[HN Gopher] Food Grammar: Unspoken rules of cuisine
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Food Grammar: Unspoken rules of cuisine
Author : pseudolus
Score : 74 points
Date : 2021-01-31 12:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| hirundo wrote:
| About 300 million McDonald's Fillet-O-Fish sandwiches, "topped
| with melty American cheese," are sold each year. I offer this as
| proof that cheese-on-fish does _not_ violate the American food
| grammar, just the {haute cuisine,foodie} American food grammar, a
| very different thing. Just because _they_ say "ain't" ain't
| right don't mean ain't ain't right.
| Spivak wrote:
| I think you're thinking about rules too much like a programmer
| in that they are something absolute rather than the rules _of
| thumb_ that they actually are. Fillet-o-fish (and fish-sticks
| in general) are an exceptional dish in American cuisine that is
| akin to an irregular verb.
|
| It doesn't matter if the individual dish itself is popular but
| that the paring it rare among the different types of dishes in
| American cuisine. Just because an irregular verb is commonly
| used doesn't mean it's not still irregular.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Fillet-o-fish (and fish-sticks in general) are an
| exceptional dish in American cuisine that is akin to an
| irregular verb._
|
| Ironically, irregular verbs get regularized over time as the
| language evolves (hell, I saw some paper the other day that
| attempted to compute half-life of irregular verbs in English;
| can't find it now) - but in case of food, I fully expect the
| opposite to happen; that is, cheese-on-fish will become
| normalized. McDonald's is the vanguard of the universal
| culture - whatever stuff it sells everywhere is here to stay.
| hirundo wrote:
| An irregular verb is not ungrammatical. It just follows an
| exceptional rule of conjugation. Same with a fish sandwich
| with cheese.
| Spivak wrote:
| Fair enough. I consider these to be spiritually equivalent
| since any ungrammatical form can be made grammatical with
| the addition of a new rule.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| technothrasher wrote:
| _Offer an American a hamburger patty coated in thick demi-glace,
| and they'll likely raise an eyebrow at this common Japanese
| staple dubbed hambagoo._
|
| But I'm an American, and that immediately sounds pretty good to
| me. Like a little Japanese meatloaf. The only "grammar" problem I
| see there is that I suspect the word is hambagu.
| quicklime wrote:
| One of the mistakes that many gaijin make (myself included) is
| to assume that katakana words are always loan words from
| _their_ home country. "Hambagoo" is the Japanese take on a
| Hamburg steak, not an American hamburger.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg_steak
| icefrakker wrote:
| What this article partly talks about is one of the reasons I
| think "cultural appropriation" is such a silly and offensive
| concept, an indication of the intellectual bankruptcy of the
| American left when it comes to things like multiculturalism and
| race.
| [deleted]
| klyrs wrote:
| In my life, I've made a commitment to combining foods that break
| the grammars that I've been exposed to. Much of the time, I've
| enjoyed (pear compote on steak!) or at least tolerated (hot dog,
| peanut butter and banana? Only whilst camping) the results.
| However: _never mix strawberries and shrimp_. It wasn 't my idea,
| but I did execute on the suggestion.
| mhh__ wrote:
| One of the worst things ever featured on the UK version of
| Kitchen Nightmares was someone who was serving up chocolate and
| prawn smoothies in sunny spain...
| silicon2401 wrote:
| Just watched that and was about to comment the same. I wish
| there was some kind of quantification to this stuff, or at
| least a subjective graph demonstrating the different aspects
| of foods and which ones are complementary: flavor, texture,
| color, smell, etc. if we had this kind of quantified space to
| explore, i think we could programmatically find some bizarre
| combinations that taste amazing
| mhh__ wrote:
| I don't think there's as much science to it as he implies
| but this is how heston blumenthal cooks.
|
| I genuinely can't find the book (it's not modernist
| cuisine) but he recommended a book which is sort of part
| chemistry textbook part cookbook.
| euoia wrote:
| I think you are talking about to "On Food and Cooking" by
| Harold McGee. It is a very good book and I do refer to my
| copy from time to time.
| RobertKerans wrote:
| Flavour thesaurus is very good, if quite small relative to
| what I think you want (or I might be projecting -- it's
| what I want). Would be a good start for seeding the graph
| anyway, it's a great book.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flavour_Thesaurus?wprov=s
| f...
| _jal wrote:
| A high-school friend once made a chicken milkshake.
|
| Pot may have been involved.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| try peanut butter, banana, sriracha over greek yogurt with
| granola... sounds weird, but I eat it for breakfast all the
| time
|
| One day I decided to make a cobbler with thanksgiving
| leftovers... turning it into a "shepherds pie" thing but as a
| turkey cobbler.. that thing was delicious.
|
| I love taking and combining familiar concepts in unfamiliar
| ways... it's at least one way to pass time during the
| pandemic...
| klyrs wrote:
| > One day I decided to make a cobbler with thanksgiving
| leftovers...
|
| Marvelous. I did an "all-in-one" dish for a winter potluck
| one year. Ham, cranberries, and (a few) brussels sprouts, in
| a base of potatos au gratin. It got a few weird looks, but
| there were no leftovers.
| CapitalistCartr wrote:
| Yeah, don't do orange juice on cereal, either.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Of course cookies can be dunked in milk. Once on a plane,
| sometime around her first birthday IIRC, my daughter tried
| dunking Biscoff in Diet Coke. I was so proud of her because
| clearly she was a culinary genius! Until I tried it.
| blendergeek wrote:
| I LOVE orange juice on Wheat Chex. So, I don't think this
| warning applies to me.
| kazinator wrote:
| Rooibos tea works on some cereals. You can think of that as a
| sort of North American hipster version of chazuke.
| yomly wrote:
| Wow I was with you until strawberry and shrimp.
|
| Korean marinades use pears for kalbi iirc.
|
| PB on a hot dog isn't crazy tho the addition of banana is
| slightly more odd.
|
| But my god. Strawberry and shrimp. Especially that very rich
| full bodied shrimp would be awful with strawberry! Gross!
|
| And yet the brain is ticking, if you chose sweeter prawns that
| were very fresh and steamed them, I could see them going with
| milder raw strawberries. At least not contradicting them. Maybe
| some balsamic can bridge the two.
| klyrs wrote:
| > And yet the brain is ticking...
|
| Well met, friend! After writing that, I started reconsidering
| how it could be done. I arrived at a sibling comment's
| observation, that ceviche could be a better approach. Not so
| far from the balsamic! Onion in the ceviche may help (on
| second thought, it might be another strike against the
| strawberries). But no, the original incident was a grilled
| skewer -- yikes.
|
| One flavor that I've found to be a a very flexible "strange
| bridge" is mustard. But... ye gods... that'd only turn the
| retch up to 11.
| burke wrote:
| Riffing on ceviche seems like a plausible path to something
| edible.
| monocasa wrote:
| Yeah, I was about to say, I've had mango salsa ceviche that
| was pretty killer. Strawberry isn't a leap.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| shrimp is usually combined with lemon, or that radish stuff
| right?
|
| yeah I'd definitely try balsamic, or maybe sour apples, or
| orange marmalade? Shrimp, mayo, apple is definitely a thing
| right? Is the cream part required? What about a citrusy
| balsamic shrimp banana crepe, with a light sugar dusting? ok
| weird but I'd love to try it
| jimmaswell wrote:
| I once browned some ground beef and cookie dough together and
| thoroughly enjoyed it.
| yesenadam wrote:
| Maybe HN could apply itself to finding solutions to George
| Hart's _Incompatible Food Triad_. (George is father to maths
| /art youtube superstar Vi Hart and himself an amazing
| maths/artist.)
|
| _After twenty-five years of thinking about this problem I
| decided to write a web page about it. Here is the problem:_
|
| _Can you find three foods such that all three do not go
| together (by any reasonable definition of foods "going
| together") but every pair of them does go together?_
|
| The page is extremely funny, but also serious - my favourite
| combination.
|
| http://www.georgehart.com/triad.html
| klyrs wrote:
| Indeed, the pb/hotdog/banana experiment was performed with
| this problem in mind. Though, nobody thinks that banana and
| hotdog is worth considering... until you roast the banana...
| (and, yeah, still questionable)
| curiousllama wrote:
| > That this thought experiment merits a web page is really
| quite astounding. That I decided to write you an e-mail
| telling you that is even more astounding. And that I don't
| drink myself stupid following this exchange will be the most
| astounding non-event in the history of mankind. I am baffled,
| shattered, and destroyed by the mind-numbing pointlessness of
| The Incompatible Food Triad experiment. It makes me ill. I
| promise you, sir, I will never again be the same after
| witnessing the sheer mind-blowing uselessness of that puzzle.
| My life as I know it, is over. I once was lost, but then I
| was found, and then I found your website linked to Wikipedia
| and now I am lost again, irretrievably lost in a dark maze, a
| pitch dark maze with the Minotaur of Bafflement hunting me
| down. I shall not escape him, I shall not escape my doom. No,
| good sir, instead I fall - far and away, even from myself I
| fall until I slam forcefully into the cold steel floor of my
| own mind, crippled and alone, dead to all sensation. I am
| gone, sir, and I shall never return.
|
| Loved the page, myself.
| babelfish wrote:
| This deserves it's own post
| InitialLastName wrote:
| Nobody ever accepted me putting chocolate chips in my tuna
| subs.
| wirrbel wrote:
| French fries with vanilla ice cream is somewhat popular in
| Germany.
| babelfish wrote:
| It is in the United States too - mostly vanilla milkshakes,
| though (Wendy's frosty, In-N-Out shake, etc)
| jimbokun wrote:
| This is why I don't like "fusion" dishes.
|
| When I'm exploring new cuisines, I want to learn the grammar of
| that culture and how they put food together. I find those
| traditional dishes that have evolved over a long period of time
| to have flavors that complement each other very well. And also
| like imagining the experience of people from that culture.
|
| And I know others enjoy something new and innovative that hasn't
| been done before, and that's OK, too.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| A lot of "traditional" dishes are not that old.
|
| Japanese Ramen is my favorite example. Inspired by Chinese
| noodles, it is only about a century old, and it really took off
| during WW2. A sign of it not being of Japanese tradition is the
| fact it is most often written in katakana (ramen).
|
| The fact it is not traditional is actually a strength. While
| more traditional Japanese food like sushi or tempura is highly
| codified, Ramen shops are free to do as they please, which
| result in a great deal of variety. There is no "one true
| Ramen".
| lhorie wrote:
| Fun fact: tempura are actually of portuguese origin. And
| california rolls are, as the name suggest, from California.
| Another japanese staple that has a weird history is curry: it
| mimics the _british_ curry, rather than the indian/thai
| varieties.
| OnlyOneCannolo wrote:
| Where do you draw the line? At the Columbian Exchange?
| retrac wrote:
| A valid question. When my mother was growing up, pizza was
| considered a somewhat exotic Italian-American import.
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Depending on your perspective, all food is "fusion". If you
| take any dish, it's always going to be a fusion of different
| cultural, and trade, and climate, and agricultural...
| influences. Today's perspective on "traditional" could be
| yesterdays tradition-defying modern innovation. You find (with
| very few exceptions) that it's vary hard to define what a dish
| actually is. There's no such thing as a "correct" Laksa recipe
| for instance, so if you want to understand what it is, you have
| to investigate how different people make it differently, and
| how that's changed over time. Where you draw the line of
| "traditional" is mostly rather arbitrary.
| lhorie wrote:
| I like fusion cuisine: it tends to be endemic of places with
| lots of immigration and it's part of the character of these
| cities.
|
| What I think you're referring to is the idea of authenticity,
| which I think is illustrated well by looking at how different
| cultures barbecue. The "classic" american barbecue features
| harburgers and hotdog sausages in bread, brazilian barbecue
| offers a large variety of cuts of meats along with an extensive
| salad buffet, and chinese barbecue might get you duck to go
| with rice.
| dekhn wrote:
| I love this idea and want to expand on it. I personally think of
| all cuisines in the worlds as points within a large embedding-
| "recipe space". Every recipe is a graph of nodes representing
| items, and edges representing actions ("take sugar and flour and
| mix in a bowl"). Out of this whole space, different cultures have
| explored various areas but we've ended up with a number of very
| similar approaches, such as:
|
| flatbreads. a wide range of cultures/cuisines use a flatbread as
| a starch structural vehicle (tortilla, dumpling wrappers)
| combined with a protein/fat interior (cheese, dumplings,
| whatever). This pattern shows up over and over and suggests a
| wide range of new fusion approaches ("world wrapps" is an example
| of prior art).
|
| Once you've cooked across enough cuisines you'll see people have
| rediscovered a number of techniques (quick fermentation, drying,
| evaporating) to get rich flavors quickly.
|
| There's a side comment in one my cookbooks (Sauces) which dives
| into salsa- which means "sauce" but most people think of it as a
| condiment. It points out that if you think of salsa as fresh
| sauces it opens up a whole new world of saucing opportunities.
|
| Building the latent space for recipes would mean taking every
| recipe in the world, encoding it, and generating an embedding;
| with the result, you could easily create fusion food by casting
| vectors between two cuisines and sampling points between them.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Eggs are breakfast food.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| eggs are a food fit for every meal... does that mean every meal
| is breakfast?
| dsr_ wrote:
| Eggs hold things together. Cake, enriched breads, sauces,
| breading on your fried foods...
| polygotdomain wrote:
| While I've never heard it expressed that as "food grammar",
| there's definitely a context that tends to get lost with cuisines
| from another culture. Interestingly enough, that context tends to
| get "filled in" with their local vernacular.
|
| When done well, it can result in some really interesting fusion
| cuisine and dining experiences. That's not always the case
| though, and I'm reminded of an experience I had in Rome ordering
| a cheese burger in a quasi-Irish pub, and getting a dry puck of
| ground beef with a cold thick slice of fresh mozzarella on top.
| Not really what I was hoping for.
| pmontra wrote:
| > fish is often perched on risotto
|
| As Italian I confirm that this is The Horror, really. And yet I
| can have a Spanish paella with no problem.
| yesenadam wrote:
| How about an authentic, traditional paella made with water rats
| and eels?
|
| " 'The peasants would cook the rice in a frying pan and
| accompany it with whatever they could find. This would normally
| be water rats and eels,' explains respected Valencian chef
| Rafael Vidal in an interview with El Pais. 'These were more
| like rabbits than the modern sewer rats found in cities' "[0]
|
| It seems these are actually water voles:
|
| "Water vole meat was one of the main ingredients of early
| paellas, along with eel and butter beans. Novelist Vicente
| Blasco Ibanez described the Valencia custom of eating water
| voles in Canas y Barro (1902), a realistic novel about life
| among the fishermen and peasants near lake Albufera."[1]
|
| [0] https://jbcrocket.medium.com/anyone-for-rat-and-eel-
| paella-t...
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paella
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_water_vole
| bonzini wrote:
| Not entirely true. It's kind of traditional in some places to
| prepare it with lightly fried lake fish (I am from the Como
| area). The horror would be parmesan with fish. But it is
| "small" fish, not a whole bass or trout.
| ryanbrunner wrote:
| A lot of Italian food rules tend to be more regional than
| most italians think. Even the classic heretical example of
| spaghetti and meatballs pretty closely resembles traditional
| dishes from Abruzzo -
| https://www.lacucinaitaliana.it/ricetta/primi/spaghetti-
| alla...
| mikehollinger wrote:
| There's a pretty good article from the BBC [1] on the "bad
| grammar" of ordering a marinara pizza with cheese in Italy. It
| got covered on HN back in 2015. [2] There're some pretty good
| anecdotes in there if you like this article. :-)
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33542392
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10026519
| pierrebai wrote:
| Give this article to someone, taking out every occurence of 'food
| grammar'. I'll bet they'll guess the missing words are 'eating
| habits'.
|
| Why invent new words for existing concepts? Most of the times, in
| my experience, it is done to either appear more intelligent or to
| stake a new ground and be the self-anointed expert.
|
| What's wrong with eating habits?
| crazygringo wrote:
| They're different concepts.
|
| Eating habits are, well, just habits. They're what you usually
| do. But they don't embody notions of right and wrong.
|
| Grammars embody notions of right and wrong. Americans don't
| avoid eating horses and dogs because it's not part of their
| habit, they do it because they think it's wrong.
|
| Habits are relatively easy to change. Grammars are not. I think
| food grammar is a great term.
| roelschroeven wrote:
| I think 'style' would be a much better name. Grammar
| describes how to put words together, style describes which
| combinations are a good idea and which aren't.
| morsch wrote:
| The article (and the related book[1], written by a linguist)
| introduce the term to refer to cultural rules around what foods
| to combine, either at the same time or sequentially.
|
| Eating habits is a very general term. The first 3 google
| results I got[2][3][4] aren't really related to what the
| article refers to as food grammar. I'd say referring to habit
| stresses the individual preference, while referring to a
| grammar stresses the cultural preference.
|
| I'll say that if the Google results for grammar inside the book
| are exhaustive, the concept isn't fully developed though. I'd
| have expected a longer, systematic list of food-grammatical
| rules.
|
| [1]
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/7BF0AwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gb...
|
| [2]
| https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/losing_weight/eating_habit...
|
| [3] https://www.healthlinkbc.ca/health-topics/ad1169
|
| [4] https://www.everydayhealth.com/diet-and-nutrition-
| pictures/b...
| vz8 wrote:
| Hunched over a bitter + savory hotpot in Nanning, China was both
| dizzying and delicious. A tour-de-force of sinus-clearing,
| palate-disorienting goodness.
|
| Boiling roiling fungus and grasses (lemon, bamboo, some things
| entirely new)
|
| A wordless meal, punctuated by satisfied sighs and appreciative
| noises
|
| Plates of piled high greens. Mystery broth, mystery guests.
|
| The live entertainment: torchlit, rhythmic caterwauling over a PA
| grawprog wrote:
| I've never heard those.concepts described as grammar before, but
| it makes a lot of sense and puts into words well the reason why
| some food just feels like it doesn't go together.
|
| As far as adapting food goes vs traditional recipes. Personally,
| I think there's room for both. I really enjoy getting to try food
| done 'traditonally' but I also enjoy fusions of food, or new
| rakes on old things or just finding a recipe myself somewhere and
| changing it up in some way.
|
| Food's great and it's great people keep experimenting, adapting
| food from other cultures and combining things.
| Djvacto wrote:
| You can see this in stuff like Chinese-American restaurants, or
| British-Indian food, but a lot of great food comes from what
| cooks have to do when using their original recipes/cooking
| styles in a region with distinct ingredients. I end up
| accumulating a lot of ingredients that are traditional from
| international groceries and stuff, but a lot of interesting and
| tasty dishes come from what you can substitute regarding local
| produce and ingredients.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| Grammar was very much a class thing, imposed top-down.
|
| However, one had to wonder how Icelanders came up with the
| rotten-shark-in-a-clay-pot, french with garlic and snails. It
| feels like survival tactics turned cuisine grammar.
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