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Editor’s note by Christopher Kimball
Fries with Your Sushi?
Back to March - April 2024
If I were to ask you what the most popular dish is in Japan, you might say sushi. The truth is that, for home cooks, Japanese curry served with rice is huge (sold as instant curry in 7-Elevens and still a Friday-night staple for many), as is a meat and potato stew called nikujaga and hambagu, a form of Salisbury steak made from ground beef and served with the standard vegetables, potato, broccoli and carrots.
Of course, if you spent time in Japan, you would find this list mostly bogus, since every region has its own specialties, and tastes are changing rapidly. I visited a hamburger joint, MOS Burger, in Tokyo years ago—it was surprisingly good—but McDonald’s is well entrenched, with 3,000 outlets. True, gyoza are still popular, as are soba joints, sushi, ramen, tempura, and oyakodon (chicken and egg rice bowl).
Traveling for food, one encounters endless surprises: sourdough pizza in Oaxaca, lemon meringue pie on the Pacific coast of Mexico in Yelapa and Kentucky Fried Chicken in Beirut. The notion that local people in far-flung locales have to “eat local” is the bane of culinary tourism; we spend a lot of money and time going somewhere unfamiliar, and we want the foodways to mimic our unfamiliarity.
On a recent trip to Romania, I was lucky enough to taste many variations of ciorbă, their signature sour soup, as well as a lemonade-like drink made with fermented wheat bran (borş), lettuce soup, fried doughnuts served with sour cream and jam, and a lovely polenta-cheese casserole, but was taken aback at the hotel restaurant in Sighișoara, a much-promoted historic town in Transylvania, where the main offering was steak.
On some trips, as in Taiwan, the local foods never seemed to end, from homemade scallion pancakes to phenomenal pepper buns at the Raohe Street Night Market, soup dumplings, authentic beef noodle soup, and three-cup chicken. In other places—Ecuador, for example—I was introduced to the national specialty, grilled Guinea pig, one day and then served bad lasagna the next.
We all love to construct our own vision of how the world works—we daydream about nomadic Berbers wandering the Sahara desert, doro wat being cooked over wood fires, and the vision of Mexicans grinding their own corn to make masa and homemade tortillas. (Most buy them in the local market or get them home-delivered.) Yes, some of this is still true—I have seen goat herders in the Sahara, and much cooking is still done over live fires around the world, but Lagos has 20 million inhabitants, Mexico City has 10 million, and if you want the best pizza in the world, many experts suggest either Tokyo or Buenos Aires.
It’s even worse when you have been to a place 50 years ago and then return. I visited the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul in 1971 and on a recent trip was disappointed that it looked more like a New Jersey shopping mall than a set from an Indiana Jones movie. Bucharest 50 years ago was a small gray Soviet satellite city, and today it is a sprawling mishmash of extra-wide boulevards and a bustling old town. I visited Tangier in 1969—I was a guest in Barbara Hutton’s sprawling palace on Rue Amrah in the medina. Ms. Hutton was stretched out on a Greek divan in front of a wall of carved ivory, and the evening included the Prince of Morocco’s favorite belly dancer. I will never return—those enchanted memories are best left undisturbed.
So if you are looking for culinary adventure, you might consider a modern metropolis such as Paris. The city itself is rooted in the past—its landscapes echo the works of Vincent van Gogh and Georges Seurat—while the cooking itself is ever-changing, from the bakeries in Belleville to the Vietnamese eateries near Montparnasse, not to mention dozens of other culinary influences from Morocco to Senegal to Lebanon. Vietnamese fried chicken wings may not fit our notion of classic cuisine, but it’s what’s happening now, it’s where the action is.
As travelers, we expect others around the world to honor their foodways, to celebrate tradition while we mostly ignore our own culinary past. It’s an unreasonable ask. History can point the way to the future, but the past remains an unknown shore, a place we can never revisit. Instead, order a plate of chicken wings and, with glorious appetite, eagerly anticipate whatever culinary surprises the future may bring.
March - April 2024
