Cookaholics Bulletin Board

An interesting take on food authenticity by New York chef Sara Jenkins.

In Italian Food, What's Authentic and Does It Really Even Matter?

Personally, I find the premise of the article to be dated.

Of course it's okay to update classic food. If any of us tried to cook directly from the recipes that inspired modern cuisine, we'd all be shaking our heads at some of the ingredients and/or techniques.

Would anyone complain about the Model T being updated? Would anyone say Pollock or Klimt is a lesser artist because they didn't follow "the rules?"

I find articles like this annoying, as the authors simply are too bored or too old-fashioned to accept new ideas. I appreciate the complaints against lazy chefs who try to make classic dishes with sub-standard substitutions, but really...it's not an overall valid argument.

Long live 'modernist' cuisine!

Amy

I never have quite figured out the "everything’s ok" mentality, we all know that certain cheeses, wines, etc. (heavy on the etc.) authenticity is driven by where / how, it was produced.

We know that California cannot produce an authentic XXXXX wine, or Wisconsin a XXXXX cheese.

They very well might be able to produce a similar (perhaps even better) product but not an authentic one.

Why is that so hard to accept? Model T's should always be model T's, New models should be Model U's

Sorry Frank, completely disagree with you. And, find your argument to be lacking.

California (and most of the 'new world') produce some of the finest wines in the world. Does that mean their Pinot Noir is less 'authentic' than a Burgundy? Of course not.

Does making a 'Model U' mean it's lesser an automobile than a 'Model T?' Of course not.

Just sayin'.

Amy

Because it depends on an authority figure to define what is authentic. People who tell me that a dish is not authentic almost invariably have assigned themselves the role of authority figure (or interpretation of it), but I see no reason at all why I should accept that. Who made them ruler of classification?

Your Model T example is poor because it is a brand, not a idea. "Italian Food" is either a) food from italy, in which case a Big Mac from there is Italian food or b) an idea, a kind of meta-recipe or cuisine.

The problem is that meta-recipes don't translate to recipes very cleanly. There are recipes we can probably put up against the idea and judge to not be Italian (I don't see how Pho could meet Italian, even if I couldn't put an exact finger on it) but to eliminate dishes solely on a single ingredient is to try to take the meta-recipe and make it concrete, and it isn't. I guess you could call it a philosophy. The problem is even that is wildly variable. What a northern Italian considers the 'right' idea will be quite different then what a southern Italian considers. Even if you went crazy and compiled all Italian recipe and and made a master ingredient list, and said anything that varied outside of that list was not Italian, you would numerous problems.

First, and foremost, your selection of what constituted an "Italian" recipe would be problematic. Do you take a recipe involving Kraft cheese slices as Italian? The article alludes to a local restaurant in Italy using it. If you refuse to take that recipe, then now all you're doing is cherry picking your data to fit your preconception. If you do take it, suddenly you'll have a recipe which will be giving people heart attacks as it's not authentic cuisine. This is not even to start on the zillion other problems. I bet some Italian places make a stir fry. Does that make it Italian? Why not? At some point new imported dishes morph and become part of the 'native' cuisine.

Secondly, even if you did have an agreed upon list of ingredients, you could easily combine those ingredients in new ways that would be judged by most to not be characteristic of the cuisine. You could just drive it down to an 'approved' list of recipes, I suppose, but then you just have a stagnant cuisine that likely no one really agrees with, because every region (or village) will have their "own" way.

Really, all you end up with is a tautology. X is not "Italian" because we have defined "Italian" as not including X, and where "we" is some ill-defined group of people we can't name, can't identify, but "they say" it is just that way.

I don't accept blind statements of authority in just about anything else, I don't see why I should accept it about cuisine.

I maintain there is only one authentic "Amy" argument lacking or not...

Awwww...

You are too sweet.

Amy

Another insightful response from Paul. I'll try to add to it a little bit.

Actually, the article, if you read it, is quite thoughtful and addresses the issue of authenticity will all of the ambiguity that it deserves. Fie on the NYT editor for choosing a pull quote which means something completely different out of context.

7x7 magazine also tackled this issue a while ago with contrasting profiles of chefs Paula Wolfert and Mourad Lahlou ( clickety ). Wolfert makes "authentic" Moroccan cuisine because she researches and produces historically an culturally accurate dishes from all over Morocco. Lahlou make "authentic" Moroccan cuisine because he is a Moroccan chef, innovating with Moroccan spices, flavors and ingredients to produce new dishes.

The problem is that the word "authentic" means different things depending on who is speaking. Authentic cuisine can be:

1. traditional
2. of the correct national origin (i.e. a Basque making Basque food)
3. true to the spirit, flavors, and methods of the cuisine

Different people have different opinions on whether A, B, or C are more important, and this leads to a lot of arguing. Frequently, chefs who are not of the nationality of the cuisine become obsessed with historical accuracy and use the word "authentic" as a skewer with which to pierce their born-to-the-cuisine colleagues. Some of this is competitiveness ("I'm more authentically Italian than Mr. Batali!") and part of it is an inferiority complex ("I'll never be as Italian as Mr. Batali.").

For my part, while I enjoy tremendously trying to recreate traditional dishes of various cuisines, I am aware that food traditions are seldom more than a couple generations old. And every traditional food was once an innovation or an import.

I redact Medieval recipes for fun. Working from translations of old documents, my friends and I work to try to create a food that (as far as we know) hasn't been made in hundreds of years.
The recipes are often sketchy on details, instead telling you to do things with "enough" stock, or to cook until "done".
I often remind people that the dishes we thus create may well be very tasty, and may well resemble the originals, but that they are at best approximations of the originals, and that we have no way to do more. This has lead to arguments about how one illustration must be interpreted one way, and not any other.
With my knowledge of ingredients and cooking methods, I could make a dish in the "Spanish Style of 1250", but it would have no claims to doing anything more than feeling authentic.
Of modern cuisines, (or at least of current cookery) I think the perceived age of a variation feels more authentic, as does the point of origin of a recipe.
Also in the NYTimes was an article about key lime pie. The author harbored romantic notions about what the condensed milk replaced in an "original" version. They were quite surprised to find out that the recipe was developed using sweetened condensed milk.

I think we all know where this is heading...

Currently checking my powder...

Jimbo...good bait