A Hungarian friend says that the Steak Tartare being tucked in under the saddle is also an Hungarian legend, my Bucharest friend says she had never heard of Steak Tartare as Belrus was the part of east Asia that was not invaded by the Mongols (fair enough), but " Hungarians like OUR goulash, you know" Haha! I love those debates over ownership of a dish that is quite often the national pride. Yes, for the Anglophones a goulash is a Hungarian Goulash. You type "Goulash" in English on Google and you get references about Hungary.
"You know, all my life, we make gulash and my grandparents made goulash". I then tried searching "goulash" on Baidu website, and it shows "Russian soup" in Chinese.....
It is as delicious a debate as the one between Malaysia and Singapore where each claims "Hainanese chicken rice" its national dish. Noting that Hainan was the smallest (well, let us not get started on Taiwan) province, if not one of the poorest of China, Chinese netizens snorted at the debate that no one except Hainanese themselves have tasted this dish. The hard working Hainese immigrants brought their local dish to both sides of the Malacca straits, so thrifty they were that they cooked the rice with the residue of the chicken broth so the less fortunate of the family members could still indulge the fragrance and taste of the meat. Hainanese, who were not part of the mainstream Chinese immigrants from the South, namely Hokkien and Canton, deprived of employment opportunities in transportation, commerce and commodities, mostly ended up as domestics for the then colonial families such as the Dutch and British. They quickly learned the European cuisine and started their own restaurant business known as "kopitiam" which offered toasts, coffee and "local delights" like their home dish the "chicken rice". "Kopi" is the local oronunciation of "coffee", "tiam" is Hokkien for "shop". The toasts are the ones at every street corner of Singapore nowadays-hot pieces of white bread lathered in a concoction of coconut cream and margarine. 100% comfort food dated back to the colonial time.
Speaking of comfort food, what we believe to be healthy diet choices like Sushi was invented as "fast food". It began in Tokyo when some very clever restaurants decided to cater the busy streets of working class people by combining raw fish with fermented rice. The rice was vinegered to present the raw fish from spoiling too quickly. Not only tht, they started the fast food delivery service where a delivery man would load tens of sushi lunch boxes on a bike snd delivered to the dock for workers.
Immigrants bring with them fantastic treasures as such cheap labors, exotic food and imagination. Some generations later, the host country tend to claim such dish their own. One dish whose origin was completely confused is the "Vietnamese dish" called "Pho". Once upon a time in the Yunan province in the northern east region of China, an ambitious yet somewhat finicky local scholar decided that his young wife was a distraction to his preparation for the national examination and set up his study in a bamboo hut across the river from his own village. However, he still missed his wife's cooking and insisted that home made noodle and soup be brought to him for lunch everyday. The standard noodle dish made at the time was like every other noddle dish in China: noodle cooked in hot broth, with pieces of beef and vegetables. As his wife had to cross the bridge to deliver the soup, our scholar complained that the beef was becoming stale having been in the soup for too long. The clever and (obviously distractingly beautiful) young wife had the brilliant idea of separating the soup, the noodle, the beef and the vegetable in different containers. Upon serving, all ingredients were thrown in together. It is called "Noddle Over the Bridge". Later the dish must have been brought to Vietnam and the rest is history.
No comments:
Post a Comment