US), and shredded cheese and lettuce (extremely American fixings).
"And while they probably weren’t Mongolian to begin with, it was our dining companion Genghis Khan who was ultimately responsible for their spread across Eurasia." True, and you can tell that because they contain wheat flour. Moreover, if you find a Mongolian dish with flour, the name is 95% likely to be Chinese. Khuushuur is huashao'r: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%81%AB%E7%87%92%E5%85%92_(%E8%92%99%E5%8F%A4%E9%A3%9F%E5%93%81), mantuu is mantou: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantou, and buuz is baozi by name but in fact refer to steamed "pot stickers," zhengjiao: https://www.tasteatlas.com/zhengjiao . In fact, the terminology for these dishes is systematic and interestingly different from the Chinese. As I explained in a lecture on culture I gave to a bunch of American undergrads who came to Mongolia for a zoological expedition, what Chinese call small jiaozi or zhengjiao are bansh (from a different Chinese term, bianshi, so it sort of lines up with Chinese usage; however, in Mongolia you usually boil them in milk tea for breakfast, which is very very non-Chinese); if the meat is inside an unleavened shell, it's called buuz; a steamed leavened bun is called mantuu (this one lines up with Chinese usage); and if it is meat inside a steamed leavened bun, Chinese baozi, it's called mantuun buuz: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=mantuun+buuz&mid=5E099BDDF50587D003925E099BDDF50587D00392&mmscn=stvo&FORM=VIRE . (This was of course one of their two favorite parts of the lecture.)
As an amusing dessert to that linguistic feast, Mongols even have moon cakes, yuebing, only they make them from flour instead of red bean paste, and fill them with things like cinnamon and sugar. They're called yeeveng and I suspect started in Inner Mongolia. These are examples of the ceremonial ones you stack up at the big feasts: https://www.olz.mn/product/21833
And it's an interesting field of thought, to see how modern day state-subsidized foods cook their consumers...examples abound at every American gas station and Walmart.
It makes a lot of sense that the cooking would be a marker of civilization, even just by making food safer to eat. With all the issues of unsafe water and cross-contamination in ancient urban environments, raw food was a tough sell.
Or think of the air of sophistication in drinking hot tea or water with a lemon wedge — both civilizational solutions to making water safer!
So there's an interesting irony that eating raw food feels like a return to nature, when you could also think of it as a fruit of high civilization. We got so civilized that we made raw food pretty safe, standing on top of our very civilized sewage treatments and sanitary codes. Now we get the freedom to be "uncivilized" again!
"This particular kind of hierarchical thinking survived into the early modern period, when Tudor doctors confidently explained that the stomach of a laborer, burning hotly to fuel his brute physical tasks, would immediately burn up the refined foods appropriate for a gentleman, while a gentleman’s digestion would be too moderate to extract any benefit from the coarse meals of a ploughman."
It's easy to be dismissive of this, but I wonder if there could be a kernel of truth to this thinking. It's pretty clear that being abruptly introduced to modern diets is bad for the health of a lot of aboriginal peoples. Similarly, tolerance of lactose or alcohol varies by location. Could medieval elites have been genetically distinct enough from the people they ruled to have a noticeable difference in what foods they could tolerate? Or if not that, would exposure to more foods from a young age cause a gentleman to have a wider range of foods he could eat without some kind of negative biological reaction?
BTW, I am raising money for my Blue Apron meets 23andMe startup, where we send you meal kits to cook the foods to which your ancestors were genetically adapted.
I can imagine this particular business idea being hugely popular with SWPL types if it happens in 2011, then denounced as unthinkably racist and possibly criminal if it happens in 2018 instead.
Me, I have an iron stomach that will eat anything (making me middle class in Tudor terms).
There is (or at least was) a movement to get black people eating West African foods -- lots of millet, yams, greens -- for health reasons. Kevin Twitty gets into it in "The Cooking Gene," which is actually a pretty good read.
My guess is that if there is a difference in digestion, it has more to do with microbiome and habituation than genes. The shift from a pretty bland diet of whole grains and legumes to one rich in meat, dairy fats, etc. (or vice versa) can be hard on the body for a bit! But I don’t know enough of the science on blood pressure, diabetes, etc. in groups recently introduced to an industrialized diet to know how quickly new genes can spread.
I'd also lean towards that explanation, since humans have switched diets often and fast enough with seemingly relatively little long-term negative effects. And it fits well with humans already being omnivores anyway.
But we do have a particularly obvious example for genetic differences in lactose-(in-)tolerance, which also has a very clear & distinct geographic pattern. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of the digestive issues some modern people seem to have stem from some kind of unexpected mismatch between their "biologically intended" diet vs all the fun new stuff that we can now cram into our food.
And, while generally genes also can spread faster than most people think (though it's rarely truly "new" variants), for modern cuisine I think it has more to do with simple pre-existing genetic diversity. This gets a bit more speculative, but I'd assume it's more like having a specific variant that makes a protein shaped in a slightly different way that in the ancestral diet wouldn't have made a difference, but causes trouble when interacting with some relatively modern ubiquitous additive.
Such variants would only be subject to genetic drift and can have become common either in entire larger ethnic groups or just in specific local groups long before modern cuisine arrives. And as long as the trouble is not debilitating, it would still be more or less unselected, especially if you consider that people do adapt with simple trial and error. So it wouldn't vanish, either.
My father spent four years in an other ranks German prison camp before escaping to the advancing Red Army in 1945. He said that when (American) food parcels reached the camp in which Russians stored allied PoWs, some of his fellow inmates gorged themselves on the unaccustomed riches. Two or three died of the resultant dysentery. And a Tudor labourer's diet will not have been better than a German prisoner of war (unless the PoW was Russian).
Synthesis: ethnic food is legitimately the best, but mostly because it's a crazy mishmash of influences, not because it's somehow "pure" or "foreign".
You can't do better for comfort food than a Mission burrito (invented by Mexican corner groceries in Sixties SF) with al pastor pork (adobo-style pineapple sauce, Lebanese cooking method), sour cream (Eastern European by way of the Northeastern US), and shredded cheese and lettuce (extremely American fixings).
Great review!
"And while they probably weren’t Mongolian to begin with, it was our dining companion Genghis Khan who was ultimately responsible for their spread across Eurasia." True, and you can tell that because they contain wheat flour. Moreover, if you find a Mongolian dish with flour, the name is 95% likely to be Chinese. Khuushuur is huashao'r: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%81%AB%E7%87%92%E5%85%92_(%E8%92%99%E5%8F%A4%E9%A3%9F%E5%93%81), mantuu is mantou: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantou, and buuz is baozi by name but in fact refer to steamed "pot stickers," zhengjiao: https://www.tasteatlas.com/zhengjiao . In fact, the terminology for these dishes is systematic and interestingly different from the Chinese. As I explained in a lecture on culture I gave to a bunch of American undergrads who came to Mongolia for a zoological expedition, what Chinese call small jiaozi or zhengjiao are bansh (from a different Chinese term, bianshi, so it sort of lines up with Chinese usage; however, in Mongolia you usually boil them in milk tea for breakfast, which is very very non-Chinese); if the meat is inside an unleavened shell, it's called buuz; a steamed leavened bun is called mantuu (this one lines up with Chinese usage); and if it is meat inside a steamed leavened bun, Chinese baozi, it's called mantuun buuz: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=mantuun+buuz&mid=5E099BDDF50587D003925E099BDDF50587D00392&mmscn=stvo&FORM=VIRE . (This was of course one of their two favorite parts of the lecture.)
As an amusing dessert to that linguistic feast, Mongols even have moon cakes, yuebing, only they make them from flour instead of red bean paste, and fill them with things like cinnamon and sugar. They're called yeeveng and I suspect started in Inner Mongolia. These are examples of the ceremonial ones you stack up at the big feasts: https://www.olz.mn/product/21833
Another beautiful review
Them Shangz wuz cooking PEOPLE in them cauldrons.
And it's an interesting field of thought, to see how modern day state-subsidized foods cook their consumers...examples abound at every American gas station and Walmart.
Wonderful review, Mrs. Psmith!
I recommend “The Taste of Empire: How Britain's Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World”, by Lizzie Collingham for those interested in such books
Wow, another review from Jane Psmith!
The French learned a lot from the Italians, as mentioned in a Nero Wolf story.
As a native Manhattanite, I have always wondered about the similarity of Kreplach and Wontons.
Now, I suspect it was the Mongolians.
Can we get more math book reviews from your husband?
Great review!
It makes a lot of sense that the cooking would be a marker of civilization, even just by making food safer to eat. With all the issues of unsafe water and cross-contamination in ancient urban environments, raw food was a tough sell.
Or think of the air of sophistication in drinking hot tea or water with a lemon wedge — both civilizational solutions to making water safer!
So there's an interesting irony that eating raw food feels like a return to nature, when you could also think of it as a fruit of high civilization. We got so civilized that we made raw food pretty safe, standing on top of our very civilized sewage treatments and sanitary codes. Now we get the freedom to be "uncivilized" again!
For those who want to learn more about cooking history i recommend the Tasting History and History in Taberna youtube channels.
"This particular kind of hierarchical thinking survived into the early modern period, when Tudor doctors confidently explained that the stomach of a laborer, burning hotly to fuel his brute physical tasks, would immediately burn up the refined foods appropriate for a gentleman, while a gentleman’s digestion would be too moderate to extract any benefit from the coarse meals of a ploughman."
It's easy to be dismissive of this, but I wonder if there could be a kernel of truth to this thinking. It's pretty clear that being abruptly introduced to modern diets is bad for the health of a lot of aboriginal peoples. Similarly, tolerance of lactose or alcohol varies by location. Could medieval elites have been genetically distinct enough from the people they ruled to have a noticeable difference in what foods they could tolerate? Or if not that, would exposure to more foods from a young age cause a gentleman to have a wider range of foods he could eat without some kind of negative biological reaction?
BTW, I am raising money for my Blue Apron meets 23andMe startup, where we send you meal kits to cook the foods to which your ancestors were genetically adapted.
I can imagine this particular business idea being hugely popular with SWPL types if it happens in 2011, then denounced as unthinkably racist and possibly criminal if it happens in 2018 instead.
Me, I have an iron stomach that will eat anything (making me middle class in Tudor terms).
There is (or at least was) a movement to get black people eating West African foods -- lots of millet, yams, greens -- for health reasons. Kevin Twitty gets into it in "The Cooking Gene," which is actually a pretty good read.
My guess is that if there is a difference in digestion, it has more to do with microbiome and habituation than genes. The shift from a pretty bland diet of whole grains and legumes to one rich in meat, dairy fats, etc. (or vice versa) can be hard on the body for a bit! But I don’t know enough of the science on blood pressure, diabetes, etc. in groups recently introduced to an industrialized diet to know how quickly new genes can spread.
I'd also lean towards that explanation, since humans have switched diets often and fast enough with seemingly relatively little long-term negative effects. And it fits well with humans already being omnivores anyway.
But we do have a particularly obvious example for genetic differences in lactose-(in-)tolerance, which also has a very clear & distinct geographic pattern. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if some of the digestive issues some modern people seem to have stem from some kind of unexpected mismatch between their "biologically intended" diet vs all the fun new stuff that we can now cram into our food.
And, while generally genes also can spread faster than most people think (though it's rarely truly "new" variants), for modern cuisine I think it has more to do with simple pre-existing genetic diversity. This gets a bit more speculative, but I'd assume it's more like having a specific variant that makes a protein shaped in a slightly different way that in the ancestral diet wouldn't have made a difference, but causes trouble when interacting with some relatively modern ubiquitous additive.
Such variants would only be subject to genetic drift and can have become common either in entire larger ethnic groups or just in specific local groups long before modern cuisine arrives. And as long as the trouble is not debilitating, it would still be more or less unselected, especially if you consider that people do adapt with simple trial and error. So it wouldn't vanish, either.
My father spent four years in an other ranks German prison camp before escaping to the advancing Red Army in 1945. He said that when (American) food parcels reached the camp in which Russians stored allied PoWs, some of his fellow inmates gorged themselves on the unaccustomed riches. Two or three died of the resultant dysentery. And a Tudor labourer's diet will not have been better than a German prisoner of war (unless the PoW was Russian).