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"Lots of planets have a North."
Instead of fixing egg salad for the GWO as promised last night, I suggested a trip to Masouleh. He was game, the restaurant was empty, and Nazim was humming along to Persian music as always. Our kabobs came garnished with mint; I couldn't say with absolute certainty it was orange mint, but it sure looked like it. I asked the owner to indulge me and make me a cup of tea with it. He made me a cup of regular Persian black tea and brought a plate full of sprigs. Not sure what else to do, I plunged them into tea and the result was quite lovely. Some of them that is; he brought so many that I was able to literally fill my pocket with them and brew another cup of pure mint tea when I got home.
On the way, we passed Denden, reportedly Chicago's sole Eritrean restaurant. That prompted me to ramble on to the Old Man about the construction of national cuisines. As we were finishing up our meal, we overheard a band of diners struggling to make sense of the label "Northern" on Masouleh's menu. The eponymous city is located in Gilan Province, which is in the northwest of Iran and is well-known for the distinctiveness of its cuisine. So Azim uses the term to spotlight regional specialties. Of course, since hardly any Americans know anything about the geography of Asian or African countries, it becomes quite meaningless to us.
It's thanks to Azim and his restaurant that I know anything I've just told you above. It took me years of frequenting ethnic restaurants to even consider the role of regional variation. Sometimes that's due to the fact that the local immigrant community is chiefly from the same area, so their regional cuisine becomes what we think of as the national cuisine. (Think, for instance, of the role the Cantonese have had in defining "Chinese food" for Americans, or the Sicilians and Neapolitans in defining "Italian food".) And sometimes it's due to the existence of a de facto "national cuisine" (usually a bastardised court cuisine) in the country in question.
The latter is the case with Indian food, for instance. It didn't occur to me to consider what a limited selection we were getting from a highly diverse country until I ate at the Bay of Bengal, a lone Bengali outpost on Devon. Later, when I asked a knowledgeable South Asian friend about it, he confirmed that the "Indian food" we know is chiefly a popular version of Mughal court cuisine and that was true of India as well. Local specialties dominated the streets, the markets, the ashrams, not to mention the homes, but eating out meant eating Mughal in much the same way that it once meant eating French in the West.
This is no longer as true as it once was in either the US or in India--Devon now has almost as many "regional" restaurants (both northern as southern) as it does Mughal--just as it's no longer the case here that "Chinese" is synonymous with sweet-and-sour or "Italian" with red sauce. But "Ethiopian" is newer cuisine to our shores, and its ambassadors represent a narrow representation of a diverse society. Many of the "Ethiopian" restaurants in the US are in fact run by Eritreans. But according to what I've been able to find online, the uniformity represents not only that but also the fact that cuisine of the north-central highlands is the basis for "Ethiopian cuisine" in the same way as that of the North Indian plain functioned for India.
Still, I did managed to discover a few regionalism. Chief among them is kɨtfo (beef tartare), which originated with the Gurage in the South. (Yeah, I know--as someone who only thinks of ensete when someone mentions the Gurage, I'm as surprised as the rest of you.) Possibly gomen (collards) as well. And the chief distinguishing feature of Eritrean cuisine seems to be pasta. (Traditionally, there seems to have been a lot of culinary conservatism in central Ethiopia; although they were familiar with Western food, they considered it rude to serve it to guests.) Also, according to this roundup of unusual Ethiopian dishes, it's apparently possible to get Oromo cuisine in the US, just not in Chicago.
On the way, we passed Denden, reportedly Chicago's sole Eritrean restaurant. That prompted me to ramble on to the Old Man about the construction of national cuisines. As we were finishing up our meal, we overheard a band of diners struggling to make sense of the label "Northern" on Masouleh's menu. The eponymous city is located in Gilan Province, which is in the northwest of Iran and is well-known for the distinctiveness of its cuisine. So Azim uses the term to spotlight regional specialties. Of course, since hardly any Americans know anything about the geography of Asian or African countries, it becomes quite meaningless to us.
It's thanks to Azim and his restaurant that I know anything I've just told you above. It took me years of frequenting ethnic restaurants to even consider the role of regional variation. Sometimes that's due to the fact that the local immigrant community is chiefly from the same area, so their regional cuisine becomes what we think of as the national cuisine. (Think, for instance, of the role the Cantonese have had in defining "Chinese food" for Americans, or the Sicilians and Neapolitans in defining "Italian food".) And sometimes it's due to the existence of a de facto "national cuisine" (usually a bastardised court cuisine) in the country in question.
The latter is the case with Indian food, for instance. It didn't occur to me to consider what a limited selection we were getting from a highly diverse country until I ate at the Bay of Bengal, a lone Bengali outpost on Devon. Later, when I asked a knowledgeable South Asian friend about it, he confirmed that the "Indian food" we know is chiefly a popular version of Mughal court cuisine and that was true of India as well. Local specialties dominated the streets, the markets, the ashrams, not to mention the homes, but eating out meant eating Mughal in much the same way that it once meant eating French in the West.
This is no longer as true as it once was in either the US or in India--Devon now has almost as many "regional" restaurants (both northern as southern) as it does Mughal--just as it's no longer the case here that "Chinese" is synonymous with sweet-and-sour or "Italian" with red sauce. But "Ethiopian" is newer cuisine to our shores, and its ambassadors represent a narrow representation of a diverse society. Many of the "Ethiopian" restaurants in the US are in fact run by Eritreans. But according to what I've been able to find online, the uniformity represents not only that but also the fact that cuisine of the north-central highlands is the basis for "Ethiopian cuisine" in the same way as that of the North Indian plain functioned for India.
Still, I did managed to discover a few regionalism. Chief among them is kɨtfo (beef tartare), which originated with the Gurage in the South. (Yeah, I know--as someone who only thinks of ensete when someone mentions the Gurage, I'm as surprised as the rest of you.) Possibly gomen (collards) as well. And the chief distinguishing feature of Eritrean cuisine seems to be pasta. (Traditionally, there seems to have been a lot of culinary conservatism in central Ethiopia; although they were familiar with Western food, they considered it rude to serve it to guests.) Also, according to this roundup of unusual Ethiopian dishes, it's apparently possible to get Oromo cuisine in the US, just not in Chicago.
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Oh, man. I've pretty much abandoned nationalism studies for the time being because the lessons always seem to be the same (or I'm having trouble seeing past the most rudimentary ones) - national food, national dress, national monuments, language, all seem to be constructed in similar ways for similar reasons. My favourite by far is the Thai variant, which AFAICT was born when the ethnically Chinese royal court adopted a particular set of Bangkok street dishes, so as to paint that Chinese court as populist by fiat, and that fiat continues today, with Thai restaurants abroad being subsidised by the government back home with decorations and cookery classes and so on.
Ethiopian/Eritrean's a really interesting case too, right? The civil war, the unification in US restaurants, injera bread as the defining characteristic. Honey wine. I sometimes wonder how these things form if it's not by centralised dictat.
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