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You are here: Home / Food & Recipes / Food / Ethnic Cookery (Open Thread)

Reader Interactions

135Comments

  1. 1.

    lamh36

    Does Cajun or Creole count as ethnic? If so I could eat gumbo every day and not feel sick, and even though um not big on red based sauces, I can go to town on some good shrimp Creole or Etouffe

  3. 3.

    beth

    My Babci always asked for something that sounded like ammonia (she only spoke broken English) when she wanted baking powder. I figured it was some old-fashioned type of leavening.

  6. 6.

    Go ask mom

    I’ll bet that the recipe actually calls for what gets called “hartshorn” in old cookbooks. It used to be from actual, uh, deer horn, and does contain ammonium carbonate. Luckily, the ammonia all cooks off at oven temperatures, so it’s at least as safe as eating all the cream that goes in a paczski. You can buy ammonium carbonate for baking now, if you’re really into trying an ammonia cake.

  8. 8.

    Mr. Longform

    I asked my grandmother what was for dinner and she said “hummingbird tongues.” And damn if it didn’t taste just like ham. And it was kind of pink and chunky like ham, too. Not sure of the ethnic provenance, but a rare treat.

  9. 9.

    Villago Delenda Est

    Does pizza count as an ethnic food anymore, or has it been thoroughly assimilated into the hive?

    Rouladen with Spatzle is excellent, but, yes, I do like my bulgogi as well, and three cheers for authentic soul food!

  13. 13.

    Bill

    It might be like the “salty” licorice you can get in Europe the “salt” is ammonium chloride, and it has an ammonia-like flavor.

  22. 22.

    Roger Moore

    I’m a big fan of Chinese food, especially their special holiday dishes. I’m greatly looking forward to getting some nian gao now that New Years is coming up.

  24. 24.

    Roger Moore

    @Amir Khalid:

    I agree with Werebear: some ethnicity deserves to be blamed for Twinkies and Wonder Bread. Why not the white European-Americans?

    I think the correct group to blame for those “foods”- and all other overly processed food-like substances- is food processing chemists. They don’t properly count as an ethnic group, though.

  26. 26.

    dedc79

    At some point it became unfashionable to eat stuffed derma (beef intestine stuffed with flour meal, spices and rendered chicken fat), and meatless versions were created. My grandmother made a fantastic mock derma and this vegetarian was particularly grateful.

  31. 31.

    opiejeanne

    @schrodinger’s cat: You know, Kansas and Missouri are part of the MidWest and I don’t think a lot of lutefisk is eaten there, but I could be wrong.

    I think of midwestern food as bland, prepared by people who think garlic is only used by them Eye-talians. My mother discovered the joy of garlic when I was about 16, and it was a revelation. I only tasted pastrami for the first time when I was 18; a friend gave me a bite of a sandwich when I asked what it was. I managed to overcome my upbringing and never called meatballs and noodles in tomato sauce spaghetti.

  32. 32.

    japa21

    One of my mother-in-law’s favorite delicacies was czernina, otherwise known as duck blood soup. We would occasionally go to a Polish deli and buy some. Always a small amount because my wife and I wouldn’t touch it.

  34. 34.

    Botsplainer

    Personally find of the cuisine of the Eastern Mediterranean – Greek, Turkish, Arabic. My grandmother taught me a lot, I’m self trained on some more.

    The savory stuff is outstanding.

  35. 35.

    schrodinger's cat

    @opiejeanne: True, the Mid-West is a huge geographical area. I was thinking of Minnesota and the like. I don’t actually know where Werebear’s family is from.

    As an ode to my Indian roots, my motto is, spice, spice baby.

  37. 37.

    TaMara (BHF)

    Shoot, I just looked at the calender and Mardi Gras falls on the 17th, so probably not able to do a recipe exchange for it (because I won’t be around for the 13th).

    But I may just do Cajun later in the month because I can. I love Cajun and Creole and JeffreyW always has such great photos of his stuff.

  38. 38.

    srv

    Betty, I have always appreciated your support for outside-the-box solutions, unlike the rest of the mob here who think we just need more regulation.

    Amazed they have not demanded Obama create a Cook Book Czar.

  39. 39.

    schrodinger's cat

    @opiejeanne: True, the Mid-West is a huge geographical area. I was thinking of Minnesota and the like. I don’t actually know where Werebear’s family is from.

    As an ode to my Indian roots, my motto is, spice, spice baby.

  41. 41.

    p.a.

    You had ammonia? What I wouldn’t have done for ammonia cakes! They must think the sun shines out your arse.

  43. 43.

    Everett

    Hey Betty,

    They’re probably talking about ammonium carbonate. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cookies are similar to German “springerle,” which are crunchy, anise-flavored cookies that include ammonium carbonate as a leavener. These are the cookies that are flat, white and usually have a pattern pressed into the top. They’re just divine when dipped in coffee or espresso. So, don’t discount the recipe just yet! I’d give it a shot; you might find it to be a great addition to your repertoire (or total crap, who knows?).

  44. 44.

    schrodinger's cat

    @raven: One of my really good friends is Norwegian. She hosts a kickass traditional Norwegian Christmas feast every year, that was my exposure to lutefisk.

    ETA: Your dad looks a bit miffed about something.

  45. 45.

    Botsplainer

    @p.a.:

    I’ve had several cured dry Italian sausages that had some ammonia spicing in the mix. Haven’t figured out the cracker/cheese combo that dampens that flavor.

  46. 46.

    WereBear

    @schrodinger’s cat: I don’t actually know where Werebear’s family is from.

    Born a Hoosier. Northern rural Indiana, mind you, not those hippies down near Indianapolis. So we ate:

    the good: Amazing pies & crisps & crumbles. Homemade egg noodles. Chicken that had been doing other things just that morning. Grazing beef. Hogs who lived outside. Corn on the cob we picked ourselves and whispered “steam” in its ear, with lots of local butter.

    the bad: three layer Jello salads with all the layers suspended. It was quite an art. To this day, if you order “salad” in the local eating spots, this is what you’ll get. You elitists must specify “green salad” if that’s what you want.

    the ugly: Vegetables and elbow macaroni, both boiled until no hint of resistance might remain.

  47. 47.

    opiejeanne

    @schrodinger’s cat: Yes, I recognized that region from the food you mentioned. That’s not the first place I think of when the Midwest is mentioned even though I know it’s considered part of it.

  49. 49.

    sparrow

    @schrodinger’s cat: I’ve always thought so, but then, you have to remember that almost all the “ethnic” food here has been american-ified. I’ve travelled pretty extensively, and the only food that I think is similar in both countries is french (because it’s fine dining I guess), and maybe english (disgusting in both places, IMO). Greek, Mexican, Japanese, Italian were all very, very different (and mostly better) in the home countries.

    But my favorite is greek, of course. :)

  50. 50.

    gelfling545

    My great grand-mother used alum in her baking. I wonder if this is similar. She bought it from the place where medical necessities are sold in crystal form & powdered it as needed.

  51. 51.

    opiejeanne

    @WereBear: Very similar to what I experienced growing up despite living in Southern California. Did you ever have Broken Glass Cake?

    http://www.tastebook.com/recipes/1853370-Broken-Glass-Cake

    my grandparents lived next door and Grandma baked all of our bread. My sister and I thought Wonder Bread was the most exotic thing we’d ever seen or eaten, and you could wad it up into a really small pellet. She also baked cookies for us, so I almost always had homemade chocolate chip cookies in my lunch.

  53. 53.

    schrodinger's cat

    @WereBear: I have only seen these “salads” in old cookbooks. I am not a fan of the texture of Jello.
    The good sounds great. Although I would add a dash of cayenne and kosher salt along with some lime juice to the corn on the cob!

  54. 54.

    opiejeanne

    @sparrow: There is a Mediterranean restaurant in Greenwood/Seattle that I think hasn’t been Americanized. The food is brilliant especially the Greek food and unlike the stuff at a nearby Greek restaurant, which has been dumbed down just a little I think.

  56. 56.

    WereBear

    @WereBear: After growing up with such bland fare, one can imagine how thrilled I was to hit New York City at 21 and eat real Italian, Polish, Brooklyn Jewish, Chinatown Chinese, Greek from the Astoria section of Queens, and authentic felafel from the street carts.

    Heck, Nathan’s hot dogs were so good I won’t buy any other kind to this day.

  59. 59.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @WereBear:

    You elitists must specify “green salad” if that’s what you want.

    I imagine that specifying argula would cause the earth to tremble?

  60. 60.

    Linnaeus

    Possibly, but I think I’ll stick with pączki.

    A reminder that I need to get some before the 18th.

  61. 61.

    Svensker

    @Gravenstone:

    Yes, the ammonia is used as a leavener. Some of my old US cookbooks mention the option — apparently the ammonium carbonate gives a crisper cookie than other chemical leaveners.

  62. 62.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @jeffreyw: The other day the Oregon Liquor Control Commission (which has been charged with putting together the rules for legal pot in Oregon come 1 July) held a public hearing, and one thing that the crowd was pretty much unanimous about was that growers needed to be Oregon residents…we’re not going to have that stuff imported from Southern Illinois here, by gum! Or that Maui Wowi or Napa Sonoma Mendicino weed, either! Panama Red and Colombian Gold? Right out!

  63. 63.

    trollhattan

    @opiejeanne: @schrodinger’s cat: “Upper” Midwest at least has a strong Scandinavian influence, extending as far south as Iowa. And I’ll propose that at a minimum the Ozark portion of Missouri might as well be the South because it’s basically a displaced chunk of Arkansas.

  65. 65.

    opiejeanne

    @schrodinger’s cat: That was another ethnic group that my midwestern family was suspicious of; heck, they were suspicious of everyone else, and just forget about eating traditional food from those groups. I think barbecue was the only time the worst of them crossed the line. Pizza from Shakey’s doesn’t count.

    Mom got over it, living in California for so many years. Most of the family in KC, not so much.

  66. 66.

    p.a.

    It’s an issue of ingredient availability and demographics. If there’s a large enough population to support immigrant-owned ethnic restaurants and if the immigrant community has enough resources to import ingredients or take trips to restock (and if the stuff needed is legal to enter the US) you can have great ethnic cuisine. If not, comprimises have to be made. And adjusting recipes to appeal to local palates isn’t a sin. Nothing wrong with earning a living.

  67. 67.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @trollhattan: Given that Missouri has given us great (in stature) types like Carl Schurz and Harry Truman, and great (as in “can be seen from orbit”) types like Rush Limbaugh, it’s certainly a land of contrasts.

  69. 69.

    normal liberal

    @Go ask mom: you can get this stuff from a place called House on the Hill, which mostly sells beautiful but very pricy springerle molds and such. The King Arthur Flour site might have it. I’ve read that your kitchen smells of ammonia while the cookies bikes, but that it goes away.
    Springerle are a pain to make, so I leave them to others.

  73. 73.

    opiejeanne

    @WereBear: Me too, both.

    My daughter made a version of it for the Superbowl party, using coconut milk to flavor the white ground, and the “broken glass” were green and Jello shots. I had one small block and I could feel the alcohol within seconds. I’m a lightweight when it comes to booze.

  74. 74.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @opiejeanne: Given the last 30 seconds of the Superbowl this year, that would be a good thing to have eaten just before the fatal INT.

  78. 78.

    Roger Moore

    @sparrow:

    I’ve always thought so, but then, you have to remember that almost all the “ethnic” food here has been american-ified.

    That depends a lot on how recently the ethnic community- or even the individual cook- moved here, and to what extent they’re cooking for other immigrants vs. the dominant culture. So, for example, there’s a lot of good, reasonably authentic Mexican cooking in the Southwest because there’s large-scale, ongoing immigration. It’s only when you get outside that core area that it’s hard to find authentic Mexican food. Or, to give a different example, you can still find reasonably authentic German food in the Midwest because there were insular German communities there that were cooking primarily for themselves.

  81. 81.

    schrodinger's cat

    My father’s cousin used to make some seriously tasty Vindaloo. He would marinade the pork in rum and then slow cook it for hours. Goan cuisine is a great fusion of cuisine from the west coast of India and Portugal. Great breads too and the sea food is to die for, as are the beaches.

    This thread is making me hungry and nostalgic.

  82. 82.

    opiejeanne

    @trollhattan: That could be argued. Some of my Ozark family fought at Pea Ridge (Union), which is about 150 miles from their neck of the woods which was north of Springfield near Macks Creek. It’s still pretty isolated, the roads aren’t paved once you get off the state route, no street signs, and there are fords to cross the rivers.

  84. 84.

    opiejeanne

    @WereBear: My mother made that, sometimes with a bit of celery in it. I don’t think I’ve made Jello fruit salad with canned fruit more than a couple of times in the past 45 years. I have not missed it.

  85. 85.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:

    Chinese cuisine in India is hot and spicy, while in the US it can be sickeningly sweet, both very different from what Chinese people eat in their own homes.

    Saying that “Chinese” food is a particular way is as silly as saying “Indian” food is a particular way. There’s a huge difference between regions within the country. In particular, most of the American Chinese food is based on Cantonese and Shanghainese dishes, which tend not to be very hot and are frequently sweet. In contrast, dishes from some of the interior areas like Szechuan and Hunan are very spicy. It’s likely that the dishes that became popular in India and the US are different by selection for authentic dishes that already appealed to the local tastes rather than by drastic alteration to fit them. And Chinese cuisine is also one where there are huge differences between what people cook at home- usually simple stir-fried dishes to accompany rice- and what they eat in restaurants- often very fancy stuff that’s only sensible to cook in larger batches.

  87. 87.

    opiejeanne

    @Villago Delenda Est: We consoled ourselves with a little chocolate cake vodka, which is amazing stuff. It smells and tastes just like chocolate cake. This was from UV.

    Then we went home and watched too many episodes of Burn Notice (which we had just discovered the day before) until we were so tired we could sleep. The next day we all felt better.

  88. 88.

    opiejeanne

    @WereBear: The best part was that none of the people at the party was old enough to have had much Jello salad forced on them as children, so it was a novelty.

  89. 89.

    schrodinger's cat

    @Roger Moore: Oh I agree. Its just that I am not that well versed in all the differences of the various regional cuisines of China. I was mainly speaking of the widely available restaurant food.

    ETA: Though there is a lot of regional variation in Indian food, most restaurants (90%) serve food from northern India around Delhi, while the remaining 10% serve food from southern India. I have never seen cuisine from the West or East represented all that much.

  91. 91.

    WereBear

    @opiejeanne: To truly experience Midwestern farm cuisine, the church potlucks and state fairs are hotbeds of competition and that’s when Jello salad becomes a cage match.

  92. 92.

    opiejeanne

    @Roger Moore: There are lots of Mexicans in the Seattle area but apparently none of them learned to cook from their abuelitas; so much bland or just bad food. I mean, even the Americanized version isn’t hard to make taste good. How hard are rice and beans?
    I have found exactly two good ones in the four years here, and one was in a failed fast food restaurant, all of the clientele were Hispanic (probably specifically Mexican) and the food was divine.

    The other one was in a neighborhood that boards itself up around 4pm, in South Seattle. Oh my, that was brilliant, and the clientele was mixed and the place was packed. The people who made the food were lovely and spoke very little English, and if I knew where the heck either one was I’d go back there for lunch again. Middle child knows. She could make me a map.

  95. 95.

    Calouste

    @opiejeanne: You mean the Olive and Grape? Unfortunately, that’s no longer as good as it used to be. Went there a couple of weeks back after not having been for a year or two and I was severely disappointed. The Mediterranean Kitchen in Bellevue is my favorite for Mediterranean food in Greater Seattle.

  96. 96.

    newdealfarmgrrrlll

    One grandad in my extended Scandinavian heritage family liked lutefisk, the rest of us couldn’t stand it. When dad’s Norwegian cousin visited a number of years ago we discussed foods we still had in common. Yep, still baking the same family Christmas cookies! But when we asked about lutefisk, Astri replied, “Once refrigeration was invented, everyone stopped eating that nasty stuff!”

  97. 97.

    opiejeanne

    @WereBear: Ha! Jello Cage Match at the Baptist church basement, 7pm.

    I attended lots and lots of potlucks in the basement of the Methodist church in Baldwin Park, CA growing up in the 50s and 60s. Cakes and fried chicken were the big throw-downs. Mrs Jackly’s was good but she used too much black pepper. Mrs Curry’s was better, but Mrs Weaver’s was the best. For cakes, nobody could touch Mrs Zugg, although many tried. She tended to bring a seven-layer cake that used about a dozen eggs, and oh my. There were very good potato salads and various pies and cookies that were all good.

    Almost everything else was stuff your parents wanted you to eat, so of course you didn’t want to, and they really didn’t want you sampling every dessert in the place but we all managed to compare quite a few of them.

    When we moved to Temple City the food battle remained the same, and there was a woman who made teriyaki skewers that were to die for. She hosted the youth group at her house once a year for a pool party.

    You can imagine my shock and disgust (and laugh at us) when my husband and I attended the christening of a relative’s twins at a Lutheran church in Los Angeles and the potluck afterward was entirely made of aspics; those women were involved in a cage fight alright, and they must have coordinated. What looked like lime Jello was not at all lime Jello, and the cherry Jello was certainly not cherry. We ate some, it was 2pm and we were starving so we ate a tiny bit, made our excuses, and took the kids to a fast food place about a mile away.
    Our next church potluck at a Methodist church in a different town was nothing but salads, no meat, no rolls, nothing solid and there were lots of kids. There weren’t any desserts other than the one I brought. The men fought over that pie. My husband ran out to KFC and fed all of the kids pieces of fried chicken. We had been attending for a couple of years but had never been to a potluck there; they didn’t seem to have them as often as when I was growing up. In the summer when I was a kid they were every Saturday evening, and then the kids played hide and seek in the early evening until an older kid rounded us up, then we watched Godzilla or Mothra in one of the classrooms until the adults were finished with their meeting.

  99. 99.

    opiejeanne

    @Calouste: That’s the one, and I haven’t been there in over a year now, so I’m sorry to hear that it has changed. It used to be very good.

  100. 100.

    Roger Moore

    @schrodinger’s cat:
    One other thing to consider is the distinction between authentic and traditional. There’s a tendency to want to treat ethnic food as if there’s a static definition of what the real food is like, and any departure from that definition is inauthentic. But real cuisine changes over time, so that food can be perfectly authentic in the sense of reflecting what foods people actually eat in that country without being at all traditional.

    A good example are Taiwanese-style boba tea places. They’re authentic in the sense of being part of Taiwanese chains and serving exactly the same stuff that’s being served in Taiwan today without being at all traditional. And I’m not sure how to classify the Hong Kong style cafes, which serve a mixture of southern Chinese dishes and Sinicized Western dishes. I guess they would classify as fusion cuisine, but one that we’re importing already fused rather than doing the fusion here in the US.

  103. 103.

    JCJ

    @WereBear:

    Lime jello is just “salad.” With carrot shreds and marshmallows

    Oh no! How could you remind me of that abomination?

    Your list of good and bad reminds me holiday gatherings at my uncle’s house in the farmland near Pine Village, Indiana.

  105. 105.

    priscianus jr

    @schrodinger’s cat: “Except may be Wonder bread and Twinkies.”

    There are a lot more things than Wonderbread and Twinkies that are in the same category as Wonderbread and Twinkies.

  106. 106.

    Iowa Old Lady

    I really miss the middle eastern food I used to be able to get in Detroit. Anita’s KItchen was my favorite restaurant.

  107. 107.

    trollhattan

    @JCJ:
    Things I have seen suspended in Jello (mostly but not exclusively at Lutheran potlucks).
    Canned pineapple, oranges, pears, cranberries, peaches and most popularly, “fruit cocktail”
    Cottage cheese
    Sour cream (probably that fake stuff, but who can know for sure)
    Shredded carrot
    Grapes
    Raisins
    Strawberries
    Maraschino cherries
    Actual cherries
    Marshmallows
    Shredded coconut
    Olives
    Nuts of many kinds
    Celery
    Bell pepper

    I need to stop.

  108. 108.

    priscianus jr

    @Villago Delenda Est: There’s ethnic pizza and then there’s assimilated pizza. I’ll even go so far as to say that some of the mass-produced ones taste more like ethnic and some less.

  110. 110.

    priscianus jr

    @Villago Delenda Est: “Except may be Wonder bread and Twinkies.”

    There’s a lot more things than just Wonder bread and Twinkies that are in the same category as Wonderbread and Twinkies.

  111. 111.

    Tree With Water

    “Doug Baldwin has reportedly been fined $11,025 for pooping a football”.

    That’s an imaginary football, folks. What great minds want to know is why the fine is $11,025 rather than, say, $11,030?

  113. 113.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @trollhattan:

    My family thinks I’m nuts for carrying My cell phone, drivers license, and credit card in my pocket when I’m traveling by plane, but that aircraft had over 50 people on board and only 13 fatalities. If I survive something like that, I want to be able to call my family to tell them I’m okay and then buy a drink.

  114. 114.

    Origuy

    Growing up in southern Indiana, pizza was an ethnic food for us. We had it a few times when my mom took us someplace, but never at home. Dad is still a meat and potatoes man. It was a revelation when I went away to school in Champaign and had a gyros my first week there. I was a picky eater at home and my folks couldn’t believe that I liked it.

    Now I live in the Bay Area where almost every cuisine in the world is available.

    ETA. Mmmm, gyros. It’s lunchtime.

  115. 115.

    priscianus jr

    @Amir Khalid: some ethnicity deserves to be blamed for Twinkies and Wonder Bread.

    It would be an interesting project to trace the cultural factors that led to the invention and popularity of delectables like Twinkies, Wonder Bread, French’s mustard, etc. I think it may have something to do with infantilism, spoiling children and then spoiling oneself. “White Europeans” seems an over-generalization, as every white European culture I know of has an excellent tradition of baking, mustard, etc.

    There is a definite perception, however, that white bread with a soft crust is more luxurious than brown bread with a hard crust. Take that a bit further and you wind up with Wonder bread and Twinkies …

    The thing that really gets me is that everything in America seems to be getting sweeter and sweeter . . . and by that I don’t mean better. People get addicted to sugar (or corn syrup).

    No, I think something happened to some people after they got here. And they didn’t get it from the Indians either.

  116. 116.

    Roger Moore

    @priscianus jr:
    I get the impression that some of the variation in pizza in the US is authentically Italian. The Neapolitans like to pretend that they’re the one true pizza, but there’s substantial regional variation within Italy, much of which was brought to the US by Italian immigrants. There are obviously some genuinely American developments in terms of acceptable sauces and toppings, but the basic crust styles and even the different shapes reflect different Italian predecessors rather than American innovation.

  117. 117.

    opiejeanne

    @catclub: actually, that last church was the wealthy one. They were concerned about people getting fat so everyone brought salad; this was way back when seeing a fat person was not as common as it is today, and most kids were not fat.

  118. 118.

    trollhattan

    @Mnemosyne (iPhone):
    How does anybody even board a plane without ID? I want at least enough stuff to get by if/when my luggage gets lost. And yeah, the important phone call and then the drink. Hopefully, it’s on the airline.

    Friend who was at the Reno Air Show crash called his wife and told her, “We’re okay, just minor injuries and we’re headed home.”

    “…What?”

    “Turn on the teevee, I’ll explain when I get there.”

  119. 119.

    trollhattan

    @Roger Moore:
    Favorite pizza joint is co-owned by an Italian-American and an Italian-Italian, who supervised the oven (massive) and kitchen construction, created the menu, got it up and running and only then closed his pizza place in Italy to live here full time. I like to think of it as “authentic.”

  121. 121.

    priscianus jr

    Gefilte fish. For those not familiar with East European Jewish cookery, this is made of chopped freshwater fish, typically carp, pike and whitefish, mixed with onions, carrots and eggs, shaped into pieces about the size of a potato, then boiled in broth so they get more or less solidified, then chilled so the broth sometimes jells and sometimes it doesn’t. Then you eat it cold with grated horseradish or a mixture of beets and horseradish.

    I still eat this practically every week, but my kids don’t like it and from what I hear, hardly anyone does any more, though many still eat it because they kind of feel they ought to. To me this is amazing, because I always loved it even as a kid.

    However, the fact is that it’s a lot of work to make it yourself (starting with a live carp) and nobody does it since our grandmas died. Even when I was a kid people mostly used to buy them in jars. But here’s the thing — the ones in jars used to be a lot better than what you get now, even though they’re mostly the same brands.

    My mother taught me to doctor the ones out of a jar by reboiling them for a while with celery, onions and peppercorns. It helps, but it’s better if you have time to put ’em in the fridge so they can get cold.

  122. 122.

    priscianus jr

    @Roger Moore: There are obviously some genuinely American developments in terms of acceptable sauces and toppings,

    In this part of East Texas, I think the most popular toppings are ham and pineapple, which in my view is pretty much of a stretch for pizza. But I’m from Brooklyn.

    As for your other point, you can get pizza in any city in Italy, but then, you can get it in any city in Europe. But ’twas not ever thus. It’s home really is Naples. Maybe Sicily as well.

  123. 123.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @priscianus jr:

    In this part of East Texas, I think the most popular toppings are ham and pineapple, which in my view is pretty much of a stretch for pizza. But I’m from Brooklyn.

    Puh-leeze. That’s “Canadian Bacon” not ham, and it’s a common topping (along with pineapple) in the Pacific NW, often going by names such as “Maui Wowie”.

    We have an authentic, certified Neapolitan pizza joint here in Tracktown, USA, and that’s some very good pizza.

  126. 126.

    Roger Moore

    @priscianus jr:

    It’s home really is Naples. Maybe Sicily as well.

    And Rome. And plenty of other cities in Italy. That’s the point. Pizza was a genuinely Italian food, but like all real food it varied tremendously from place to place. That variability across Italy was transmitted faithfully to the US and helped to give a lot of the variety you see here. Then people in Naples tried to claim that theirs was the one true version of pizza and every other version was either a bad imitation or a mutant.

    I think you see this general pattern with a lot of foods. When food was a local affair, there was lots of regional variation and people weren’t too strict about how things were named. All of the strict naming and precise definitions of what does and doesn’t meet the exact standards of the type is a quite recent invention.

  130. 130.

    Rachel B.

    @raven: Cut the grapefruit in half around (through?) the equator. Sprinkle liberally with brown sugar and just a tiny bit of salt. Shove under the broiler until good and bubbly. Eat immediately, being careful not to burn your tongue on the molten sugar. It helps if you happen to have those ridiculous grapefruit spoons with the serrated tips, but they aren’t necessary. Run a sharp knife around the outside of the fruit, between sections and rind; then attack with a regular teaspoon.

    Squeeze them for juice. Mix juice with sparkling water or club soda. Tiny dash of salt, again. Sugar if your personal diet has room, but it’s very good and thirst-quenching without sugar too, especially in the heat of summer. (You know you can freeze the juice too, right?)

    Take one for lunch with a bit of cheese or leftover meat of some kind. Peel and eat. Delicious, especially if chilled, and you digest the protein better.

    Squeeze juice and use it in place of the regular liquid in pound cake. (This works WONDERFULLY with orange or tangerine juice, by-the-bye.) If you need a good pound cake recipe, please let me know.

    Rachel

  131. 131.

    Mnemosyne (iPhone)

    @trollhattan:

    Most women keep their ID in their purse, not in their pocket, so they put it back into their carry-on. I have one of those wallet cases for my iPhone, so I keep that in the cargo pocket of my travel pants in case we have to deplane without being allowed to carry any luggage.

  133. 133.

    RAM

    One of our favorite family Christmas cookies, springerles, require baker’s ammonia. The first time we tried my grandmother’s recipe, though, we were perplexed since it called for a “chunk of baker’s ammonia the size of a walnut.” What kind of walnut, we wondered. And what the heck is baker’s ammonia, we also wondered. We finally found it after visiting the local German bakery, and they agreed to sell some to us, but it came in powered form, not in chunks, walnut-sized or any other. So we used the old trial-and-error method, and eventually came up with an amount that worked. And by the way, springerles are to die for…

  134. 134.

    Abo gato

    @Mr. Longform: As a small child, my dad would always tell me we were having hummingbirds tongues on toast. My mind goggled at thinking about how many hummingbirds it would take to have enough to put onto toast. And it always turned out whatever we had was never any thing that would have resembled that. At least your grandmother provided a dish that would work with your imagination.

  135. 135.

    sfrefugee

    Actually, powdered ammonia is an actual ingredient in baked goods – usually Eastern European or Greek (see e.g. here).

    It is hard to find. You need to look in an ethnic grocery or online.

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