YOUR own "authentic ethnic" cuisine

[LaurieB]

A recent thread made me think about this. What do you consider yours to be? I began thinking of what, and how, I cook, & I came up with such a mish-mash of answers that I could not define it.

Great. A new project for me.

Tell me about yours, and I'll tell you about mine.

Laurie

[Chris Amirault]

LaurieB, I don't really understand. Most people use the modifier "ethnic" to refer to a collective cultural and geographic category. In addition, "ethnic" usually means "other than what I'm used to around here." So I'm not sure how an individual can define an "ethnic" cuisine.

[Anna N]

LaurieB, I don't really understand. Most people use the modifier "ethnic" to refer to a collective cultural and geographic category. In addition, "ethnic" usually means "other than what I'm used to around here." So I'm not sure how an individual can define an "ethnic" cuisine.

←

I somehow missed the "ethnic" in the title of this topic and as a result found it to be an interesting question and one which I have been grappling with over the past few weeks. I interpreted the question to be "what do you cook for your family that is authentic to you". I think of Susan in FL as someone who has an authentic family cuisine. It spans many ethnic dishes, many different preparations but somehow seems to have a real something that defines it for me as "Susan's cuisine".

When I think about our authentic family cuisine I see it evolving and perhaps gaining some definition. While I love the French Laundry Cookbook, I know its cuisine is not authentic to my family. All About Braising comes much closer. Slowly I am evolving a cuisine that combines a few new dishes and some old favourites that seems to say "The Nielsens".

I hope I have not hijacked Laurie B's question and turned it into something else!

Weigh in Laurie B and reclaim your topic if I have.

[Gigi4808]

If I am understanding the question,

The benchmark of "authentic" Italian for me is memories my grandparents Italian cooking. Any Italian food that I eat is compared to the memory of they're cooking as to how things should "really" look or taste. My grandmothers cooked Northern style and my Grandfather cooked Southern. NO red clam sauce has ever measured up to "Gramma's" and what I consider polenta to be is closer in terms of look and texture to cheesy southern grits then it is to the polenta found in most restaurants.

And if I have misunderstood the question well it wasn't all bad now I am dreaming of clam sauce.

Edited June 6, 2006 by Gigi4808 (log)

[Torrilin]

I don't have an "ethnic" cuisine. My parents are of Norse, Austrian, some kind of British, French Canadian, and probably some Native American descent. The most recent immigrants in the family are on the Norse side, and like many immigrant women, my great-grandmother refused to teach my mother any traditional Norwegian dishes. Like many proud granddaughters, my mom insisted on learning them from cookbooks.

What I do have is a family cuisine, built on my Dad's sensibilities (Austrian food is good, it's what his mom made!), and my Mom's (French! Thai! Chinese! Norse!). So we eat lots of things that would not strike a Scandinavian family as odd. My friends from Norway and Sweden laugh at me at Christmas as I bemoan not having krumkake and the other traditional cookies *their* moms make. I no longer live at home, and don't have the necessary pans and presses and molds for proper Christmas cookies. Someday tho... There's also lots of things my Thai aunt would find very familiar, if not precisely as she'd have it at home. French and Austrian are what mom and dad default to (respectively). If they're not sure what else to do, they'll head that way.

Emily

[srhcb]

"Ethnic Food" is what Grandmas made. In my case, I had a Serbian Grandmother who came to this Country when she was 15, and a Scotch/English Grandmother whose family has been here since the 1600's.

We ate lamb, sarma, saurkraut, strudel and potica my Mother learned from her Mother, and my Dad's favorites; Pasty, Roast Beef, Scalloped Potatos, Pork Pie and custards and cream pies she'd learned from her Mother-In-Law. My Mom also had a BS in Home Economics, so we had all the 50's and 60's foods, including the early half-hearted attempts at Italian and Chinese fare.

I started cooking about 15 years ago and have added more recent items incorporating fresh ingredients and exotic spices and seasonings into my repertoire.

Put that all together, and I guess that if anything it would be called "American" cusine?

SB (still can't hold a candle to Mom's and Grandmas'cooking though)

[SuzySushi]

Hmmm.... my own personal ethnic cuisine would be a combination of Jewish deli (or is it Russian peasant?) fare like kasha, or a bowl of sour cream with cubes of hot potato; combined with Chinese stir-fries--especially anything served with noodles; and classic Japanese dishes (the first food I learned to cook first-hand from friends). Eclectic ethnic?

[scubadoo97]

My own authentic ethnic cuisine would be the food that my Grandmother made which was Syrian-Jewish/Southern. She immigrated from Aleppo Syria and lived in NY, ran a grocery store in Georga and then Tampa. Mushe, stuffed mulberry leaves, Kibbe, rice and things like that were regulars as well as collards, black eye peas and corn bread. No ham hocks in those collards.

[cdh]

Personal authentic ethnic food... now that's both a mouthful and a tough concept to wrap my brain around... but maybe that's because I'm so far removed from the culture of any of the ethnicities to which I might genetically lay claim.

In hunting for ethnicity in American food culture, we've begun to look how it expresses itself most around the holidays, so I'll add to that stream of thoughts.

The side of the family who always traditionally hosted the holidays (by virtue of still being alive, as opposed to the departed side of the family who checked out at right about the time I checked in) was largely Dutch descended from early New Amsterdammers, though intermarried with other colonial stock as the family drifted southerly from New Amsterdam through New Jersey. These are very much people who saw no ethnicity in themselves, but rather attributed it to the new arrivals who immigrated more recently and still had some non-American memories/traditions/etc. that a dozen generations here hadn't scrubbed out of memory.

The foods that got served at the holidays were all extremely simple dishes, in the Dutch meat-and-potatoes tradition... big roast, stewed onions, mashed potatoes, succotash, chopped cranberry relish, boiled green beans, candied sweet potato, etc. The only dish in there that is not standard "American holiday" food is the stewed onions, which I've read about as a colonial New York dish, so I guess that they're my only authentic ethnic food I can identify.

[LaurieB]

Ah, Torrilin, the phrase "family cuisine" was exactly what I was looking for!