mongo_jones

thank god! it isn't just me! i often cook shrimp in a sauce with more than just the tail shell on and just chomp the entire shell up--you should also see just how much of chicken and goat bones i crunch up with my curries. most bengali shrimp dishes (including highly sauced ones) are made with the whole shell on (head too)--most bengalis will sort this out while eating --though this has its origins in the fact that most bengalis (other than hyper-westernized ones like me) eat with their hands.

it is certainly the case with indian food. many dishes aren't meant to be spicy at all. in fact nothing drives the average indian foodie up the wall more than the "mild, medium, spicy" question at the average indian restaurant in the u.s. that and the absolute substitutability of primary ingredient (no, i don't want a chicken vindaloo, thank you very much!). what is absolutely inimical to the indian ethos of eating, and which many "fancy" indian restaurants in the u.s seem to have adopted, is the concept of individual plating. indian food is always meant to be eaten family style--with multiple things available at the same time. the closest an individual serving would come to that would be a thali.

i'm assuming the kinds of pressure-cookers being talked about here are different from my stone-age pressure cooker from india--which releases a little to a lot of steam depending on heat.

Based on this, you might like to sample Bun Bo Hue next time you're in a good Pho shop. Not the same anise flavored broth, but spicy with lots of interesting tidbits in the soup. i didn't realize i'd given the impression that i am new to vietnamese food--i'm not an expert on it but i've been eating it for a long time now. i like the bun soups, but prefer pho.

you could say the same about pretty much every single lauded (by the mostly anglo food establishment) indian restaurant in the u.s.

it is always interesting how "tradition" gets created. thanks for the link skchai!

i don't suppose we have any vietnamese specialists among us. i was introduced to pho by a vietnamese co-worker many years ago in los angeles. she taught me to mix my hot sauce and my hoisin in with the broth, throw in everything else and eat. the place that we used to get pho from only ever gave us basil (never cilantro). now, she's just one person so i'm hesitant to formulate any theories about standard pho procedure from any of this but as a result my own pho preferences are set: chilli sauce, hoisin, lime, green chillis, basil, sprouts--all in the broth with the noodles and meat (ideally a mix of brisket, flank, tendon and tripe). i don't know how spicy most people like their pho but i like my broth to be pretty close to battery acid. in this too i am guided by my ex-colleague's example. this is how i like it but i don't raise eye-brows at other people's practices since for all i know mine is farther from the norm than theirs. that being said i can't imagine what it would taste like with plum sauce and i don't want to find out. also: i really don't like it with cilantro; pho places in koreatown in l.a usually serve it only with cilantro. i'd thought this might be a korean take on it but this is also how the local vietnamese place here does it (and i see cilantro in jason's picture 1 above too). my wife likes to lace her broth with dangerous amounts of chilli sauce and then also squeeze some onto a plate to further dip pieces of meat into. but she's korean and what does she know? we're both uber-dexterous in the manner tommy describes though. i like to think it gives us street-cred here in colorado (which is not what you would call chopstick-friendly). edited to add: the woman last night was adamant that she knew the difference between hoisin and plum sauce (there was a squeeze bottle of hoisin right next to the sriracha on their table) and that she'd always been served her pho with plum sauce before (in d.c). i'm more and more inclined to think that this was a face-saving claim and not a commentary on the state of pho in d.c--though there might be a strange symmetry to another assault on vietnamese culture in the capital of the u.s.

this discussion of how "haute" may be defined and/or freed from its french roots is an interesting one. since i don't know how to point to specific posts within a thread i'm going to take the liberty of adding excerpts of posts i've made to an older related thread to this newer discussion: both excerpts are from http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=27631 -- a thread on the subject of wine and indian cuisine. 1) "my bigger problem is with the mindset that often drives these wine-indian food discussions (and i'm not accusing anyone here of having it). there's a certain eurocentric way of defining good cuisine that i think is easy to fall into (for chefs, foodies, critics, and restaurant patrons alike): indian cuisine can't be haute if it isn't plated and served a certain way, or if it can't be paired up with wine. in a more insidious form there is sometimes an evolutionary narrative that creeps in, in which indian cuisine can only be seen as "developing", "growing" if that change is mapped onto high-western approaches. or new dishes are seen as innovative only if they are articulated in a western idiom. why can't indian food, in all its heterogeneity, be taken on its own terms? do japanese restaurateurs or critics worry about which wine will go best with their food? " 2) "to pick up the thread from my earlier post in this thread: part of the reason i think indians have been less inclined to develop indigenous spirits, and why some indian gourmands sometime get caught up in these convoluted narratives and dubious histories about wine etc. is the high-colonial heritage of the expensive spirit drinking classes. this doesn't play out just in the world of alcohol but also in the arts: indian writers who win the booker or other international awards are more celebrated than those who don't. there's a certain cultural investment in the signposts of english/european and more lately, american distinction. and of course class has a lot to do with why feni is often considered just another country liquor. as for my second point, that innovation in indian cuisine is only acknowledged if it is articulated in a western idiom it too is of a piece with a larger cultural pattern. here in the west cultural hybridity is only recognized and celebrated if it directly involves the west. thus, to take a very simple example, baz luhrmann is credited with hybridizing bollywood and hollywood film conventions when in fact bollywood is already an amazing hybridization of hollywood and indian film/theater conventions. similar things seem to be happening with food. of course in the indian context little of this anxiety probably holds true (i hope)--indian chefs, restaurants, homes probably continue to develop, innovate with little regard to or thought of whether this would be recognized as innovation by western foodies (including many snobs on our own egullet, though of course none of us ourselves )"

for pho fanatics: i've been to pho houses in which the only herb you're given is basil, and to ones in which you're instead given cilantro, and also to places that give you both. is there some sort of regional or traditional variation at work here? or is this a case of things changing as pho leaves vietnam and comes to the u.s? furthermore, at the vietnamese restaurant we had dinner in last night there was a bit of a commotion when the young woman at the table next to ours asked the waiter for plum sauce to go with her pho. he recoiled in horror and said that plum sauce would not go well with pho. due to a language barrier (he's vietnamese, she's a young anglo-american) it wasn't clear for a while as to whether he thought he was being asked his opinion on compatability or refusing to bring the offending plum sauce. since i'd overheard her complaining to her companion that she'd mistakenly laced her broth with too much hot sauce i attempted to intervene and suggested she amend matters with the provided hoisin sauce instead. at this point she informed us all (much to the waiter's consternation) that in d.c she was used to eating pho with plum sauce. eventually, a more english-fluent member of the staff was summoned, some plum sauce was procured and everyone, except possibly the original waiter, was happy. now, i'm no authority on pho or vietnamese cuisine in general. all i know is what i've eaten in a variety of establishments in los angeles. i've never encountered plum sauce as a condiment for pho before. is this yet another regional variation or is it perhaps the case that the restaurants in d.c referred to may have been pan-asian restaurants that happened to have plum sauce on the table as well? i suppose it is also possible she only mentioned the d.c thing to not seem foolish. anyone?

amen! i guess this is my signature theme on egullet. rather than repeat it, i'll just point to another recent thread where this has come up obliquely: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=36699 and an older one from the india forum: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=27631

Most assuredly it was tohpohki - chewy little flat, oval rice cakes; thinly sliced fish cakes; lamyan; spicy red sauce - with thick sliced yellow vinegar marinated radish on the side. Are you sure you're not a Chinese-American girl living in Paris? we're talking about the same thing. however, each of our korean-american native-informants transcribes it differently in english. "tohpohki" is what it sounds like though when "dok (the rice cakes) bok (from the verb "to fry") ki" is spoken idiomatically. or so my wife says.

tohpohki? shurely not dok-bok-ki? my wife's making it too. we seem to live in some strange parallel universe. you're not an indian man are you?

i really didn't know what it was, now i do--thanks. that's some scary stuff. especially that it was developed by the dept. of agriculture. gives biological warfare a whole other meaning. and what does it mean they won't develop it "commercially"? if they aren't going to sell it what are they going to keep playing with it for? causing more disquiet in all this is the fact that monsanto is a perfect bond villain-organization name. they probably have a satellite in space ready to shoot this terminator gene into the seed supply of every potential customer nation.

excuse me, but my wife is the korean-american nigella. and she's upstairs making kim-chi as we speak. from shrimp she raised herself in our bath-tub and fermented with her own sweat.

the terminator gene? a body-building seed from the future sent back to kill the leader of the slow food movement? then he marries a fringe member of a prominent political family and becomes the governor of california? now, that's a movie i want to see.

all just a matter of time. how about that wto? p.s: i'm saving my seed too, but more in order to preserve my precious, bodily fluids.

didn't some texas company also patent basmati rice a couple of years ago? pharmaceutical companies were also trying to take out patents on the medicinal use of turmeric etc. that's the other face of globalism (the one we don't see in the ads) and what happens when commodity fetishism encounters knowledge that constitutes itself differently.

who else thinks grace needs to get her own egullet membership?

oh man, i guess those haute cuisine chefs need to send memos to cooks in bengal and kerala in india who've been ruining top-grade shrimp and lobster for years now with their heat and pepper.

the flame-broiled whopper when craving a fast-food burger, looking nervously over your shoulder for the egullet police: accept no substitutes then there's california's mini-chain burgers at in 'n out and fatburger

in my completely objective (of course) opinion people who don't like mangoes have never eaten mangoes in their places of origin. the obscenities available in american grocery stores cannot compare to genuine tree-ripened varieties. i'm sure every citizen of a mango-growing country can make a case for their own local mangoes but let's face it, they all secretly know that indian mangoes rule. unfortunately, there's only a very small window of opportunity in the year to eat mangoes in india, and even more unfortunately for non-indians, this occurs in the middle of the hot season. however, the sheer range of mango varietals available (literally in the hundreds--i remember seeing a number like 340 tossed around) makes it worth going to india in may and june just to eat them. bengalis swear by the langda, delhi-ites by the daseri (bite of the peel at the tip and literally squeeze it into your mouth) and mumbaikars by their alphonsos, but those with no regional ties can just savour them all. and then there's the heavenly raw mango chutneys (in india this refers to dessert, not preserves) and drinks. for a book from a completely different part of the world that opens with an extended description of mango as national symbol and metaphor see michelle cliff's "abeng".

Why aren't you a fan of Jonathan Gold? Just curious. answer here: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?act=ST&f=1&t=36756

jschyun, i did say that i wasn't saying that you were doing the kind of thing i talked about in my last post so i'm not sure why you think i need to "chill"--i'm not really worked up about it. on the other hand, how would we know that when you said "sophisticated" you meant "cosmopolitan"? i did ask for the clarification, didn't i? and the tendency i'm talking about exists--even if you're not an advocate for it. we can certainly talk about it separate from you, can't we? it is an interesting topic, i think. regards, mongo

while agreeing with skchai about the usually recent provenance of "traditional" in many asian cultures i do want to militate against the tendency (and i should add that it isn't clear to me if this is what jschyun implies, hence my question) that "sophistication" maps onto some form of a movement to the global, if not "western". this is a tendency i see in a lot of writing about indian food as well and in a lot of reaction to "fusion" cuisine. as though certain cuisines are forever relegated to the "traditional" while "excitement", "progress" and "sophistication" only come from hybridization with something else. korean food as i know it seems pretty sophisticated on its own terms. i guess the question is one of how we define "sophisticated", and whether this is something that is culturally determined.

what exactly does it take to become "sophisticated diners"?