What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice

enaaem

If we view carbonara through Asian cooking theory, then the recipe from Il Piccolo Talismano Della Felicita (1964) is probably the best, because the wine and onion adds acidity and sweetness for balance.

epolanski

While it's true that you won't find published Carbonara recipes pre dating 1952, the Lazio region has had for centuries pasta dishes based on the same ingredients. And they are thoroughly documented. Both gricia and amatriciana, too other famous pasta dishes from the same region use the same cheese (pecorino) and guanciale. In fact carbonara is nothing more than a gricia with egg yolks. It just makes no sense to have parmiggiano or french cheese in a recipe coming from a region that did not have these ingredients in the first place and are not part of its culinary history. And thus the point of authenticity is into rooting where the recipe originated with local ingredients. Anybody's free to change the recipe all they want, but to call it carbonara when ingredients don't match is misleading the customer expecting a roman dish with roman ingredients.

j7ake

Italian restaurant cuisine today is judged by whether it tastes like the way their particular Italian grandma made it. Asian restaurant cuisine is judged by partly by how different (technique, taste, looks) the dish is from what they can make from home.

_doctor_love

The older I get, the more I view identity as a sort of trap door. There's no there there that can stand up to sustained scrutiny. Everything has a history, everything is made of something other than what it is. In the context of food, I laugh at notions of authenticity and tradition - unless the time scale is over 1000 years there's not much interesting to talk about.

bobthepanda

I think what is so interesting is also, if you peel back the curtain, most recipes have standardized at a fairly recent point in their national mythos, depending on how long that is. Recipes are a snapshot of economic and technological advances of the time, and whole classes of recipe are not available until certain technological watersheds, like * precise temperature controls for ovens and stoves in the early 20th century * cheap and health(ier) chemical leaveners in the late 19th century * discovery of consistent vanilla pollination in the 19th century * exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.) Also our modern supply chain is very good at magicking away the seasonality and perishability of ingredients, so for example you had early Scottish shortbread primarily using rice flour because it was cheaper at that time.

AndrewKemendo

Tribalism knows no bounds

supertroop

Food authenticity should only mean DOP or geographic identity (GI) regulation. Everything else is gatekeeping and power struggle. Im glad this discussion comes up every year with a hard hitting blogger recycling the same points for clicks because at least it makes a new batch of people think about it and the second order implications about identity in general.

chupchap

Most loud voices get obsessed with a specific definition of a dish and I think for the sake of creativity we should/would shift to using creative names to accommodate preferences.

bilalq

I cannot wait for a cultural shift away from respecting "authenticity" and "tradition" in food. It's fine to remember and recognize how things were often done. But the ridiculousness of saying New York style pizza is not pizza or that you have to make things the "right way" needs to go.

llsf

I believe that us, Americans are pretty good at bending international food to our limited ingredients, our own favorite chemicals, sweeteners (corn syrup in everything), our flour and butter (good luck to make pastries like in Europe, with our poor flour and butter). So I get it when Italians get offended by our poor rendering of carbonara... and feel that what we get here is off.

SugarReflex

Food snobbery is so annoying. But as an Australian I can get behind coffee snobbery. Sorry, we're the best.

fortran77

"If my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike" is a bowdlerization of a much older phrase. As my Great-Grandfather, born in 1890 in Widz, Belaruz would say it "ווען די באָבע וואָלט געהאַט בײצִים, װאָלט זי געװען מײַן זײדע" (If my grandmother had balls, she would have been my grandfather.)

goosejuice

Well to start chicken and rice are the name of ingredients. Carbonara is a unique name given to a particular set of ingredients and a method of preparation. I suspect if people just said pasta with pork egg and cheese no one is going to make a big deal out of authenticity. In other words, this is about words more than anything. They do matter, in the sense that most people would be upset to order a pizza and get a sandwich or order a sandwich and get a taco. You don't need to leave italian (American) food to see the same phenomenon the author describes. Pizza is also endlessly re-interpreted and adapted. There's value in protecting and exploring. So while I share some of the author's opinions, I think the whole locking recipes into imaginary vaults thing is a bit overblown.

arexxbifs

For me it's mostly about knowing what you're getting when craving the flavour of a particular dish. Carbonara is perhaps an example of a recipe that's turned too rigid, but I've also ordered it and been served diced boiled ham in bechamel - an affront to anyone with their sights set on pan-fried pork and a rich, fatty mouthfeel. Everyone has their own personal limit and variations are allowed within certain unwritten boundaries. Swedish meatballs, for example, can be varied in many ways - but if you put garlic in them, I think you should call them something else.

wcfrobert

I think this is what makes Asian food more exciting and innovative. No whiff of elitism. No status-signaling or having to appeal to the taste of King Louis the 14th. Just cook stuff and make it taste good for as many people as possible; let the market decide what's good and let cuisines intermingle and evolve organically. Striving for authenticity is essentially a pause button. While we should absolutely preserve culturally important recipes[1], we also need to move forward and invent the stuff that people in 2080 will call 'authentic.' Bring on the durian pizza, the strawberry Mapo tofu, and the Kraft singles in Korean army stews. Food is meant to be enjoyed. Don't gatekeep and keep the performative taste-signaling to wine and coffee please. --- [1] As a side note, a lot of culturally important recipes are actually imports. Tomatoes weren't even available in Italy until the 1600s, Neither did Ireland have potatoes until they were brought over from the New World. Most contemporary Chinese dishes were created in the last century; fish and chip was brought over to the UK by Jewish immigrants; the famous red peppers of Sichuan didn't make its way to China until like the 1600s; Japanese tempura was brought over by Portuguese Catholic missionaries; banh mi has its origin in Vietnam during French colonial rule; national dish of UK is chicken tikka masala; al pastor tacos was brought over by Lebanese immigrants; pad thai was literally invented by the government of Thailand to foster Thai identify. List goes on.

Bukhmanizer

Part of this is definitely cultural and class snobbery. Europeans are seen as being high class. So if you put cream in your Alfredo you are seen as being as ignorant and not knowing any better. Yet any sort of fusion with cultural foods that are viewed as lower class only serves to “elevate” the dishes.

xkcd-sucks

Sure, "authenticity" evaporates under close inspection but it's still a good proxy for quality

zquzra

Sometimes something really is lost when people stop paying attention to the origins of a recipe. It is well known that Nestlé, through advertising campaigns and sponsored cookbooks, introduced its condensed milk into many traditional Brazilian dessert recipes, some of Portuguese origin and others of African origin. Nowadays, it is very difficult to find someone who makes brigadeiro or milk pudding without condensed milk, almost always using that ingredient plus sugar, which often produces a sickly sweet mush. In fact, the whole history of how sugar, or sucrose, entered the human diet is fascinating. It brings together slavery, the exploitation of Indigenous peoples, plantation agriculture in Spanish America and Brazil, and the interests of kings, merchants, and so on. And Nestlé. :)

yen223

If I ordered a chicken burger and got a chicken sandwich, I would be a bit miffed. I think there's an element of expectation-setting when we're talking about authenticity. Personally, I wouldn't sweat authenticity too much. There's excellent food to be had by mixing and remixing dishes.

GarnetFloride

Authenticity basically revolves around waves of immigrants. The authentic food comes from the time and place the immigrants came from. 20 years later things have changed. Food prices in both places have changed and so the cuisines split. Then another wave comes and the food is all new.