i just got 'reprimanded' for using pork belly instead of pork cheeks like what the fuck
the same reason you better not say anything about the METS BABY YEAH GO METS LOVE THE METS.
My guess is that the recipes, being regional, become tied to their cultural identity. Adulterating those recipes therefore causes them to experience stress about their cultural identity being diluted or erased.
Some recipes genuinely are better with specific ingredients or cooking techniques, but I think the majority of the time it comes down to culture as you said.
Absolutely. There are very real differences between, say, canned veggies vs fresh ones, or lean meat vs fatty meat, or basmati rice vs jasmine rice, etc., and those differences could be significant depending on the dish. Being weird about pork belly vs pork cheek, though, sounds like someone responding from their lizard brain.
As an aside, a while back I told my wife I was going to make cranberry sauce for a holiday meal we were hosting for some friends. She had a knee jerk negative reaction, saying that her family always used the canned sauce. I said it was no problem, I could do a canned sauce for her as well as the homemade. She told me she doesn't eat cranberry sauce 🤷♂️
People are weird about food sometimes, and that's honestly fine. You have to be weird about something, right?
Oh totally, I've gotten into extremely silly arguments with people about food that have gotten heated. Don't argue with a passionate italian about pineapples on american-style pizza actually being pretty good :scared:
Actual Italian-Italian pizza was garbage until they started copying Italian-American pizza.
My grandma recently tried telling me that olives and mustard simply do not belong in potato salad and that it's not "traditional". She did not appreciate the 50,000 recipes I found detailing "classic" potato salad with olives and mustard.
I'm sorry, she said not to put mustard in a dish that was invented by Germans?
She has an idealized version of every food in her head and anything deviating from that is blasphemy.
Not sure about historical, but right now most of the country puts fucking mayo on it.
Never heard of olives tbh but mustard? The stuff that's in like 90% of potato salad recipes?
The regional differences in potato salad are a very divisive topic in Germany.
For the record, potato salad should be made with broth, vinegar, oil, onions and maybe cucumber. It also needs to be slightly warm. Definitely no mayo.
Good stuff- round these parts they call that GPS
Lil bit of bacon in there :marx-ok:
Well grandma is right. Olives?!?
Plus, don't you want to make your grandma's potato salad? I make my grandma's potato salad. It's awesome. Could I go to foodnetwork.com and fool around until I make a "better" one? Probably.
But that's not the damn point, is it? The point is that I make my grandma's potato salad. It's just the way she made it and I make it that way too. When I serve it to guests, I tell them it's grandma's potato salad and that always gets a lot of smiles. I'm keeping her alive and serving delicious food at the same time.
She's possibly the most critical person I've ever known and gets upset when anything is done differently than she would do it to the point it gives me anxiety.
Oh...I kind of assumed that you felt about your grandma the same way I feel about my grandma. I guess that was unwarranted.
:shrug-outta-hecks: It's fine. I kinda accept it at this point, like you know how they say you're your own worst critic? No. Your worst critic is grandma, and that she would have done it while working 3 jobs and raising several children. She has an almost pathological need to let you know that her sense of smell, hearing, how to use a yard blower, are simply superior to other people.
Untrue, just look at all the drama over gross hummus flavours.
https://www.aratherat.com/blogs/home-page/the-top-12-most-ridiculous-flavors-of-hummus-youve-ever-seen 🤢 don't put chocolate in hummus folks.
Fucking anglos with brains of spun sugar still feel compelled to add bacon to everything.
Moles are great and you can put cocoa in chili for a nice deep flavor, so as weird as it sounds I can't immediately write off savory chocolate bean dip
U need to cook it and add the right spices though, it's not "let's throw a legume and chocolate in a blender"
Nostalgia also plays a role I'm pretty sure. Who doesn't know the disappointment when you first encountered an unfamiliar take on one of your childhood favorites?
Also, let's be honest, 90% of changes home cooks do to any classic recipe just makes it worse, with the other 10% being merely interesting and not better.
as brazilian i reserve the right to add cream cheese to anything and everything
Also, let’s be honest, 90% of changes home cooks do to any classic recipe just makes it worse, with the other 10% being merely interesting and not better.
In my experience it's almost the other way around, the "classical" stuff tends to taste boring, especially Italian food.
Also, let’s be honest, 90% of changes home cooks do to any classic recipe just makes it worse, with the other 10% being merely interesting and not better.
That's because most people can't cook and so gormlessly following a set pattern that's vaguely good enough is the only way they can make ok food. One has to remember that local recipes do not come about because they are perfect, but because they represent a set of ingredients that are readily available where they developed, prepared with tools that are readily available where they developed, with an amount of labor that's considered acceptable for those circumstances. That means that in a different material context the recipe should shift to accommodate what's available there and the amount of labor the cooks can expend on it, with the goal of making something good regardless of what one has available. And that's before you get into prestige recipes that were just about conspicuous consumption of luxury goods and the waste of large amounts of highly skilled labor, which are always mid at best and don't have a place anywhere (like aspics before instant gelatin).
All that people should learn from non-baking recipes is methodology and general combinations of things, which should then be applied to whatever one actually has or can easily acquire, and general dish names should just be a shorthand to explain what something is rather than something rigid and prescriptive.
Me: Having flashes of black and white footage of warcrime trials in my head because I found a pea in my midwest classic "tuna casserole"
afraid so
i also used farfalle because i hate spaghetti for some reason
Oh yeah no you can't change Italian stuff just like that, you gotta consult with the Vatican vaults first to see what has been decreed.
:sicko-instapot: https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/P79D2Gul7b.jpg
Yeah just add tiny bit of sugar and more fat. If you aren't in Italy that's a very ridiculous thing to be anal about. Guanciale can be hard to find.
well guanciale isn't hard to find, it's just 5-6 times the price of belly. parmesan is already expensive and pecorino is twice the price. :no-mouth-must-scream:
As an Italian (I know I'm sorry) I almost always use bacon, sometimes pancetta if it's at the store, for this exact reason. Guanciale is waaay too expensive and makes carbonara from an easy cheap dinner into needless expense.
As an Italian (I know I’m sorry)
New site tagline dropped folks!
My 100% Italian American grandmother used to just use bacon too, I use pancetta and sometimes bacon. I have almost never seen guanciale around here. Besides, pancetta usually has more meat vs fat in it and I prefer that honestly
Besides, unless you're in some parts of Lazio, or have the good fortune of having a good salumeria closeby, most of the guanciale (and pecorino for that matter) is going to be bland industrial bs.
Might as well make tasty food with good, local stuff (when possible). Anything else is class performance (not ok) or diaspora nostalgia (very valid).
Yeah, it depends on where you live. Here in Houston, the 4th largest city in the US, there is only 1 store I know of where you can get guanciale. Pancetta I can get at most grocery stores, but for guanciale I would have to go to this one high end grocer.
EDIT: Oh, one liquor store would also probably have guanciale.
i may or may not have started referring to every restaurant as the best in the city as an internal joke of my own. this includes franchises like kfc.
A guest of mine complained because I served them a "burrito" drizzled with balsamic vinaigrette . I don't give a shit if it isn't authentic Tex-Mex, I'm just trying to make a satisfying meal with the ingredients I have on tap. I think most of it comes down to people expecting a certain flavor profile, and can't adapt to anything that deviates from it.
i only recently discovered jambalaya was a dish, as i grew up thinking it was a place close to shangri la
