Cooking, High and Low

My wife and I were having a conversation yesterday about food, and how there is a strange disconnect between Americans and the French about which French dishes associated with country folk and common folk are a kind of 'high cuisine.' This is of course an accident of history, associated with the mid-century popularity of noted early special operator and famous cook Julia Child. Child was of course capable of cooking the 'highest' French dishes, having fallen in love with French cuisine after the war and arranging to become fully trained in the best schools. But she taught Americans a lot of common dishes as well, blurring the lines between the stuff that the French thought of as 'high' and 'low' so that the Americans came to see French cooking as a kind of high cooking per se

However, it occurs to me that it is often the country folk dishes -- the lowest of the low cuisine -- that ends up being recognized as the essential dish of that nationality. For Scots it is of course the Haggis; the Mexican national dish is mole that is made of various chilis and seeds, particularly served over turkey, and originally concoctions as much designed to try to preserve meats as to flavor them. You can all doubtless think of your own favorite examples of this. 

Yet then I thought of my time in China, where the 'essential' dish is surely Peking Duck -- a 'high' cuisine if ever there was one. The rural dishes sometimes make the running, like Sichuan cookery (my personal favorite of Chinese regional cuisines) or Hunan. The class hierarchy is better preserved there, though, even in spite of decades of Maoist leveling aimed at culture and class. 

Is this a feature of democratic revolutions in the West (certainly including Mexico and the United States, but also France and the United Kingdom)? Or is something else at work, do you think? 

6 comments:

  1. I am quite fond of Pot au Feu....rarely found in American French restaurants.

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  2. Zigeunerschnitzel for me. From a small restaurant at the top of a hill in Prűm, Germany. The proprietor and head cook claimed he'd done time in the Yugoslav army, and been one of Tito's regular cooks. True or not, it made an interesting claim. And the man could cook. There were no bad meals in that restaurant, ever, but the zigeunerschnitzel was das beste.

    And französische Zwiebelsuppe from a little restaurant just across the Zoll into Luxembourg from Germany. Served with a cheese-covered slice of toast floating on the soup.

    And Eis mit heißer Schokoladensauce in a little restaurant down a farm road a piece from Sembach. The chocolate sauce was made fresh for the desert when the dish was ordered, and it was served separately from the ice cream in a chafing dish to be kept hot and liquid until the diner was ready to deliver it to his ice cream.

    I've never been a big fan of French cooking, and Mexican is uniformly good, but where I am, it's old hat.

    Eric Hines

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  3. Eric Blair5:56 PM

    Pot au Feu is not only the "chicken in every pot" of Henri II, but it was also the soldier's main meal of the day, with a couple of twists, one, you didn't cut up the vegetables, and at the end, you took out the vegetables and meat, and served the broth as soup (sometimes adding rice if you had it), and then the meat and vegtables on the side, with condiments like pickles and mustard.

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  4. I had a great "French Onion" soup once in Boston. In an Irish pub. It was fantastic even though, on the cultural appropriation scale, it must have been off the charts.

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  5. A bit OT, if we're truly going to worry about cultural appropriation, we need to utterly and hermetically seal our borders.

    Letting all those folks in with their several cultures is the epitome of cultural appropriation.

    Eric Hines

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  6. We aren't of course even a little worried about it, since all cultures always learn from others. It's not immoral, nor even an option; and it can be delightful.

    You are right, though, that there's a sort of oddity in the stance of those who both want to (a) change the demographics as part of changing American, and also (b) insist that none of the old inhabitants learn anything from those being brought in to improve upon them.

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