Cuisines

Among my Osher Lifelong Learning Institute courses for this semester is one on the history or food, which is not what it is really about.  A more accurate description would be a list of recognizable cuisines from different geographic districts of Western Europe.  Thinking like an American, a Kosher one at that, makes the understanding of this more difficult.  I have no regional cuisine, as much as making an elegant dinner, as I did for Rosh Hashana, challenges me.  My 23 and Me profile has me unequivalently identified as Ashkenazic origin, as were my grandmother's culinary roots, but I have been imprinted by cookbooks and diverse availability of food.  Since my dietary restrictions keep me from sampling a lot of restaurants, anything of meat origin has to be made at home.  I make Hamburgers, meat loaf, clops from ground beef, chicken in every which way, steaks that would pass in Texas, and stew as cholent or hamin.  Desserts are usually baked.  I've made linzertorte with no idea of its Austrian origins, apple walnut pie and oatmeat chocolate chip cookies of Philadelphia lineage, and torta del rey from an Italian Kosher cookbook.  Baklava is a lot of work, but I've done it.  Apple strudel may be overdue.  Fish is what they have at Shop-rite which becomes gravlax, seared tuna or coulibiac.  They each have a regional origin, but importation of ingredients and availability of recipes has undermined any authenticity.

I suspect the regional European cuisines have similar challenges to authenticity.  In this era of Autobahn and Aldi's, to say nothing of German populations shifts of two world wars, I think my skepticism of what distinguishes Munich from Cologne is justified.  Borders have been historically fluid.  Is Swiss chees made in Switzerland really better than Swiss cheese made commercially in Wisconsin?  In America where about half the Kosher restaurants are Chinese, the proprietors and chefs are not.  I would expect that a German or French restaurant of the upper echelon in America would be founded and run by somebody who trained in those regions rather than a native.  And the people preparing the food are as likely to be undocumented people keeping a low profile as trained chefs trying to have their own place one day.

I guess there are some regional ingredients that survive.  Crabs from the Chesapeake, gooey butter cake which I've not seen on a menu outside St. Louis despite its ease of preparation, abalone that I have only seen on menus in California.  But mostly we have commercial agriculture and ranching, refrigerated shipping and rail cars, reality TV of megaharvests of whatever in the Bering Sea.  Purity of cusine is just hard to sustain.