Quote:
Originally Posted by CityTech
I doubt we'll ever see "North Americanized" Middle Eastern or West African cuisine the way chop suey or spaghetti and meatballs are for Chinese and Italian cuisine.
|
Well, you do have something like Halifax donair for a Canadian example of Middle Eastern (I think said to date to the 70s though), and in New York city and spreading elsewhere internationally, there's the famous "Halal Guys" American chain/food cart phenomenon.
For West African cuisine, there's the argument that actually many West African influences survive in the western hemisphere through the African diaspora, even those surviving the slave trade (eg. Soul food in African American cuisine has black-eyed peas from west Africa, Jambalaya in Louisiana may be influenced by both west African Jollof rice as well as Spanish/French Provençal cuisine).
To your point about globalization doing away with the pressure that created "new cuisines" due to necessity (substituting hard to get ingredients in the New World for old country ones), that's true. But I still wouldn't put it past people to create new cuisines by deliberate experiment and trial and error and in that way still create "new cuisines" (yes, I know "fusion" cuisine gets a lot of flak for being oversold), even if not in the old style of substituting and swapping ingredients out of necessity rather than choice.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rousseau
Well, they're not opening up new Canadian-Chinese restaurants anymore, but really good Chinese restaurants with authentic dishes are popping up all over larger cities to cater to Chinese immigrants and students, and my impression is that there is a spillover effect into the non-Chinese population.
I don't have statistics, but you can tell that there are a lot fewer mom and pop Italian and Greek restaurants in Toronto and Hamilton than there used to be, and they're not being replaced. These days any new Italian eatery opening up is going to go for authenticity, not "whatsamatter for you?"
I'm not sure how much I trust my own perceptions on this, as my more than passing acquaintance with the "Chinese world" hinders my objectivity, but my take: Tex-Mex tastes as good or better to the North American palate than what you actually get in Mexico because it exaggerates the base Mexican flavours in a way that you can't do with Chinese cuisine. The flavours in American/Canadian-Chinese cuisine are really different from what you get in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia (not to mention the extreme lack of variety), whereas any Mexican will recognize the flavours in Tex-Mex food and readily scarf it down.
By contrast, you don't see recent Chinese immigrants in Canadian-Chinese restaurants. Well, unless they're in a smaller locale where it's the only game in town. But they won't be eating sweet and sour chicken balls.
My suspicion is that the non-Chinese children of people who grew up eating Canadian-Chinese sweet and sour chicken balls will eventually be won over by the vastly superior flavours and variety offered by authentic Chinese food, not least because people these days tend to be concerned with authenticity in a way that previous generations weren't. I could be wrong, though. Maybe it's only the large-scale immigration from China that's driving the Chinese food revolution in Canada.
|
Another thing that I wonder about. People talk a lot about how you need immigrants from X country to genuinely maintain authenticity. But in theory, why couldn't you get cuisines maintained by people who genuinely like a cuisine and want to cook it at home.
Why couldn't you get non-Chinese people to make authentic Chinese cuisine or non-Italians to make authentic Italian?
We already have this kind of attitude for example, for fine dining, we don't expect a French chef to be always the one to be making French cuisine nor do we expect that the only way to get "real" French food is to import French immigrants. It's expected that people can pick it up, regardless of their ancestry or cultural background.
You can be a French literature professor and not have any French ancestry or be an expert in Chinese martial arts or Arabic calligraphy and not have Chinese or Arab ancestry, after all.
Prev
Linear Mode
