Aliette de Bodard, a Vietnamese-French award winning sci-fi and fantasy author, made some valid points on the question of what constitutes 'authentic' food on her blog. These excerpts give you the flavor, pun intended, of her observations: "What makes an authentic recipe? What is and is not an acceptable
variant? [1] How should a cuisine as a whole be judged? Because truth
is, like cultures, cuisines merge and adapt, and evolve. Sometimes, they
adapt because they don’t have basic ingredients: there’s a very cute
Vietnamese cookbook in French, Le Chant du Riz Pilé (Song of
Crushed/Ground Rice), which makes do without half the Vietnamese
staples, because it’s an old book and those staples weren’t available in
France at the time." ... "In the specific case of immigrants, new dishes become created, whether for the diaspora or for a foreign audience: General Tsao’s Chicken
is a pretty good example of a typical Chinese-American dish that you
won’t find in Chinese restaurants in France (and, if Wikipedia is
correct, which isn’t always the case, a dish that the Chinese in China
didn’t much appreciate)."..."There’s also the “restaurant effect”: restaurants tend to serve festive
food that you can’t make at home; therefore, most people’s perception of
foreign cuisines is really skewed, because the signature dishes tend to
be extravagant dishes that are only served for feasts. One good
example in France is chả giò, fried rolls, which everyone associates
with Vietnamese cuisine in spite of the fact that it’s hardly part of an
every day Vietnamese meal."
In : Culture and cuisine
Tags:
authenticity
alliete de bodard
vietnamese food