National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home

Trying different national cuisines is perhaps the most common way people experience modern globalization. Yet it is paradoxical. Many people imagine their willingness to eat foreign food as evidence of their cosmopolitanism. At the same time, they crave unfamiliar food as ways to experience ostensibly authentic historical and indigenous cultures as if they were natives. In this work, a veteran cookbook writer visits six global cities—four in Europe—and uncovers the hollowness in this quest for authenticity. Iconic national dishes are almost invariably artificial constructs of recent invention. In Naples, the pedigree of the pizza margherita, supposedly concocted to celebrate the queen of a newly united Italy, proves to have been invented in the 1930s. In Seville, tapas turns out to be a twentieth-century upper-class luxury, and beloved regional cuisines a politically constructed bulwark for Franco’s authoritarian rule. Turkish cuisine is revealed to be an amalgam of Armenian, Greek, and Iraqi recipes. Borsch(t) is Ukrainian or Russian or perhaps Tatar. If one skims the chatty travelogue and conversations with local intellectuals, this book of tall tales about food makes for an engaging read.