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:
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?
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.
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.
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.
This problem could be easily solved by eating beans
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.
Carbonara?
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:
