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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (130809)	5/1/2004 8:26:25 AM
From: jttmab	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

No idea whatsoever, except maybe that the food doesn't taste good. Being 1/4 Prussian [Prussia being currently occupied by Polish Forces <s>], 1/4 Czech and 1/2 Slovak and having a serious interest in cooking a wide variety of cuisines, I have given it some thought. There are a variety of reasons. Germans were some of the earlier settlers in the US and there has been so much of their food that has been integrated into the US that it's not even noticed as being of German origin. You illustrated that nicely. You could have noticed that besides German, there are very few Polish, Czech, Slovak, Lithuanian, Hungarian... restaurants. It seems you would conclude that none of those cuisines taste good. One common aspect of those cuisines is the time involved in cooking. One of the better known foods of German cooking is sauerbraten. Properly made, sauerbraten takes 3-5 days of preparation [depending on how long the cook wants to marinade the meat]. Not very suitable for a restaurant, particularly American restaurants that want to throw something on the table in 15 minutes. Much of eastern European foods have long preparation times. A Chinese restaurant could make a Szechuan dish called "Frangrant Crispy Duck", but that takes 5 days to throw together so you won't see it very often on a Chinese menu. Is sauerkraut German? The French disagree, they call it choucrout. They call hot dogs saucisson. As you know, the French are the French and quite resistant to adopting other language words into their vocabulary. The very words Hamburger and Frankfurter sauerkraut would give most people a clue as to their origin. French fries are pommes frites. Definitely of French origin, which is why I didn't mention it. pot roast is pot-au-feu, and beef stew is ragouts de bouef or bouef bourguignon Every cuisine has something that resembles a beef stew. At the cooking process level curry is a stew; it's a slow cooking process. Though I can make a Thai or Indian chicken curry in less than an hour. What differentiates the cuisines is not the cooking method but the spices and herbs that are used in the cooking process. I can make a Asian beef curry that takes the same amount of time as a beef stew, but the spices used are bouef bourguignon is French because it uses a uniquely French flavor of Burgandy wine. [BTW, substitute Burgandy for a nice Merlot, it makes a more flavorful and richer entre.] If you're going to decide what the origin of a food is, such as pot roast and beef stew, you look at the spices and herbs used and what ethnic cuisine those items are closest to. What's widely accepted as pot roast and beef stew most closely resembles the spices and herbs used in German cuisine. Another aspect that affects the appearance of ethnic restaurants is when that ethnic group immigrated. There used to be more German, Czech, Slovak and Hungarian restaurants when those groups had their own neigborhoods. I think I would have a hard time finding a German, Czech, Slovak or Hungarian neighborhood today. On the other hand, I can find Mexican, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese neighborhoods. There's a large and recent influx of El Salvadorans into the D.C. area and you'll see those restaurants popping up. You can tell the difference between French cuisine and German cuisine because the latter has little flavor of its own. LOL. You want little to no flavor, how about gifeltefish and matzo? The first time I had gifeltefish, I assumed it was a bad batch. The second time I had it, it was exactly the same as the first batch. How could anyone do that to a perfectly good fish? jttmab