THE MYTH OF AUTHENTIC CUISINE - by Elizabeth Baer

General Tso's Chicken

We can hardly imagine Italian cuisine without the tomato. Yet as a “New World” fruit, tomatoes did not reach Europe until the 1500s, and likely had only ornamental uses until the

1600s. Now, centuries later, Italian cuisine has been designated by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Considering this in relation to the ubiquity of the tomato in Italian cooking, one must wonder how long a food needs to be part of a cuisine to be considered “authentic.”

Somehow we’ve become obsessed with the idea of authenticity, as if that makes a recipe

better, of greater value, more worthy of praise and adoration. Like a mirage of an oasis in the

desert, if you only seek authenticity, you will never truly find it. The illusion of “authenticity” in

cuisine prevents you from seeing the world as it truly is.

Good luck finding General Tso’s chicken in China. My guess is some restaurant somewhere

in China might offer it to appease tourists, but it’s not native to the region, so many disparage it as not “authentic.” I would ask, “Authentic to what?” Do we mean to deny, to belittle the immigrant experience when we criticize this dish for not being authentic? A wonderful documentary, The Search for General Tso, explores the history and culture of Chinese immigration and cuisine, and we learn how, in an effort to survive and thrive in the restaurant industry in a time when it wasn’t as easy to acquire ingredients from around the world, dishes like General Tso’s chicken evolved in the context of authentic lives lived.

For a long time, spaghetti and meatballs was considered a quintessential Italian dish. More

recently, however, people realize that in the “Old Country” there was little meat in the cuisine,

and often, due to cost, it was reserved for special occasions. Now people are careful to refer to this as Italian-American, which, I suppose, bestows an authenticity, reflecting the ways in which immigrants adapted to the availability and affordability of meat in their new homeland. Over time, an Italian-American culture has been, in a way, validated, allowing this menu item to reach a more revered status.

Some years back, with an air of moral superiority, a group of college students criticized their

school’s food service offering of a banh mi sandwich, claiming it wasn’t “authentic” enough. I

had to shake my head. How could this sandwich be considered authentically Vietnamese anyway, if the bread needed to construct the sandwich came from the French? Oblivious to history, these complaints somehow glossed over the colonial history of Vietnam.

This fixation with authenticity misses a more important narrative about humanity, how we

experience the world and how the world impacts us. Having trained in the field of linguistics, I

see strong parallels in how languages change over time and across space. I spent my career as a Latin teacher, so, of course, I heard all the time about how Latin is a “dead” language. Let me ask, then, whether we would consider English to be a “dead” language? To make a valid comparison, do we speak the same English as it was spoken two millennia ago? Hardly. Many English speakers today struggle with Shakespeare, merely four centuries back, never mind Chaucer or Beowulf. In this light, I would argue that Latin is not “dead,” but rather, for reasons of history and geography, is now known as Italian, French, Spanish, et al. Through conquest and colonization, the autochthonous languages were pushed to the margins, quite literally. At the edges of the empire, we find Basque and Breton, neither a Romance language. Even English, also not a Romance language, bears the imprint of Latin, whether through vocabulary introduced through French after the Norman conquest that began at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, or the later introduction of Latin words when it served as the lingua franca across Europe.

As language is not static, neither is cuisine. Since time immemorial, humans have been on

the move. Whether in search of space or resources or new places to explore, when people

relocate, through migration or travel, they encounter new ingredients and new people. Carrying their traditions, they seek to adapt, holding onto parts of their memories, particularly taste memories, innovating as necessary. This is only part of the story, I believe, with General Tso’s chicken, using available ingredients to approximate a flavor profile. Another aspect – how to make a living running a restaurant where people are unfamiliar with the cuisine – led many Chinese restaurant owners to modify dishes to attract a profitable clientele. As a side note, I have one cookbook where the first-generation immigrant author explains how General Tso’s chicken was a family favorite, but her parents adapted it using strawberry preserves, an available ingredient, rather than orange, which is the usual iteration of this dish.

The Jewish diaspora, with its extensive spatial breadth, gives a unique example of the

adaptations people make as they move. Haroset, a ritual food served at every Passover Seder, calls to mind the clay the Israelite slaves used to make bricks for Pharaoh. The symbolism supersedes the ingredients, so variations use local ingredients, whether dates or coconut or apples or countless other possibilities.

And yet taste memories can become fixed, even as a person learns and grows and adapts in a new land. I remember reading the cookbook Xi’an Famous Food, and how the author, Jason Wong, waxes poetic about the food he remembers eating as a child in western China, before he, at age eight, and his family migrated to New York City where he now runs restaurants showcasing that cuisine. When, as an adult, he returned to Xi’an, he could no longer easily find those beloved dishes from his childhood. At a few places tucked away here and there he could savor those memories, but as language always changes, so too does cuisine, and the food culture in western China had not stood still, even as he was working to bring his remembered tastes to a new audience, with great success, I might add.

I read a lot of cookbooks, and I keep a running document of quotes that evoke for me an

understanding that authenticity is not about a fixed, immutable cuisine, but rather comes from a desire to feed not only our bodies, but also our souls. We can do this with comfort foods from childhood (and certainly when you’re sick in bed, there is nothing quite like those taste memories), or with new flavors that broaden our world and build bridges to others’ experiences. I wish it were as easy to learn other languages. But for now, I will continue to explore cultures and cuisines through taste, mindful that everyone brings so much history and so many layers to the kitchen, knowing that both tradition and innovation hold value, in language as well as in

cooking.