For more than 20 years in the food, I have talented chefs and restaurants that lead through campaign contributions to the formation of a new American-average kitchen was often, French art from Asia, Africa, Middle East and ingredients Latin America as yuzu and turmeric Berber observed, Poblanos and zaatar. As usual white and born in America, the treatment of these kind of ingredients cooks as an experimental inputs, not parts of experience and history of other people. This approach to websites and magazines rivulets of food Recipes Americans present cook at home. As an Indian immigrant, I realized there was more to the stories of these foods. To listen to these stories, I travel the past years for the United States to speak with the migration, African-American and Native American home cooks, chefs, restaurateurs and food historians. “There is the court and then there’s the hands that prepare and serve the court,” Mark Padoongpatt, a Thai-American scientists at the University of Nevada, told me. In El Paso, I met Kristal and Emiliano Marentes, a woman and man of Mexican immigrant families who had just opened his restaurant, Elemi. Recalling the tortillas of his childhood using their mothers, to cross the border to buy Juárez, Mexico, they have decided to make corn tortillas by hand. It is a complicated age-old process, heirloom wheat land in an alkaline solution involves soaking to improve the nutritional content and make it more digestible. Pressed and cooked tortillas windows were beautiful green water. Add the mushrooms confited, muddy, salty cheese and cooked with quesillo Hoja Santa beans, avocado leaves and epazote, Emiliano showed me as the best taco I’ve ever had to do. Stories, it turns out, add flavor. But the taste is not the most important part of history in general. “It ‘s hard for me that people think, go my tortillas accept before accepting my cousins,” said Emiliano. His cousins are now so heavily militarized Mexican citizens across the border that his family does not often visit. I found the story that the food in the investigation, sometimes learned the United States during times shameful that we did not fully anticipate. In Phoenix, I met Andi Murphy, a journalist who hosts a podcast Navajo toasted sister of indigenous foods. He told me the story of Fry dough fried bread, sometimes sprinkled with sugar, perhaps the most famous food of Native Americans. Except it turns out that is not original Native American at all, as none of its components is a native of this country. The bread was fried for the first time in 1860, when the government forced more than 10,000 people Navajo in Arizona to hike 450 miles away from their cornfields, orchards and sheep from a prison camp in New Mexico. Thousands of people died. For hungry AVERT mass, officials distribute flour, sugar and lard, which boil the bread people. “I had a lot of self-hatred” Murphy said, “until I learned this story.” On the coast of South Carolina, I found myself on a boat in a reedy swamp of Wadmalaw Island, rising up crabs in a case with Keith Smiley, a local crabber. Later the chef BJ Dennis accommodation Smileys came to me to show how the crabs to cook and fry with rice. Smiley and Dennis are Gullah Geechee, part of a distinct culture of African Americans in the coastal region stretching from North Carolina to Florida. Many of their ancestors from West Africa rice-growing areas; They were forced into slavery by slaves and white owners for their knowledge and expertise recruited to dry in floods and rice fields. Dennis grew up in Charleston nearby rural Wando visit to see his grandfather, who showed him how the sugarcane buried Bank during the winter for replanting in the spring. He would catch shrimp and fish and dry on the roof of his house in the hot sun. He told stories of his youth, when his family grew rice in their garden of rice mother would be on Saturday for Sunday dinner pounds. The rice and the pounding came from Africa. Sugar cane was introduced during slavery as a cash crop. The seafood and fish were captured by the fertility of the marsh. This was not just the waste from the main table. This was a complex and regional differences of about half a dozen African-American cuisine, which contained a story that I had never met with chefs at school or in my work. Dennis a whole value system was wrapped in these foods, said- “to be self-sufficient and take care of the family”, and his grandfather entrusted him with the execution of this. “He said,” A day will come the old ways have to survive “For me, growing up in New York City, foods that old way of representing the old life in India and the people we left behind .. every summer, when I visited my relatives in Madras (now Chennai), my aunts and grandmother would a suitcase for me at home with the fat cucumber, turmeric white powder, sambar and dried green mango and take dried root of full lotus. Back in new York my mother, a single mother would do his weekend with me collect ingredients of South Indian in small shops in the city and wake up at 5:30 every day to spend to cook dinner for me before his shift as a nurse in a hospital. how can American chefs talk about turmeric, without knowing anything of the Indians like my mother, who is here and led to understand its use in dozens of recipes, their role in Hindu rites its centrality as an anti-inflammatory medicine in ancient ayurved ica, and in turn the American continent in the spice trade, led European Voyagers? I’m not saying that you can not spray a bit ‘of turmeric in your soup at home without paying tribute to my mother. I say that professional cooks, food should publishers, food writer and creator-trendsetter recipes in the food stop cherry-picking what they want from a culture and claim as their own. You should begin to look and listen to the true cultural experts. I made my mistakes. now I cringe to make accessible to Americans of my first cookbook, Easy Exotic, my attempt at foreign recipes on title. Food is an important part of our collective American experience, our culture. about our inspirations We must be honest to actively create space for people of color in our fields, especially African Americans, and solicit and value of their stories. Image copyright Aaron Montes
The food world needs to hear the real cultural experts, not only their ingredients
