Eat This Newsletter 189: Inauthentic
Hello
Authenticity is big again this week. I’m not against that, I just don’t feel like doing it myself.
Whodunnit
Who Invented Mac and Cheese? asks an article in Epicurious. Although it is an entertaining and informative read — one would expect no less from Karima Moyer-Nocchi and Adrian Miller — it doesn’t really offer an answer. At least, not a positive one. Not James Hemings, or Thomas Jefferson isn’t nearly as satisfying as “plump elbows surrender[ing] to the thick, creamy orange cheese sauce” accompanied by the “voluptuous, squishy sound of walking barefoot through mud”.
The authors do a fine job of digging back to Cato’s De Agri Cultura and forward to the influence of Kraft’s processed cheese (though not the genius St Louis salesman “who wrapped rubber bands around packets of grated Kraft cheese and boxes of pasta and persuaded retailers to sell them as a unit”). And, probably wisely, they ignore the fetishisation of mac and cheese as a humblebrag luxury garnished with lobster and, for all I know, gold leaf. As a whodunnit, the mystery of who invented mac and cheese is like Murder on the Orient Express: everyone dunnit, but it is still good to get the lowdown on the usual (and unusual) suspects.
I know enough not to blame authors for headlines. Especially when their take home message is as clear as this:
Authenticity in a recipe is not necessarily bound to a moment or an inventor. More often, it arises when authoritative hands have invested their expertise in a dish and positioned it within the folds of a tradition; as regards macaroni and cheese, that prerogative reverberates predominantly from the collective wisdom and generational experience of Black women in the United States.
Sourdough Really Was
Sticking with myth-busting histories, Gastro Obscura pulls aside the romantic veil that obscures the less-than-ideal sourdough bread of the gold miners of the American West. Plundering “letters, diaries, and newspaper articles written by and about the 49ers, lumberjacks, and pioneers of the American West,” the article concludes that the bread made by these rugged icons of American masculinity was “really gross,” and I have no reason to argue.
I do, however, argue with the notion that use of the word sourdough to indicate that a bread was leavened with a starter based on a mixture of yeasts and bacteria necessarily means that it will be sour in taste. Some people fall into this trap all too easily, and reading Gastro Obscura’s article I can kind of see why. I bake all kinds of breads leavened in this way, and none of them is noticeably sour unless I deliberately make it so. Many alternative terms exist, from the Frenchified levain to the Italianate pasta madre, but English seems to be fixated on sourdough. I try to use starter and leaven, as appropriate, not least because sourdough so ambiguously refers to both the technique and the end product.
Indian, not Anglo-Indian
Long after Robin Cook, the UK’s Foreign Secretary at the time, famously cited chicken tikka masala as “a true British national dish,” and given all that’s been said about authenticity, there’s something rather exciting about Ishaan Patil’s recent article Confronting Xenophobia Through Food—and Comics.
Patil is an anthropologist who moved from India to the UK bearing his mother’s secret spice concoctions and an assortment of snacks for a cousin in London. He has turned his experiences into an exploration of how the expansion of an Anglicised version of Indian food nevertheless left Indian migrants out in the cold. As Patil writes, “When my non-Indian friends talk about their love for Indian food (albeit a British version of it), it often leads to opportunities to discuss other aspects of Indian culture that were unknown to them”. The result is an insightful glimpse into how Indians keep their cultural heritage and identity alive by finding “authentic” ingredients imported from India and using them to cook dishes important to them.
Hounslow’s streets will never feel familiar, but in future I will see them through more open eyes.
Microplastics in Mother’s Milk
Where are we on solid evidence that microplastics are bad for human health? All together now: “Further research is required”! But they are, clearly, scary. What, then, to make of the discovery of microplastics in human breast milk?
Three-quarters of the women in a smallish sample of Italian women had microplastics in their milk. But there was no correlation with how much each mother ate food and drink in plastic packaging, or seafood, or used personal hygiene products that contained plastics. And there isn’t, yet, evidence of harm to babies. Dr Valentina Notarstefano, of the Università Politecnica delle Marche, one of the scientists responsible for the study, summed it up for The Guardian:
“It will be crucial to assess ways to reduce exposure to these contaminants during pregnancy and lactation. … But it must be stressed that the advantages of breastfeeding are much greater than the disadvantages caused by the presence of polluting microplastics. Studies like ours must not reduce breastfeeding of children, but instead raise public awareness to pressure politicians to promote laws that reduce pollution.”
M’kay. I’m just glad this bombshell didn’t delay my recent episode on breastfeeding even more.
The gift of consistency is deeply political
Mid-way between Atlanta in Georgia and Birmingham in Alabama is “the chain restaurant capital” of the USA. Nearly 60% of restaurants in Anniston, Alabama, are chains. That’s just one of the dinner-party facts I picked up from a glorious report in the Washington Post that examines the latest data on the distribution of restuarants in America. The mystery, which the article tries to solve, is why (with exceptions) “places that support Donald Trump also tend to have the most franchise foods”.
It isn’t rurality. It isn’t education. It isn’t age of the people or the community. It wasn’t whiteness. And it wasn’t income.
So, what was it? Driving to work! I urge you to check out the entire chain of reasoning, though I still don’t understand what that has to do with their voting preferences.
Still waiting: What Did They Learn?
In the previous issue, I took issue with Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast epsiode about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment, asking, what, actually, did Ancel Keys learn as a result of starving those 36 young men. Perhaps I was premature, for the following episode charted The Rise of the Guinea Pigs with more on the famous experiment. Again, although there was plenty about the self-sacrifice of the volunteers, who genuinely wanted to help mankind and bravely published their own findings, nothing about the actual discoveries that that experiment allowed. On checking, though, I see that there is yet another episode, which “explores the scientific legacy of this experiment”. I will listen with interest.
Take care.
Jeremy