Last time I reorganised my kitchen cupboards I decided to sort ingredients by cuisine, rather than type. My first go involved splitting into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, SE Asian, Mexican, and "white people food", but when the last pile turned out to be just popcorn kernels and a solitary tin of cannelini beans I reallocated that shelf to my collection of dried chillies. 🤭
If, like me, you don't really enjoy eating meat, traditional British cuisine doesn't have anything to offer except puddings. French food is grim, overwrought and drowning in sauce. Italian food is magical until you ask them to cook a vegetable. Central and Eastern European food is just stodge with extra stodge. Spanish and Greek both are great in their own ways, but a big chunk of that comes from their locations and histories.
I'm becoming more and more interested in West African food (Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia especially), but so far I've only enjoyed those in restaurants. I want to try making domoda, a Gambian peanut butter stew that doesn't look like an impossible place to start. ('pologies for the essay)
I think you've summed up the different cuisines of the world perfectly and with great wit. I'm puzzled by the food of South America where the climate allows for the growing of wonderful fruits but the range of vegetables, though reasonably broad, is pretty uniformally treated, in a fashion that makes most meals very heavy to digest in that heat. Maize and beans and rice and cassava and yams and moles? Digestively explosive! Like the Italians, little interest in salads. Or have I just missed out on them? I spent three days on a local water bus ferry down the Amazon, sleeping on the deck under the hammocks of Native Amazon passengers, all of us fed beans and rice or rice and beans. Not a menu to suit lying under people.
It is very heavy! But to me no different to Indian food, where a lot of the diet is pulses, potato, rice... I think it's true cocina povera, in that the goal was to maximise calories for minimum cost, and now it's become identity/heritage.
And if I wanted to be glib I could point out that one of the world's greatest salads was invented in Mexico City... (The Caesar, which to be fair was invented by a chef trying to appeal to the American tourist palate.)
But you're not going to get much fresh veg eaten as we think of it in Europe. Maybe that's the lack of refrigeration? My cupboards are full of tinned and pickled bits for Mexican food, cactus leaves and courgette flowers as well as infinite chillies either pickled or preserved in sauce (chuck whole tin in blender, use as marinade/dressing).
When I think salads in LatAm my brain either goes to nopales and chayote (cactus paddles and what SE Asia calls chow chow) or to the whole ceviche/aguachile spectrum. If prawns can be a cocktail, fish can be a salad!
Also don't forget that the salsas do a lot of heavy lifting in the fresh veg stakes, from pico de gallo to tomatillo and beyond. If I was making a salsa from scratch I'd start by charring onions, chillies, and (often) tomato/tomatillo, blend or pound those, and then start adding diced fresh things (mango, raw onion, fresh tomato, corn, etc, all recipe-dependent), so that's where the freshness and vitamins can be found.
I’m not a huge fan of meat either. We discovered a wonderful restaurant here in MD near DC named Sheba Éthiopien Restaurant. It is owned by 3 sisters. Much of their menu is vegan or vegetarian. Injera bread & berbere sauce are sooooo good.
I love the way they give you a million small curries to try! I've not been to your restaurant, but my neighbourhood in London has a sizeable East African population, so we've got loads of Ethiopian and Somali restaurants that are as much community centres as they are places to eat. So cheap, and very yummy!
I'm really not familiar with Ethiopian cuisine, though I have eaten it in Adams Morgan. I suspect it was during a period, though, where it was compromised to sell as it was too unfamiliar at the time. There are fine Ethiopian restaurants in London I should try.
Hear, hear! A recipe is a moment frozen in time -- of the author, of the cuisine, of the history of the dish, of the cook who recreates it. It is story telling of all five senses. It is how we connect with the past + with the future. Thank you, Julia!
You are so right! And it's also so tactile and sensuous. One of the things people who get deliveries of food prepped ready to cook according to instructions miss out on is the slicing of a knife through different textures, the moment when that eggshell suddenly gives up and delivers the egg into your palm and when the blanched skin of a tomato slips off like a sock.
I am a cook, there are tried and true battered cookbooks, a magazine that comes monthly to try something new, various sites that send me recipes. I like to “read” cookbooks, I have memories of filling my Nonna around and stopping to measure what was in her hand as I wrote up her recipes.
Putting a good meal on the table is love to me, and since I enjoy cooking, it is not a chore. Most days I just put things together because I know how!
It not only isn't a chore, it is a move away from the day's chores into creativity and relaxation and celebration. And, as you point out, a demonstration of love. For some people, it's the way they are happiest to convey how they feel.
What a nice perspective about cookbooks versus YouTube. I’ve often watched the videos & sometimes see a mistake which isn’t mentioned. The same goes for the concept of the celebrity chefs on tv. It’s more hype than serious cooking. I miss real cooks on tv, such as Julia Child & Sarah Moulton. (So?)
As to takeout culture, I find it to be appalling. We recently had 2 family members in our home & they wanted to eat each & every meal out. It’s unhealthy!
Your duck recipe looks wonderful. We will be in France next month & I just may buy 4 duck legs for dinner one night when guests are over.
As always, many thanks for your interesting articles & recipes.
I suspect cookbooks versus social media platforms is a generational issue. It's hard these days to get a cookbook published if you don't have either a restaurant, a TV show or thousands of Instagram or TitTok followers. Which makes me even more appreciative of your support for Tabled - thank you!
I love recipe books (as witness the four shelves of the things in the hall!) - a fascinating read. I agree with you about the Instagram/YouTube recipes. I also have my grandmother's cookbook - rather like the photo in your article! - which includes, among other things, a recipe for dog biscuits made from liver and posho (East African corn meal), and 'cures' for baldness and amoebic dysentery! The duck sounds wonderful - am pursuing an online French course which includes chats with an AI bot about books and cookery, so I shall have something new to discuss tonight. And to try out in the near future ...
You're chatting with an AI bot - in French?? About books? And cooking? I'm speechless. I make a dog biscuit with oats etc (basic, nothing posho...) and grated apples. I stamp out bone shapes for the dog then roll the dough more thinly and cut circles for humans to munch with cheese. Woof.
Yes, it's quite fun really, though a bit scary as well. Victor even manages to give me quite sensible responses, which is more than can be said for a lot of humans! Yes, I think your apple-and-oat biscuits would definitely be nicer than Granny's liver-and-posho ones! Especially with cheese ...
I'm doing an online course through 'Le Monde', they've recently upgraded me, so now I get to have a short chat with a bot masquerading as Victor Hugo after I've fought with French subjunctives. Actually, it's quite fun, and I was surprised at how realistic it is, though in another way, I find it pretty scary! I know they do Italian, but not Vietnamese!
The link is: https://gymglish.com. Hope it's what you're looking for - the first lessons are very simple, to find out your current level, they take it from there, you can choose how many lessons you do a week
Last time I reorganised my kitchen cupboards I decided to sort ingredients by cuisine, rather than type. My first go involved splitting into Japanese, Chinese, Korean, SE Asian, Mexican, and "white people food", but when the last pile turned out to be just popcorn kernels and a solitary tin of cannelini beans I reallocated that shelf to my collection of dried chillies. 🤭
If, like me, you don't really enjoy eating meat, traditional British cuisine doesn't have anything to offer except puddings. French food is grim, overwrought and drowning in sauce. Italian food is magical until you ask them to cook a vegetable. Central and Eastern European food is just stodge with extra stodge. Spanish and Greek both are great in their own ways, but a big chunk of that comes from their locations and histories.
I'm becoming more and more interested in West African food (Ghana, Nigeria, The Gambia especially), but so far I've only enjoyed those in restaurants. I want to try making domoda, a Gambian peanut butter stew that doesn't look like an impossible place to start. ('pologies for the essay)
I think you've summed up the different cuisines of the world perfectly and with great wit. I'm puzzled by the food of South America where the climate allows for the growing of wonderful fruits but the range of vegetables, though reasonably broad, is pretty uniformally treated, in a fashion that makes most meals very heavy to digest in that heat. Maize and beans and rice and cassava and yams and moles? Digestively explosive! Like the Italians, little interest in salads. Or have I just missed out on them? I spent three days on a local water bus ferry down the Amazon, sleeping on the deck under the hammocks of Native Amazon passengers, all of us fed beans and rice or rice and beans. Not a menu to suit lying under people.
It is very heavy! But to me no different to Indian food, where a lot of the diet is pulses, potato, rice... I think it's true cocina povera, in that the goal was to maximise calories for minimum cost, and now it's become identity/heritage.
And if I wanted to be glib I could point out that one of the world's greatest salads was invented in Mexico City... (The Caesar, which to be fair was invented by a chef trying to appeal to the American tourist palate.)
But you're not going to get much fresh veg eaten as we think of it in Europe. Maybe that's the lack of refrigeration? My cupboards are full of tinned and pickled bits for Mexican food, cactus leaves and courgette flowers as well as infinite chillies either pickled or preserved in sauce (chuck whole tin in blender, use as marinade/dressing).
When I think salads in LatAm my brain either goes to nopales and chayote (cactus paddles and what SE Asia calls chow chow) or to the whole ceviche/aguachile spectrum. If prawns can be a cocktail, fish can be a salad!
Also don't forget that the salsas do a lot of heavy lifting in the fresh veg stakes, from pico de gallo to tomatillo and beyond. If I was making a salsa from scratch I'd start by charring onions, chillies, and (often) tomato/tomatillo, blend or pound those, and then start adding diced fresh things (mango, raw onion, fresh tomato, corn, etc, all recipe-dependent), so that's where the freshness and vitamins can be found.
All good points! I will rethink my approach 😊
I’m not a huge fan of meat either. We discovered a wonderful restaurant here in MD near DC named Sheba Éthiopien Restaurant. It is owned by 3 sisters. Much of their menu is vegan or vegetarian. Injera bread & berbere sauce are sooooo good.
I love the way they give you a million small curries to try! I've not been to your restaurant, but my neighbourhood in London has a sizeable East African population, so we've got loads of Ethiopian and Somali restaurants that are as much community centres as they are places to eat. So cheap, and very yummy!
I'm really not familiar with Ethiopian cuisine, though I have eaten it in Adams Morgan. I suspect it was during a period, though, where it was compromised to sell as it was too unfamiliar at the time. There are fine Ethiopian restaurants in London I should try.
Hear, hear! A recipe is a moment frozen in time -- of the author, of the cuisine, of the history of the dish, of the cook who recreates it. It is story telling of all five senses. It is how we connect with the past + with the future. Thank you, Julia!
You are so right! And it's also so tactile and sensuous. One of the things people who get deliveries of food prepped ready to cook according to instructions miss out on is the slicing of a knife through different textures, the moment when that eggshell suddenly gives up and delivers the egg into your palm and when the blanched skin of a tomato slips off like a sock.
Speaking of frozen in time, can I interest you in an aspic/jellied salad? 🤭🤭🤭
Could you not make it a Jello salad instead?
I AM partial to Jambon persillé - parsleyed ham in aspic...
With miracle whip to serve? 😂
I am a cook, there are tried and true battered cookbooks, a magazine that comes monthly to try something new, various sites that send me recipes. I like to “read” cookbooks, I have memories of filling my Nonna around and stopping to measure what was in her hand as I wrote up her recipes.
Putting a good meal on the table is love to me, and since I enjoy cooking, it is not a chore. Most days I just put things together because I know how!
It not only isn't a chore, it is a move away from the day's chores into creativity and relaxation and celebration. And, as you point out, a demonstration of love. For some people, it's the way they are happiest to convey how they feel.
What a nice perspective about cookbooks versus YouTube. I’ve often watched the videos & sometimes see a mistake which isn’t mentioned. The same goes for the concept of the celebrity chefs on tv. It’s more hype than serious cooking. I miss real cooks on tv, such as Julia Child & Sarah Moulton. (So?)
As to takeout culture, I find it to be appalling. We recently had 2 family members in our home & they wanted to eat each & every meal out. It’s unhealthy!
Your duck recipe looks wonderful. We will be in France next month & I just may buy 4 duck legs for dinner one night when guests are over.
As always, many thanks for your interesting articles & recipes.
I suspect cookbooks versus social media platforms is a generational issue. It's hard these days to get a cookbook published if you don't have either a restaurant, a TV show or thousands of Instagram or TitTok followers. Which makes me even more appreciative of your support for Tabled - thank you!
I love recipe books (as witness the four shelves of the things in the hall!) - a fascinating read. I agree with you about the Instagram/YouTube recipes. I also have my grandmother's cookbook - rather like the photo in your article! - which includes, among other things, a recipe for dog biscuits made from liver and posho (East African corn meal), and 'cures' for baldness and amoebic dysentery! The duck sounds wonderful - am pursuing an online French course which includes chats with an AI bot about books and cookery, so I shall have something new to discuss tonight. And to try out in the near future ...
You're chatting with an AI bot - in French?? About books? And cooking? I'm speechless. I make a dog biscuit with oats etc (basic, nothing posho...) and grated apples. I stamp out bone shapes for the dog then roll the dough more thinly and cut circles for humans to munch with cheese. Woof.
Yes, it's quite fun really, though a bit scary as well. Victor even manages to give me quite sensible responses, which is more than can be said for a lot of humans! Yes, I think your apple-and-oat biscuits would definitely be nicer than Granny's liver-and-posho ones! Especially with cheese ...
Which bot are you using? I need to dust off my Italian and work on my Vietnamese!
I'm doing an online course through 'Le Monde', they've recently upgraded me, so now I get to have a short chat with a bot masquerading as Victor Hugo after I've fought with French subjunctives. Actually, it's quite fun, and I was surprised at how realistic it is, though in another way, I find it pretty scary! I know they do Italian, but not Vietnamese!
How extraordinary! Italian sounds very appealing. I might look into it - thank you!
Saw Kate's comment before yours, so she has the link! Enjoy!
Thanks! I'll definitely check it out for Italian, might have to use the lack of Vietnamese as a poor excuse to go back and study it there... 😇
The link is: https://gymglish.com. Hope it's what you're looking for - the first lessons are very simple, to find out your current level, they take it from there, you can choose how many lessons you do a week