Cookbooks that embrace cultural messiness

One of the great debates over cuisine is the idea of authenticity: does a cookbook or recipe truly represent the culture of a place or people. This debate gets messy because culture is never static and is ever evolving. Think about how the spice trade introduced flavors that became ‘authentic’ to a cuisine thousands of miles away from where the spice is grown, such as the popularity of cardamom in Scandinavian dishes. Further, the argument over authenticity becomes muddled when an author can trace their roots back to more than one country or culture.

The last issue is what Saveur covers in a recent article about the growing number of cookbooks that embrace intersectional identities. Jessica Carbone posits that we are in “golden age of the culinary -ish, in which food comes not from one narrow origin story but from many all at once.” Some of the titles even use this appellation, such as Marisel Salazar’s Latin-ish: 100 Recipes Celebrating American Latino Cuisines, Priya and Ritu Krishna’s Indian-ish: Recipes and Antics from a Modern American Family, and Guy Mirabello’s Pranzo: Sicilian(ish) Recipes & Stories.

In these volumes authors weave stories of growing up with one foot in their parent’s culture and the other in that of the country in which they are living or were raised. Food can bridge the divide, melding flavors or techniques from one culture with those from another to create something that both cultures could recognize. One example is Frankie Gaw’s burger recipe in First Generation: Recipes from My Taiwanese-American Home, inspired by both McDonald’s Big Macs and Chinese lion’s head meatballs.

The article also discusses several new cookbooks that fall into this genre: Salt Sugar MSG: Recipes and Stories from a Cantonese American Home by Calvin Eng, Family Style: Elegant Everyday Recipes Inspired by Home and Heritage by Peter Som, Third Culture Cooking: Classic Recipes for a New Generation by Zaynab Issa, Kin – Caribbean Recipes for the Modern Kitchen by Marie Mitchell, and In the Kusina: My Seasonal Filipino Cooking by Woldy Reyes.