I will leave that fic in my little list of Somedays. I really need to focus and finish one or the other or the other or...
The whole idea of having a well-defined regional identity and cuisine is... I mean, it's more nebulous than it seems, anywhere, I'm sure! But the US has this... like... national obsession with default-ness, I think. We are allowed to be Super Into bits of our identity that are approved, but anything we do that's genuinely different is pretty heavily suppressed from within. And viewing yourself as The Default is surprisingly... flattening, I think. Like, I know academically that i have an accent, but I don't actually recognize that. (Audio recordings are a bit traumatic, honestly.) And I know that the foods in my vernacular do constitute a unique cuisine of some kind, but I am genuinely baffled at how to categorize it.
Like... out here, 300 miles west of where I grew up, there are a lot of vernacular foods, but almost all of them I can easily call to mind are *restaurant* food, requiring equipment no one has in their homes to properly make. (Commercial pizza ovens and deep fryers and meat slicers yield drastically different results than home equipment.) Pizza, wings, beef on weck sandwiches-- nobody can make those at home. They're things you buy. If you ask people about Buffalo food, it's all these restaurant things they come up with. My home region, though, is defined not really by cities, and we didn't really have many local restaurants when I was a child, so there's not the same commercial-food identity. I ate only at chain restaurants with corporate menus, as a child; the Friendly's in Troy has an identical menu to the Friendly's in Los Angeles, because that's how corporate chains work.
Homemade foods, though-- I mean, a lot of people have Legendary Family Recipes for things like chili or Italian red sauce. When Dude's Gram died, as she was not yet cold the various family members stood around her deathbed (i am not exaggerating, we arrived just after they had turned off the screaming flatline heart monitor and pulled the sheet up, and this conversation occurred immediately) and listed off her various important family recipes to find out who had inherited them. (Dude's sister has the German potato salad recipe and won't give it to us. It involves inordinate vinegar. I grew up never having eaten German potato salad, though, so I've no idea how it compares to normal.) So there are definitely traditional things, and they definitely vary significantly by... striation, but what those striations specifically are, it's hard to say.
And the stuff you just eat every day for dinner-- I mean, clearly, there's regional identities in that. (my mother's meatloaf and Dude's mother's meatloaf are significantly different animals; his mom's has vegetables in it, which I find puzzling.) (both mothers made mostly recipes out of cookbooks, and often the same cookbooks, but the daughter of 11 generations of Americans is going to have different seasoning tastes than the daughter of Latvian refugees... but it's subtle.)
It is all very interesting to contemplate and clearly, I have absolutely zero expertise or academic background in any of this.
And oh, another dimension even-- Farmsister worked as a pastry chef in the Midwest, before farming, and she and my mother now have a long-running one-upmanship kind of relationship over their pie crusts. My mother religiously relies upon Crisco, and my sister will only use home-rendered lard. My mother talks a big line about local foods, but my sister special-orders her flour in bulk from a local mill, and won't cook with anything else, and in her quest for efficiency has eliminated all white flours from her house and now only has whole wheat. It is fascinating to live through, and of course, if they both make pies, I win, so.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2018-12-06 08:39 pm (UTC)The whole idea of having a well-defined regional identity and cuisine is... I mean, it's more nebulous than it seems, anywhere, I'm sure! But the US has this... like... national obsession with default-ness, I think. We are allowed to be Super Into bits of our identity that are approved, but anything we do that's genuinely different is pretty heavily suppressed from within.
And viewing yourself as The Default is surprisingly... flattening, I think. Like, I know academically that i have an accent, but I don't actually recognize that. (Audio recordings are a bit traumatic, honestly.) And I know that the foods in my vernacular do constitute a unique cuisine of some kind, but I am genuinely baffled at how to categorize it.
Like... out here, 300 miles west of where I grew up, there are a lot of vernacular foods, but almost all of them I can easily call to mind are *restaurant* food, requiring equipment no one has in their homes to properly make. (Commercial pizza ovens and deep fryers and meat slicers yield drastically different results than home equipment.) Pizza, wings, beef on weck sandwiches-- nobody can make those at home. They're things you buy. If you ask people about Buffalo food, it's all these restaurant things they come up with.
My home region, though, is defined not really by cities, and we didn't really have many local restaurants when I was a child, so there's not the same commercial-food identity. I ate only at chain restaurants with corporate menus, as a child; the Friendly's in Troy has an identical menu to the Friendly's in Los Angeles, because that's how corporate chains work.
Homemade foods, though-- I mean, a lot of people have Legendary Family Recipes for things like chili or Italian red sauce. When Dude's Gram died, as she was not yet cold the various family members stood around her deathbed (i am not exaggerating, we arrived just after they had turned off the screaming flatline heart monitor and pulled the sheet up, and this conversation occurred immediately) and listed off her various important family recipes to find out who had inherited them. (Dude's sister has the German potato salad recipe and won't give it to us. It involves inordinate vinegar. I grew up never having eaten German potato salad, though, so I've no idea how it compares to normal.)
So there are definitely traditional things, and they definitely vary significantly by... striation, but what those striations specifically are, it's hard to say.
And the stuff you just eat every day for dinner-- I mean, clearly, there's regional identities in that. (my mother's meatloaf and Dude's mother's meatloaf are significantly different animals; his mom's has vegetables in it, which I find puzzling.) (both mothers made mostly recipes out of cookbooks, and often the same cookbooks, but the daughter of 11 generations of Americans is going to have different seasoning tastes than the daughter of Latvian refugees... but it's subtle.)
It is all very interesting to contemplate and clearly, I have absolutely zero expertise or academic background in any of this.
And oh, another dimension even-- Farmsister worked as a pastry chef in the Midwest, before farming, and she and my mother now have a long-running one-upmanship kind of relationship over their pie crusts. My mother religiously relies upon Crisco, and my sister will only use home-rendered lard. My mother talks a big line about local foods, but my sister special-orders her flour in bulk from a local mill, and won't cook with anything else, and in her quest for efficiency has eliminated all white flours from her house and now only has whole wheat. It is fascinating to live through, and of course, if they both make pies, I win, so.