Strange connexions

Some time ago, a Facebook Friend changed his middle name to "Mazeppa". I'm not even sure when he did it because it only registered for me after I'd been reading Doctor Zhivago. There's a reference in there to Ivan Mazeppa, a 17th-century Cossack hetman whose name became anathema. Literally. As late as Pasternak's time, "mazepenets" was still in use as a pejorative term for someone opposed to central authority.

My buddy, however, is not exactly a Russophile. As far as I know, he's not into history at all. So the identification always puzzled me. When I finally remembered to ask him about it, it was his turn to look puzzled. Of course it had nothing to do with Ukraine's long history of resistance; it was a reference to the eponymous character ("The stripper who bumps it with a trumpet") in the musical Gypsy.

So now we were left wondering what connexion, if any, there could possibly be between a historical Cossack and a Broadway vaudevillian. The answer (as it so often is in such cases) is Byron. His poem based on a fictionalised account of the early life of Ivan Mazeppa is centred around a depiction of him strapped naked to a wild horse a punishment for diddling the wife of a Polish count. Naturally, this inspired a dramatisation in Paris featuring a young woman playing the role of Mazeppa, a show widely copied in the UK and America. By the time Gypsy appeared over a century later, the original inspiration was obscure, so the primary associations of "Mazeppa" were with burlesque acts.

"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.