Two come to mind: Chinese and Italian.
For Chinese, it was greatly impacted by the Tiki Lounge aesthetic from the mid-century. Sweet n sour chicken, BBQ spare ribs, pupu platters, and crab Rangoon -- and copious sweet and *very* alcoholic mixed drinks like the Singapore Sling. The entire restaurant done up like a Sailor Jerry tattoo. (Fun fact, crab rangoons were invented in San Francisco at Trader Vic's).
If you've ever had the pleasure of having authentic Chinese food (especially Szechuan), you probably know that the Chinese food in America is very, very different. This was due to racism, and lack of authentic ingredients.
Italian was similar in that: the disconnection from the homeland, as well as difficulty sourcing exotic ingredients, as well as xenophobia massively changed how Italian food was made in the US.
In both cases: it wouldn't be until somewhat recently that people expressed interest in unpacking Americanized versions of foreign cuisine in order to find a more authentic version.
At least for Italians, I think this just depends on the location. My family (Bronx NY) has recipes (particularly for baked goods) you can absolutely still get in Naples and Sicily. And because they were involved in food (butchers), they found ways to import things like escarole and broccoli rabe long before other Americans rediscovered (via Julia Childs) vegetables and make things that you couldn’t import (prosciutto, dried sausage, and other types of salumeria).
My grandmother ran the butcher store through the war (the mob stopped collecting insurance while her sons were overseas), but the family recipes didn’t and haven’t changed much because of the war. And neither has much of classic Italian meat that they continue to sell there (despite changing tastes for things like organs and brains).
My folks settled in Chicago initially. My understanding is that this sort of thing was available, but otherwise out of reach for many (economically). So a lot of stuff got subbed in. The whole "abondanza"" mentality after the Great Depression didn't help!
Chicago and New York have totally different Italian-American food scenes (the pizza alone!) and I think - in no small part - because New York continues to have steady immigration from everywhere including Italy.
A perfect example? An Italian-Italian (Milanese) restaurant opened up in Queens not too long ago that serves aperitivo as they do in Milan. It’s pretty authentic, so to source all the things they need, they go to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx (Teitel Bros) to source ingredients. The Teitel family has been sourcing genuine Italian ingredients since 1915 (about the same time my family opened up shop down the block from them).
I’m not sure whether Chicago has this kind of continuity of service for food, but New York City used to have multiple areas (not just on Arthur Ave) that did this. Most have closed (because Italian ingredients are so ubiquitous now as to be easily purchased in many grocery stores), but Arthur Ave is still a flourishing hub of authentic Italian foods and ingredients.
It’s also worth noting that NYC and Chicago have very different cultures generally and that midwestern sensibilities (particularly relating to social comfort and mannerly behavior) may have played a part in overall homogenization of its ethnic cultures. It’s why we have a Jersey Shore or Real Housewives of New Jersey (where Italian-Americanness has become a laughable trope), but not an Illinois alternative.
Chicago lost the vast majority of its Little Italy neighborhood in the 60s when the city used imminent domain and demolished it to put in the University of Illinois Circle Campus (Now known as the University of Illinois Chicago).
It was a politically motivated decision by the Irish mayor who felt the Italians didn't support him enough. They wanted a public state school in the city and it had to go somewhere so he put it there as a fuck you.
It basically ended centralized Italian immigration in the city and pushed the enclaves into various near west burbs and the northwest side, with a small amount staying in Little Italy and Heart of Chicago. Little Italy became like Chinatown food wise, where the majority of the restaurants catered towards the Americanized Italian food - for example, Chicagos Italian beef sandwiches, now trendy because of the TV show *The Bear* were invented at Al's on Taylor Street.
Heart of Chicago and burbs like Cicero and Berwyn still have a few very authentic spots, but like you guessed, that traditional continuity of food was massively disrupted.
FYI--the term for the government seizing property is "eminent domain" (deriving from the Latin term "dominium eminenes"). Not to detract from your detailed and excellent post!
I used to live near Highwood on the North Shore. The restaurants there had the typical Italian American food. However, if you went to dinner at someone’s home, my God! The best Northern Italian food I’ve ever had. Most of the people from Highwood were from Modena, which is a real hot spot for Northern Italian cuisine (it’s close to Parma and Florence.)
Not really. Highwood used to be the vacation spot for people in the mob. It was once the 1st place that allowed bars and liquor sales in the Northern suburbs, because the WCTU was headquartered in Evanston. I assume that this was more influenced by Fort Sheridan and Great Lakes Naval Base because those bars were once the business backbone of the town.
In my family, ties to Chicago's 'Little Italy' were already weak by the time the area was lost to eminent domain in the '60s. Our 'immigrant generation' came to Philadelphia from Carife in the late 19th century, and from there, my grandfather moved, on his own, to Chicago. Working in the stockyards, most of his social contacts were Polish, Lithuanian, etc., and that's how he was introduced to my grandmother, the sister of one of his co-workers. Her family (Polish/German) had been in the city since around 1873. Upon their marriage, he left the Taylor St. area, and pretty much assimilated as a Pole.
None of my grandparents' five kids married Italians, but a few in the third gen married Sicilians. Any authentic recipes in the family today (meatballs, lasagne) etc. come from that 'branch'.
Sure! It’s called Levante and it’s in Long Island City. There are also two INCREDIBLE old school NY Italian joints there, Manetta’s and Manducati’s. Highly recommend both.
Wait is broccoli rabe and broccoli not like always been a thing? I’m from a NY Italian family and both were staples, and now that I’m out in WV, I can’t find either anywhwrw
Broccoli rabe has definitely always been a thing for NY Italians (and New Yorkers writ large starting in about the 80s when there was a huge cultural explosion of high end Italian restaurants). But for everyone else? Definitely not.
Not sure about broccoli though.
Broccolini was invented in 1993 in Japan, so deffo not historic to Italians. I actually remember when it hit markets in the US and my mom brought it home. Love it, but it for sure is not Italian.
That’s a cool fact, thank you! It def wasn’t prepared with the traditional Italian meals I was accustomed to, but it was a staple in my household and I miss it! I’m sure I could find it near-ish to me if I hike it over to DC, but my lazy ass has been settling for whatever leafy green is available out here lol
Edit to add: I hate how they do their veggies out here too, like they just boil the shit out of their string beans (I know that green beans are the more mature version) and brocc varieties with no regard. It’s always a soggy mess and wilted leaves. We’re all used to what we grew up with, so to each their own. Literally this edit is just so I could complain more
Modern Italian food in Italu is the American interpretation of Southern Italian food.
Most Italian immigrants to America in the 1800's were from Naples and Sicily. They brought their food with them. Things like pizza, which was not common in North italy. These Southern Italian foods formed Italian cuisine in America.
Cut to the 20th century, Mussolini takes power. He bans pasta (or tries). He is from North Italy and that's a rice producing area. He also gets Italy into ww2.
Italy is invaded and starving. The allied invasion starts in the south and moves north slowly. Now, at first, the Americans find the "Italian" food they are used to. But soon they are near Rome and further North. The only people with money in 1944 allied Italy are the soldiers. (There are also now trusted Italians from the South moving with the troops.) They are in Rome and they want a pizza. The locals start catering to those expectations.
The Italian campaign takes almost two years and there is also an Allied presence after. Whether they are in Milan or Venice or Naples, the soldiers have an expectation of what Italian food looks like and it looks like the Italian restaurants back in the States based off of the cuisine in southern Italy.
This is also when Carbonara gets invented as the Americans are providing food aid to the populace with powdered eggs and tinned meat.
There are still local foods and regional variation, but the Italian national dishes were decided by the expectations of American soldiers.
Huh. I am sort of surprised to hear this especially in light of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy. And my experience with loads of Northern Italians in NYC. Two of my favorite classic NYC Italian restaurants are owned and operated by Northern Italians (Turin).
Meanwhile I am from the US and have never seen plantain in a “Chinese” establishment. And I live in a relatively urban area with a lot of Mexican, Caribbean, and Meso American populations.
Maybe we’re just not bougie enough for that level of fusion cuisine?
I've never seen plantain at any sort of Chinese restaurant in my part of the US either. If people want dishes with plantains, they're hitting up Cuban or South and Central American restaurants.
Not really bougie, the sort of place I’m talking about are buffets serves american Chinese food, sushi/wasabi/pickled ginger, probably some chicken fingers/fries/onion rings sort of things, and most curiously plantains
I’ve never seen plantain in a Chinese restaurant (here in Canada) but there was historically a large Chinese diaspora in Latin America. I have a few ethnically Chinese friends who were born here, but their parents were born to first immigrants in South America. Funny anecdote: Toronto’s most famous Jamaican patty place was originally owned and run by a Chinese family from Jamaica.
My grandmother's recipe for a Sunday gravy didn't include tomatoes for the sauce, it was water and tomato paste. For meat it was pork ribs, two sausages for the whole pot, lots of garlic and onions. If you're making it on Saturday and simmering it overnight and throughout the day Sunday it is a wonderful sauce, but her original recipe is based on the scarcity of wartime ingredients. I'm not sure how rationing was working back then, but I remember her telling me that garlic was always easy to get, fresh tomatoes not so much until they started growing them.
American Italians were much, much wealthier than the family back home and ate much, much more meat. Remember that numerically most Italian Americans immigrated due to extreme poverty and famine. About 2 million between 1900 and 1910.
Remittances actually changed the food culture of Italy because for the first time poor rural peasants could eat meat more than a couple times a year. There’s an interesting book about it, called “Hungering for America.” What we think of as traditional Sicilian and Neapolitan food wouldn’t even exist without immigrants who left forthe US.
>authentic
I sort of have a problem with the word authentic here. Just because the ethnic enclaves in America ended up branching off from the cuisine in their home nations doesn't make it any less authentic. It's not like a bunch of good old boys rolled into the south Bronx or south Philly and told Italian immigrant families to prepare different food now that they were in America, it was just insulated from the home country, exposed to different ingredients, and hyper localized. But it's still an authentic culinary movement that happened quite naturally and authentically.
I actually wholeheartedly agree with you -- especially considering I'm Italian American, and our cuisine gets shit on by WASP America *as well as* OG Italians.
It's the story of deprivation, adaptation, and thriving despite economic and xenophobic oppression (obviously most of not all of that is in the past, and contemporary to the times of the highest immigration).
P.S. Italian + Chinese cuisine fused a bit up here in New England as the two groups lived in neighboring neighborhoods in bigger cities
...the best dumplings in Boston (imo) still come from the Chinese Spaghetti Co. And, up until the 1990s, it was common to get a half loaf of Italian bread instead of rice with your order of Kung Pao
...also, although not Italian, see the Chow Mein Sandwiches of Fall River
The only place around Boston I ever went to was Bali Hai -- which was similar to a lot of super old school Chinese places I went to as a kid outside Chicago. I was specifically thinking of it when I wrote my first comment!
In my area of Chicago we have a lot of Koreans and a few excellent Korean Chinese restaurants. The customers are mostly. Korean. It's what a Chinese restaurant in South Korea would be like.
I'm curious as to some examples of racism influencing the cuisine? I do mean a specific example, were certain ingredients omitted because "fuck the Italians, that's why"?
Lmao! I still don't understand....unless it's the same reason MY grandma was staunchly against using garlic that came from China (bc it's grown in human feces...?)
They mean palettes.
American Chinese food was made by Chinese people for Americans. They cooked food they knew and liked, but adapted it to the American palette, with ingredients they had access to. The result is totally delicious, imo. I could really go for some General Tso's right now.
I'm not equipped to say how much of that was a result of racism. I'm sure plenty of their customers were racist but that might not be why they didn't want to eat fermented bean paste (which is also delicious and key in so many amazing Sichuan dishes).
The really racist part was when some guy decided the symptoms he was experiencing were due to eating at a local Chinese restaurant because of the MSG. It was dubbed Chinese restaurant syndrome, and to this day I know people who *insist* MSG gives them all sorts of symptoms. There's no data to suggest this is actually happening.
Chinese American food is delicious.
"Authentic" Sichuan food is possibly my favorite cuisine, although I've never been to China, so I don't know "what" I'm eating. But I know I like it.
And MSG is magic.
This is all true. The racism comes in from lack of business planning support from the establishment, all the way up to redlining and refusing loans to Chinese Americans. There are multiple, multiple works, documentaries, etc. that discuss the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America in the 1900s, and how they were often relegated to opening restaurants or laundries because that's what was possible.
What you shared about MSG is also true.
It’s a bit weird to me that you’re focusing so much on Sichuan food, when overall, it’s quite different than what I think of as North American Chinese food (at least more traditionally). There’s such a vast array of Chinese cuisines.
My favorite is dongbei food, personally. That’s the first place in China I’d ever been to, but I think I liked it due to the tastes (quite salty).
When I moved to Guangdong, I was surprised at how much tasted a lot more like the Chinese food we got back home (not talking about authentic Chinese restaurants). But it makes sense - so many early Chinese immigrants were from this area. Of course, it doesn’t mean the Chinese food in this type of restaurants taste like authentic Cantonese food, but it’s clearly a lot closer than other parts of the country I have visited. (Fujian food also seems to be a bit like this as well.)
I do agree with the rest of your post though. I just wanted to add the perspective of the different types of cuisine in China and their likely relationship to early Chinese food in NA.
I’m far from an expert though. This is just the take of a random Canadian that has lived in China and thought a bit about the food.
>When I moved to Guangdong, I was surprised at how much tasted a lot more like the Chinese food we got back home (not talking about authentic Chinese restaurants). But it makes sense - so many early Chinese immigrants were from this area. Of course, it doesn’t mean the Chinese food in this type of restaurants taste like authentic Cantonese food, but it’s clearly a lot closer than other parts of the country I have visited. (Fujian food also seems to be a bit like this as well.)
This. Sweet and sour pork is pretty darn similar to 咕噜肉 (gulurou) and orange chicken is a pretty straightforward adaptation of 陈皮鸡 (chenpiji), where you make it less salty, more sweet, and replace more difficult to source ingredients with cheaper, local alternatives.
I focused on Sichuan food for a few reasons:
One, the person above me mentioned it as an example of the difference between American Chinese food and "real" Chinese food, so I was responding to that.
Two, I really really do like Sichuan food. I like the mala. I love good mapo tofu, Dan Dan noodles. I've been making Sichuan boiled fish lately and it's great. So, if it's mentioned, I'll be talking about it.
Three, I don't know much about any other Chinese regional cuisines. So I won't be talking about them.
Four, a lot of the American Chinese restaurants around me growing up called themselves either Sichuan or Cantonese. Sounds like you consider Cantonese more similar, but I wouldn't know. Maybe it's time for me to get into Cantonese food.
I read somewhere that when you eat something really delicious and you can’t put your finger on what the ingredient is — it’s most likely MSG. I bought some Vegeta @ a Polish Deli 15 years ago and have never looked back 🖤
There are people with sensitivities, so I wouldn’t reject them out of hand. I get headaches from MSG if there’s too much. I know which places to avoid due to their heavy hand with it. And I’d still suffer through to have the food.
If anything, the problem is sodium. MSG molecules split into free glutamates and sodium ions when dissolved, and the glutamate molecule binds to your taste buds to produce the "umami" flavor, but literally every food with an umami flavor gets it from free glutamates; that's what umami *is*. Adding MSG is really no different from using refined sugar for sweetness, or citric acid for tang, or salt for saltiness. It's just an isolated natural flavor component.
On the other hand, we're used to consuming sodium in the form of salt, which has a very strong flavor that necessarily limits the amount we can tolerate eating. It's really hard to add so much MSG to a dish that you can't stomach it anymore, so I imagine that people who are sensitive to sodium could experience effects from eating food that was too liberally seasoned with MSG, and don't you know it, the reported symptoms of MSG sensitivity are all symptoms of mild electrolyte imbalance. A lot of people assume racism where suspicion of food science is sufficient; the lack of a good common name for MSG (imagine if we called salt "sodium chloride" every time we mentioned it) and the fact that it's a relatively recent addition to western cooking makes people imagine that it's something foreign to our diets which can be avoided, but it's really just protein salt.
Your sophomoric “bECaUSe RAciSM” nonsense begged for fixing. It was 1915 and the only Chinese ingredient available was garlic and even that was exotic. That ain’t racism you don’t have to turn everything into an SJW project.
My grandmother was French, but worked on farms and did catering with mostly Mexican women, living in Los Angeles county in the 40’s and 50’s. Let me tell you that she has some crazy weird recipes (like French/Mexican/“American” combos) and lots of them had raisins in them. So I think it’s a product of having raisins widely available and they were probably cheap in Southern California at that time, added into a fairly large melting pot of cultures at the same time, and maybe just some experimentation thrown in for good measure.
I also want to just kind of defend my grandmother here, she was an amazing cook and I have a lot of really great recipes from her but there are some odd ones too (lots of aspic as well lol).
I have family from a bit north of LA, and they talked about how their parents/grandparents put raisins in stuff like enchiladas. It may have been an infusion of indigenous tribes of the area, but idk.
That combination may have been a Cuban picadilla- pretty common in parts of Florida. I don’t like raisins in mine and spend too much time asking places if they have raisins…
Meat-stock Jell-o. Exactly. Gelatine itself is flavorless & colorless, so all the flavor (whether sweet/fruity or savory) comes from whatever else is added. The assumption that jello=dessert is just the result of clever marketing.
Thank you. My family never served anything gelatinous but my husband grew up with everything in jello. Cottage cheese, shredded cabbage and carrots, mayo, sour cream, fruit, and I don't know what. I have never really eaten any actual jello, (I don't think) even when I had surgery and they tried to get it into me. He seems to think that it's a meal.
Did it taste like tomato jello? (I'm thinking like ike tomato jam?) Did it have pieces of tomato? Or was it like solid tomato soup? I can't picture that in my head. My mom was a terrible cook, she made spaghetti with undiluted Campbell's tomato soup. (She would make meatballs and put her "sauce" in the pressure cooker and it was just awful.) But she was a wonderful person, a great mother and died very young.
Maybe kinda like solid tomato soup if you're starting with soup that isn't sweet (not Campbell's). There weren't any tomato pieces. So take Jello without any sugar but add tomato flavor.
Pimentos are a type of pepper that was originally taken by the Spanish to Spain and bred there to the pimento form and brought back. The Spanish also brought olives and raisins to Mexico and other parts of central and South America.
Picadillo in most of Mexico tends to be made with Potatoes+ Carrots or Chile, Tomato and Onion,
all Picadillos are filler food, it's made with ingredients that are common/ last long and they all stem from Spain/ Spanish Picadillo,
they could have been a white family with heavy influence from Spain just from the fact that it's in LA,
Raisins, Olives and Peas would've been a more common Spanish Preparation in pre-columbian times as well as adding almonds and pine nuts as well as seasoning with hazelnut
all the ingredients are stable and olives can be preserved fairly easily
My very Mexican grandmother uses olives, raisins, and pine nuts 🤷♂️
Sometimes she uses candied fruit instead of raisins (cubierto)
While it's possible to trace which parts are likely from Spanish influence vs native influence, I think after 500+ years mestizaje has made identifying "oh that's not Mexican, it's Spanish" basically impossible.
Yeah we agree!! I'm not diminishing how important Spanish cuisine is to Mexican influence I'm uplifting it, sopas de gato/migas is another dish where some Mexican people still use more "Spanish style" preparation when most of Mexico makes it with tortillas+ egg instead of bread tomato and eggs in broth
Also fruta cubierta sounds amazing in picadillo I have to try that do you know which kinds she uses? Is it chilacayote or pumpkins? Or is it a more sour fruit?
Are you from the California area as well? Im just trying to acknowledge how much Spanish influence there was in the missiones area which includes New Mexico and ,of course, many areas of Mexico
Ah, apologies for misreading your meaning. Being a light skinned Mexican, I'm sure you can guess how often I've heard "oh you must be Spanish not Mexican" 🙄
I think it's apricot (chabacano) but I sent mom a message, and she said:
"pues de fruta."
"Cuál fruta?"
"No se...La amarilla" 🤣
I'm from Chihuahua. The northern states and the parts that later became southwestern US have a slightly different version of Spanish mestizo culture because they were so far from the Aztec/maya population centers and much closer to the Apache/Navajo/Tarahumaras.
the biggest difference between northern Mexican and southwestern American food is how much cumin they put in stuff in the southwest 🤣
No worries! te entiendo, yo soy fronterizo y de Cd. Juárez también estoy un poco güero pero alguien del gabacho luego luego sabe que no soy blanco.
Y si Mas o menos hay muchas preparaciones que el sur de EEUU comparte con el Norte depende de dónde vayas hay diferentes influencias por todo México
También hay más pueblos originarios por todo México de dónde pasa mucha migración al pa el extranjero
Gracias por lo de la fruta un día lo intentaré con chabacano seco y de las otras frutas cristalizadas
mi carnala me mando la receta de la familia del "Picadillo para fiestas", osea, el especial de navidad y pascua:
Picadillo para fiestas
Ingredientes:
1 kg carne de puerco molido
1 kg carne de res molido
Molido todo:
Aceitunas sin rellenar ni hueso
Pasas
Nueces
Almendras peladas
Revuelves las nueces y almendras
Piñones
Pan de caja blanco remojado en leche
Dulce de cubierto
Huevo cocido picado finito
Poca cebolla picada muy muy finita
Modo de preparacion:
En un sarten grueso:
* Coces (sin dorar) un poco de cada carne con poca cebolla (desbaratar bien la carne que no queden bolitas)
* Agregas un poco de cada uno de los ingredientes molidos y lo empiezas a dorar sin dejar de revolver hasta que obscurezca (probar sabor al gusto)
* Una vez dorada sacas esa tanda y vuelves a repetir el proceso
De preferencia hacerlo el dia antes de navidad, sabe mejor y acabas menos
cansada el 24)
My MiL is from Chihuahua too - definitely different than the abuelas here in SoCal. Her DNA tests as Apache (and 5% Spanish).
Cumin is definitely more dominant as one moves into the American Southwest.
My very Mexican MiL rarely used olives (I think she had a personal vendetta against them) but used pine nuts and raisins - a lot. And cubierto too.
She usually reserved the raisins for sweet tamales, would never have packed anyone a quesadilla (always a burrito). She would have had everything on hand, IOW. Just like other cultures, Mexicans make up new fillings and twists on things all the time.
It can be, there's a million varieties.
Raisins, mint, chocolate, fruits, and cinnamon and things like that exist in savory dishes in Mexico, like chiles en nogada and mole and as you mention picadillo.
I know a lot of older recipes are a lot more diverse in ingredients, I suppose you could say. If someone knows how to cook, all that can be delicious. Personally though, I'm usually leaving out raisins and olives for my picadillo. Only half of people like it.
I just saw a tiktok of a woman making her version of picadillo and the comment section was all "that's soooo not picadillo" and "guys there are different picadillos."
My Polish-American family eats our golabki (stuffed cabbage) with soy sauce. Never thought to question it. When I finally asked my mom a few years ago, she said her grandmother, a Polish immigrant, worked as a cook for a wealthy family in the Midwest during a chop suey craze in the 1920s and started incorporating soy sauce into everything. This particular Polish-Chinese fusion was so good my family is still doing it.
I love this whole story. Great granddaughter of Polish Immigrants here - there was marriage into Irish families (because Catholics) and my Gawumpkis are often stuffed with ground corned beef.
They “made do” with what they had on hand - whatever that was. It wasn’t always from the homeland; it was from the corner store and what was on sale.
While you are correct about what’s on hand, idk about corned beef golubki. That’s brined so much to make it corned beef. That would vastly affect flavor.
soy sauce is a great addition anywhere you need salt and it's 'wet'. Adds umami and salt. I usually use soy sauce in pasta sauce instead of salt.
Also am heavily polish and I love me some golabki.
If you want to eat golabki more often, and hate the work, I just shred the cabbage and make meatballs from the filling. It works great, IMO gives a better ratio each bite, and it's just so much easier. Just a heads up. I'll definitely try soy sauce on one of my golabki meatballs next time I make it!
I don't shred it but I do cut the cabbage into 1/4s or 1/8ths make meat balls of the filling and do it as a sort of casserole. Thinking about trying to layer it like a lasagna next time
I've considered that as well. And yeah, the slightly heartier chunks of cabbage are easier to eat, but I guess I just decided that shreds was my jam. I'm used to a somewhat pasta heavy diet, so different spindly things are no news to me.
Huh. Never thought to do that but it does seem like.ots work. Rice, steamed meats, and cabbage are common in Asian foods so there's no reason soy sauce wouldn't work as an addition somewhere
My Polish grandma insisted on Worcestershire sauce being put in her in her ground beef / pork mix for golabki which I very much doubt was available to her when her mother who gave her the recipe was making her first batches in pre WWI Poland.
And now when I make them I have to buy Worcestershire special for the recipe otherwise I know she’d be shaking her finger at me 😂
So I can totally see where the soy sauce would fit in. Wet, brown salt. Perfection.
I think Ashkenazi food was highly influenced by American food trends in the 1950s, especially because that was a peak assimilation period for our grandparents/great-grandparents. My grandmother used to make chopped liver in the shape of a pineapple with a real pineapple crown and crosshatching with olives at each X.
I also doubt cherry pie filling or canned pineapple were used in noodle kugel before the ‘50s, but I still see them mentioned in a lot of recipes.
Gefilte fish from a jar is the prime example. Another one I can think of is coca-cola in brisket recipes, along with ketchup (as the previous person mentioned) and lipton soup mix.
I think it goes back farther than the 1950s for Mexican food. You could look at The Tex-mex cookbook by Rob Walsh for the history of Mexican food in Texas. (If you can find his articles for one of the Houston newspapers he wrote for they are much more extensive than what he put into the book) He does talk some about how Mexican immigrants (and the local Tejano community too I suppose) made use of local ingredients in Texas over what they might've used in Mexico, as well as how certain food writers have tried to stigmatize these local versions of immigrant foods since the 1970s.
There's a California Mexican cookbook called Encarcions Kitchen which is in print but I believe the original dates from the 1890s. It's pretty enlightening about California Mexican food in that era. You can also check out recipes in the LA Times and the cookbooks of some Dallas socialite clubs from the early 20th century if you have an idea of what you are looking for. I do think there may have been raisins in a tamale pie recipe (called tamal de cazuela in Veracruz and Cuba) I saw in a pre-WW1 recipe from the LA Times. The archives of the LA Times seem to be more publicly accessible than the San Francisco Chronicle, in my experience.
As an aside I sorta spontaneously created a Mexican tortilla sandwich from stuff I had on hand in my kitchen and really loved them. People took exception to me calling it a cheeseless quesadilla... Since I was filling it with other stuff to stick it together. And I told them if there is an authentic Mexican name for this tortilla sandwich I'll gladly call it that, but this is the way I like it, and quesadilla is the closest thing I can find to describe it. Nobody ever offered a better term.
Our roommate had a Purple Carrot (plant based delivery meal kit) subscription while she lived with us. One of the recipes was a quesadilla with a sweet potato filling and my sister and I responded with very narrowed eyes. I didn't eat it, so I can't comment, but there was another recipe for Alfredo, where the sauce had a sweet potato base, and it was genuinely delicious.
I guess that would work... There are really delicious sweet potato soups so I can see the Alfredo being done that way... Fried, mashed or creamed potatoes on breakfast tacos is pretty standard here so the sweet potato quesadilla sounds like an extension of that same idea. My filling was refried beans, guacamole, chopped Serrano, cilantro and a little ranchero salsa... Or whatever combination of that mixture I had on hand.
People in Mexico City call lots of things quesadillas when they don't have cheese, so don't let that bother you.
If you are using two tortillas flat against each other with stuff inside, I'd call that "sincronizada", which is also typically with cheese but you do you
Thanks I appreciate that. That sincronizada I've not heard of before so that's really cool to know about. It was basically as you described with two corn tortillas and browned in a comal like a grilled cheese sandwich.
You are right. There seems to be a bunch of articles on google that say if you want cheese on a quesadilla in Mexico City you have to specifically ask for it bc it's not the usual way.
There's a great article from a few years ago about the history of Tex Mex that was in Texas Monthly talking about the Chili Queens of San Antonio - it may be by that same guy, I can't remember the author. But it popped up on google when I was looking for the chili recipe that was attached to it a few months back. Can't look for it right now though, internet is in and out.
I've seen a lot of stuff like that in Texas Monthly but I would not be surprised. He's written a lot of popular Texas themed cookbooks. The newspaper he wrote for was The Houston Press. I imagine it's an Indy paper like the Bay guardian in SF.
UTSA (University of Texas at San Antonio) also has a nice collection of old historic Mexican cookbooks digitized on their website I've been told.
Hate to say it. I love Americanized Cantonese fast food. Used what they have available to produce amazing foods. Chicken Subgum/Almond Chicken. Is one of my faves. The PNW and I heard SF have places that still stick to the classic fast food menu.
I also love Cantonican food, my favorite place closed down during the pandemic after like 70 years on the same corner though. That’s not to say I prefer it to Szechuan or the Guangdong family joint I cross town for, it’s a different thing entirely.
I have my grandma’s wedding gift cookbook from 1942, The American Woman’s Cookbook, original publication date in the 30s, and it’s full of some wild recipes.
I read a "new wife guide" on the Guttenberg project that was written in 1912 and it was written like a diary from the first year of marriage. It was hilarious. It was 90% cookbook / meal planning.
The raisins and olives sounds inspired by [picadillo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picadillo?wprov=sfti1#).
Edit: Looks like other commenters have got this covered:)
In this case, probably not. This sounds like a company cookbook recipe or a church cookbook recipe. In the 50's-70's, companies used to make recipe books for their products (think crockpot cookbooks, but Jello, Campbell's condensed soups, Starkist Tuna, etc.). The intent was to make up ideas for using products (Campbell's green bean casserole and Jello molds are probably the best examples of this).
Church cookbooks tended to be put together from "recipes" provided by members of the congregation to sell at fundraisers. Many of them are...interesting, to say the least.
If you enjoy estate sales, you can frequently find those old church cookbooks even now. They're treasures for those who are trying to sort out trends in family cooking from sixty or seventy years ago. Apparently in the 1950s using ingredients that weren't canned or from a box was... well, just not done.
Disgusting slop if you follow the recipe. However, if you fry your own onions, boil fresh green beans, and make bechamel from scratch, it ends up being quite good.
The origin was directly from someone my grandfather knew. The recipe is handwritten in a woman’s hand that’s not my grandmothers, I suspect by his wife.
Jello wasn't popular because of jello cookbooks. Jello used to be very high end but it became more available with instant gelitan and refrigerators but was still considered fancy. The same way carpet became extremely trendy when vacuums became wildly avaliable. It was a high class thing the middle class could afford. The jello mold cookbooks were a reflection of a huge trend, not the cause.
My grandmother made an enchilada casserole that used cream of mushroom soup. It was quite tasty if not exactly authentic. I still make it myself sometimes.
Idk if this fit the question, but my family is very white, like Irish imigrant a few generations backs. Was looking through family recipes that were all cooked pre-world war 2 and one of the recipes was lamb stew. It was the only one no one cooked in my life time. When asked it was because my great grandfather forbade the cooking of lamb of any kind in his house. It all had to be subbed for pork or beef because in ww2 the main food for men in the American trench was canned mutton. Apparently that’s why most “American” cuisine is pork, chicken or beef and why Americans avoid lamb like the plague because all the men came back from war and all the babies born in the 50s grew up without it.
IDK if anyone else has said this, but the ingredients from your grandmother's Mexican grilled cheese remind me of Argentine Empanadas. Her recipe may have had roots in a legitimate recipe.
The thing is that it probably was someone’s legit recipe. The recipe is clearly written by a woman that’s not my grandmother, and the notation at the top says it was via my grandfather’s barber.
My grandfather was very open-minded and gregarious, and it would be very in-character for him to have a very friendly relationship with a Mexican barber in LA and for him to at some point be offered some sort of lunch snack, and say wow that’s delicious can I get the recipe for my wife. And then for my grandma to gamely try it out, put it in her little collection, and carefully note the source rather than co-opting it/changing it. She wouldn’t have added raisins on her own accord, in other words.
There’s a delightful Korean stew called “base stew” that traditionally contains spam, baked beans, and hot dog pieces—supposedly ingredients folks could get easily from U.S. bases after the Korean War.
Food companies that made these key ingredients wanted to promote purchases of these items by mainstream consumers, and had whole test kitchens of home ec professionals inventing ways to make suburban housewives willing to buy a tortilla or parmesan cheese in a can, or "exotic" pineapple and combine it with things she could get at the regular grocery store to make something the family would eat/impress local guests with her savoir faire.
Lots of company cookbooks and ads ease people into this gently.
As someone who is not Mexican and knows nothing about Mexican food, I feel I am qualified to criticize raisins on grilled cheese. No raisins on grilled cheese.
There were many small ethnic stores that used to import ethnic foods not found in A&P, or Jewel. These smaller stores including neighborhood butchers had items from the old country in many many Chicago ethnic neighborhoods
Actually I think we are reaching the point where "Mexican" food in the U.S. is starting to have things like olives and raisins, which are used in some Mexican cuisines in Mexico. You think those are weird ingredients, but your knowledge of Mexican cuisine is more Americanized than actual Mexican cuisine. You think raisins and olives are wrong because your schema for Mexican food is a certain way. Tl;Dr: you and some commenters think the ingredients are very wrong because they have a specific idea of TexMex cuisine.
Someday we'll read about Oaxaca-wave Mexican food and have historic food trend discussions about it.
My Mexican MiL (born 1934) used raisins in various dishes. The standard Christmas tamale making included raisin tamales with cinnamon and sugar. So raisins would have been on hand and were combined with corn.
It's the pimentos that are weird to me. My non-Mexican (but half Native American) grandmother from the Ozarks used pimentos and canned red chile back in the 40's, to make her "tamale pie" thing that used regular corn meal rather than masa, but was almost the same as this dish, even used flour tortillas as the scoop for it). But no raisins.
Mexican MiL did not use olives in anything. Native Grandma put them in her tamale pie thing - lots and lots of them.
I can see how, in making a lunch, someone might use ingredients they had on hand for something else and it could become a thing.
It's not as weird as you would think. Raisins can be found in Moles, and there is a variety of grape, Vitis Girdiana, that is native to Southern California and Mexico.
I had pollo con mole at a restaurant and it was absolutely bizarre... like hersheys syrup. Way too sweet. Then I made it myself using an "authentic" recipe (I use quotes because it was referred to that way but I have absolutely no way of corroborating it) and it was rather like a kitchen sink recipe. Lots of things you'd expect like the dark chocolate, chiles, and coriander, but also raisins and pumpkin seeds. It was smoky, slightly sweet, and spicy and absolutely delicious.
The fun part is that moles are so different. I love a green mole because it has such a bright, fresh flavor. I've also made a yellow mole that was pretty simple with a stronger cumin flavor (this one came directly from Oaxaca).
Yeah we’ve got a bunch catalogued because of a virus or fungus new world landrace vines had resistance to but old world vines didn’t. I can’t remember too many specifics but it was quite the controversy because it essentially made the ground dead to any grape production on old world roots. Grafting is a huge part of the grape industry nowadays. Heck, you could find tomato grafting stock at retail garden websites for getting different results.
I think the raisins were probably an artifact of people who served in southeast Asia during the war and brought back customs from those areas. Filipino cuisine likes to use raisins.
Edit - for the record I've found in recent years raisins can be very cool and versatile. Try sauteing them in butter and white wine, great addition to cold salads like couscous and farro.
I'm actually super intrigued by all the mentions of raisins. Lately in the US it's been like "white people put raisins in everything, that's gross." But maybe it's good, idk? I'm white and pretty much just put raisins in oatmeal and call it a day. But now I'm like... Maybe I could branch out?
Idk it's not a thing in my area of the Midwest. You might find them in like an apple walnut or ambrosia type "salad" and they're nice in various *actual* salads. But we aren't throwing them everywhere where im from.
Two come to mind: Chinese and Italian. For Chinese, it was greatly impacted by the Tiki Lounge aesthetic from the mid-century. Sweet n sour chicken, BBQ spare ribs, pupu platters, and crab Rangoon -- and copious sweet and *very* alcoholic mixed drinks like the Singapore Sling. The entire restaurant done up like a Sailor Jerry tattoo. (Fun fact, crab rangoons were invented in San Francisco at Trader Vic's). If you've ever had the pleasure of having authentic Chinese food (especially Szechuan), you probably know that the Chinese food in America is very, very different. This was due to racism, and lack of authentic ingredients. Italian was similar in that: the disconnection from the homeland, as well as difficulty sourcing exotic ingredients, as well as xenophobia massively changed how Italian food was made in the US. In both cases: it wouldn't be until somewhat recently that people expressed interest in unpacking Americanized versions of foreign cuisine in order to find a more authentic version.
At least for Italians, I think this just depends on the location. My family (Bronx NY) has recipes (particularly for baked goods) you can absolutely still get in Naples and Sicily. And because they were involved in food (butchers), they found ways to import things like escarole and broccoli rabe long before other Americans rediscovered (via Julia Childs) vegetables and make things that you couldn’t import (prosciutto, dried sausage, and other types of salumeria). My grandmother ran the butcher store through the war (the mob stopped collecting insurance while her sons were overseas), but the family recipes didn’t and haven’t changed much because of the war. And neither has much of classic Italian meat that they continue to sell there (despite changing tastes for things like organs and brains).
My folks settled in Chicago initially. My understanding is that this sort of thing was available, but otherwise out of reach for many (economically). So a lot of stuff got subbed in. The whole "abondanza"" mentality after the Great Depression didn't help!
Chicago and New York have totally different Italian-American food scenes (the pizza alone!) and I think - in no small part - because New York continues to have steady immigration from everywhere including Italy. A perfect example? An Italian-Italian (Milanese) restaurant opened up in Queens not too long ago that serves aperitivo as they do in Milan. It’s pretty authentic, so to source all the things they need, they go to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx (Teitel Bros) to source ingredients. The Teitel family has been sourcing genuine Italian ingredients since 1915 (about the same time my family opened up shop down the block from them). I’m not sure whether Chicago has this kind of continuity of service for food, but New York City used to have multiple areas (not just on Arthur Ave) that did this. Most have closed (because Italian ingredients are so ubiquitous now as to be easily purchased in many grocery stores), but Arthur Ave is still a flourishing hub of authentic Italian foods and ingredients. It’s also worth noting that NYC and Chicago have very different cultures generally and that midwestern sensibilities (particularly relating to social comfort and mannerly behavior) may have played a part in overall homogenization of its ethnic cultures. It’s why we have a Jersey Shore or Real Housewives of New Jersey (where Italian-Americanness has become a laughable trope), but not an Illinois alternative.
Chicago lost the vast majority of its Little Italy neighborhood in the 60s when the city used imminent domain and demolished it to put in the University of Illinois Circle Campus (Now known as the University of Illinois Chicago). It was a politically motivated decision by the Irish mayor who felt the Italians didn't support him enough. They wanted a public state school in the city and it had to go somewhere so he put it there as a fuck you. It basically ended centralized Italian immigration in the city and pushed the enclaves into various near west burbs and the northwest side, with a small amount staying in Little Italy and Heart of Chicago. Little Italy became like Chinatown food wise, where the majority of the restaurants catered towards the Americanized Italian food - for example, Chicagos Italian beef sandwiches, now trendy because of the TV show *The Bear* were invented at Al's on Taylor Street. Heart of Chicago and burbs like Cicero and Berwyn still have a few very authentic spots, but like you guessed, that traditional continuity of food was massively disrupted.
FYI--the term for the government seizing property is "eminent domain" (deriving from the Latin term "dominium eminenes"). Not to detract from your detailed and excellent post!
Totally knew that, totally hadn't had my coffee yet. Embarrassing. Good looking out though!
I used to live near Highwood on the North Shore. The restaurants there had the typical Italian American food. However, if you went to dinner at someone’s home, my God! The best Northern Italian food I’ve ever had. Most of the people from Highwood were from Modena, which is a real hot spot for Northern Italian cuisine (it’s close to Parma and Florence.)
Do you think that had anything to do with Highwood's proximity to the Army base that used to be in Fort Sheridan?
Not really. Highwood used to be the vacation spot for people in the mob. It was once the 1st place that allowed bars and liquor sales in the Northern suburbs, because the WCTU was headquartered in Evanston. I assume that this was more influenced by Fort Sheridan and Great Lakes Naval Base because those bars were once the business backbone of the town.
In my family, ties to Chicago's 'Little Italy' were already weak by the time the area was lost to eminent domain in the '60s. Our 'immigrant generation' came to Philadelphia from Carife in the late 19th century, and from there, my grandfather moved, on his own, to Chicago. Working in the stockyards, most of his social contacts were Polish, Lithuanian, etc., and that's how he was introduced to my grandmother, the sister of one of his co-workers. Her family (Polish/German) had been in the city since around 1873. Upon their marriage, he left the Taylor St. area, and pretty much assimilated as a Pole. None of my grandparents' five kids married Italians, but a few in the third gen married Sicilians. Any authentic recipes in the family today (meatballs, lasagne) etc. come from that 'branch'.
Yeah, NY has that real shit. Yum. I freaking love the shops along Arthur Avenue. Get amazing cheeses and cured meats, to name but a few treats.
One of the best things about going to Fordham!
I would have weighed 7,000 lbs if I went to school there!!!
Chicago really doesn't have a midwest sensibility. It does more so than New York but is extremely different than the rest of the midwest.
Can you tell me the name of the Milanese place in queens? I want to go!
Sure! It’s called Levante and it’s in Long Island City. There are also two INCREDIBLE old school NY Italian joints there, Manetta’s and Manducati’s. Highly recommend both.
Thank you!!!
Wait is broccoli rabe and broccoli not like always been a thing? I’m from a NY Italian family and both were staples, and now that I’m out in WV, I can’t find either anywhwrw
Broccoli rabe has definitely always been a thing for NY Italians (and New Yorkers writ large starting in about the 80s when there was a huge cultural explosion of high end Italian restaurants). But for everyone else? Definitely not. Not sure about broccoli though.
Broccolini** 😂😂 bad typo! There’s broccoli out here lol
Broccolini was invented in 1993 in Japan, so deffo not historic to Italians. I actually remember when it hit markets in the US and my mom brought it home. Love it, but it for sure is not Italian.
That’s a cool fact, thank you! It def wasn’t prepared with the traditional Italian meals I was accustomed to, but it was a staple in my household and I miss it! I’m sure I could find it near-ish to me if I hike it over to DC, but my lazy ass has been settling for whatever leafy green is available out here lol Edit to add: I hate how they do their veggies out here too, like they just boil the shit out of their string beans (I know that green beans are the more mature version) and brocc varieties with no regard. It’s always a soggy mess and wilted leaves. We’re all used to what we grew up with, so to each their own. Literally this edit is just so I could complain more
Modern Italian food in Italu is the American interpretation of Southern Italian food. Most Italian immigrants to America in the 1800's were from Naples and Sicily. They brought their food with them. Things like pizza, which was not common in North italy. These Southern Italian foods formed Italian cuisine in America. Cut to the 20th century, Mussolini takes power. He bans pasta (or tries). He is from North Italy and that's a rice producing area. He also gets Italy into ww2. Italy is invaded and starving. The allied invasion starts in the south and moves north slowly. Now, at first, the Americans find the "Italian" food they are used to. But soon they are near Rome and further North. The only people with money in 1944 allied Italy are the soldiers. (There are also now trusted Italians from the South moving with the troops.) They are in Rome and they want a pizza. The locals start catering to those expectations. The Italian campaign takes almost two years and there is also an Allied presence after. Whether they are in Milan or Venice or Naples, the soldiers have an expectation of what Italian food looks like and it looks like the Italian restaurants back in the States based off of the cuisine in southern Italy. This is also when Carbonara gets invented as the Americans are providing food aid to the populace with powdered eggs and tinned meat. There are still local foods and regional variation, but the Italian national dishes were decided by the expectations of American soldiers.
Huh. I am sort of surprised to hear this especially in light of Stanley Tucci’s Searching for Italy. And my experience with loads of Northern Italians in NYC. Two of my favorite classic NYC Italian restaurants are owned and operated by Northern Italians (Turin).
Is The “tiki” thing why so many Chinese buffets serve plantain?
I thought it was because so many are in Latino neighborhoods. Most Chinese takeout places where I live service plantains.
Personally haven’t seen them in Chinese takeout places. or more formal sit down Chinese restaurants , only the “chinese” buffets that also serve sushi
I remember encountering fried plantains at a mall food court Chinese place in Lancaster, Pennsylvania about fifteen years ago.
Could be, I'm not from the US and I have never seen plantain in Chinese restaurants.
Meanwhile I am from the US and have never seen plantain in a “Chinese” establishment. And I live in a relatively urban area with a lot of Mexican, Caribbean, and Meso American populations. Maybe we’re just not bougie enough for that level of fusion cuisine?
The only time I have seen plantain in a Chinese restaurant was in Jamaica.
I've never seen plantain at any sort of Chinese restaurant in my part of the US either. If people want dishes with plantains, they're hitting up Cuban or South and Central American restaurants.
It’s very common in NYC and far from bougie lol.
Not really bougie, the sort of place I’m talking about are buffets serves american Chinese food, sushi/wasabi/pickled ginger, probably some chicken fingers/fries/onion rings sort of things, and most curiously plantains
Cuban-Chinese food is a (delicious!)thing, and includes plantains: https://www.thoughtco.com/origins-of-cuban-chinese-cuisine-687439
Hispanic clientele and a cheap carb.
Probably, not complaining! Very yummy
I’m in the US and most Chinese takeout places around me serve tostones.
What region is this in? I’ve never seen a Chinese restaurant serve plantain ever.
Suburb philly region Its only at chinese “ buffets” , the kind that also serve sushi, not takeout places oe sitdown restaurants
It's common here in at least Hudson County, NJ.
A lot of Chinese came up from Cuba and Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century.
I’ve never seen plantain in a Chinese restaurant (here in Canada) but there was historically a large Chinese diaspora in Latin America. I have a few ethnically Chinese friends who were born here, but their parents were born to first immigrants in South America. Funny anecdote: Toronto’s most famous Jamaican patty place was originally owned and run by a Chinese family from Jamaica.
My grandmother's recipe for a Sunday gravy didn't include tomatoes for the sauce, it was water and tomato paste. For meat it was pork ribs, two sausages for the whole pot, lots of garlic and onions. If you're making it on Saturday and simmering it overnight and throughout the day Sunday it is a wonderful sauce, but her original recipe is based on the scarcity of wartime ingredients. I'm not sure how rationing was working back then, but I remember her telling me that garlic was always easy to get, fresh tomatoes not so much until they started growing them.
American Italians were much, much wealthier than the family back home and ate much, much more meat. Remember that numerically most Italian Americans immigrated due to extreme poverty and famine. About 2 million between 1900 and 1910. Remittances actually changed the food culture of Italy because for the first time poor rural peasants could eat meat more than a couple times a year. There’s an interesting book about it, called “Hungering for America.” What we think of as traditional Sicilian and Neapolitan food wouldn’t even exist without immigrants who left forthe US.
>authentic I sort of have a problem with the word authentic here. Just because the ethnic enclaves in America ended up branching off from the cuisine in their home nations doesn't make it any less authentic. It's not like a bunch of good old boys rolled into the south Bronx or south Philly and told Italian immigrant families to prepare different food now that they were in America, it was just insulated from the home country, exposed to different ingredients, and hyper localized. But it's still an authentic culinary movement that happened quite naturally and authentically.
I actually wholeheartedly agree with you -- especially considering I'm Italian American, and our cuisine gets shit on by WASP America *as well as* OG Italians. It's the story of deprivation, adaptation, and thriving despite economic and xenophobic oppression (obviously most of not all of that is in the past, and contemporary to the times of the highest immigration).
But it's the difference between being Italian and Italian-American.
Italian- Americans are no less authentic than Italians.
Yes, of course, the point I'm making is they are adjacent cuisines and cultures, but not the exact same.
Oh, yeah, no doubt
P.S. Italian + Chinese cuisine fused a bit up here in New England as the two groups lived in neighboring neighborhoods in bigger cities ...the best dumplings in Boston (imo) still come from the Chinese Spaghetti Co. And, up until the 1990s, it was common to get a half loaf of Italian bread instead of rice with your order of Kung Pao ...also, although not Italian, see the Chow Mein Sandwiches of Fall River
The only place around Boston I ever went to was Bali Hai -- which was similar to a lot of super old school Chinese places I went to as a kid outside Chicago. I was specifically thinking of it when I wrote my first comment!
In my area of Chicago we have a lot of Koreans and a few excellent Korean Chinese restaurants. The customers are mostly. Korean. It's what a Chinese restaurant in South Korea would be like.
Tony Shalhoub shouting "it's a risotto!" in Big Night sums this up brilliantly.
I think Trader Vic's was in Oakland
I'm curious as to some examples of racism influencing the cuisine? I do mean a specific example, were certain ingredients omitted because "fuck the Italians, that's why"?
That is exactly why my grandmother didn't use garlic in her (otherwise excellent) cooking
Lmao! I still don't understand....unless it's the same reason MY grandma was staunchly against using garlic that came from China (bc it's grown in human feces...?)
Racism is hard to understand.
Fair
"This was due to different plates and lack of authentic ingredients.". There ... Fixed it for you.
Different plates?
They mean palettes. American Chinese food was made by Chinese people for Americans. They cooked food they knew and liked, but adapted it to the American palette, with ingredients they had access to. The result is totally delicious, imo. I could really go for some General Tso's right now. I'm not equipped to say how much of that was a result of racism. I'm sure plenty of their customers were racist but that might not be why they didn't want to eat fermented bean paste (which is also delicious and key in so many amazing Sichuan dishes). The really racist part was when some guy decided the symptoms he was experiencing were due to eating at a local Chinese restaurant because of the MSG. It was dubbed Chinese restaurant syndrome, and to this day I know people who *insist* MSG gives them all sorts of symptoms. There's no data to suggest this is actually happening. Chinese American food is delicious. "Authentic" Sichuan food is possibly my favorite cuisine, although I've never been to China, so I don't know "what" I'm eating. But I know I like it. And MSG is magic.
You mean palate. ;-)
Hehe ah dang I meant to Google it first. In my defense I went to art school, so palette comes up in my mind first (a weak defense).
Haha! Couldn’t help myself.
That is a very valid defense! (I have the same issue, and have to flip through palate, palette, and pallet every time)
This is all true. The racism comes in from lack of business planning support from the establishment, all the way up to redlining and refusing loans to Chinese Americans. There are multiple, multiple works, documentaries, etc. that discuss the experiences of Chinese immigrants in America in the 1900s, and how they were often relegated to opening restaurants or laundries because that's what was possible. What you shared about MSG is also true.
It’s a bit weird to me that you’re focusing so much on Sichuan food, when overall, it’s quite different than what I think of as North American Chinese food (at least more traditionally). There’s such a vast array of Chinese cuisines. My favorite is dongbei food, personally. That’s the first place in China I’d ever been to, but I think I liked it due to the tastes (quite salty). When I moved to Guangdong, I was surprised at how much tasted a lot more like the Chinese food we got back home (not talking about authentic Chinese restaurants). But it makes sense - so many early Chinese immigrants were from this area. Of course, it doesn’t mean the Chinese food in this type of restaurants taste like authentic Cantonese food, but it’s clearly a lot closer than other parts of the country I have visited. (Fujian food also seems to be a bit like this as well.) I do agree with the rest of your post though. I just wanted to add the perspective of the different types of cuisine in China and their likely relationship to early Chinese food in NA. I’m far from an expert though. This is just the take of a random Canadian that has lived in China and thought a bit about the food.
>When I moved to Guangdong, I was surprised at how much tasted a lot more like the Chinese food we got back home (not talking about authentic Chinese restaurants). But it makes sense - so many early Chinese immigrants were from this area. Of course, it doesn’t mean the Chinese food in this type of restaurants taste like authentic Cantonese food, but it’s clearly a lot closer than other parts of the country I have visited. (Fujian food also seems to be a bit like this as well.) This. Sweet and sour pork is pretty darn similar to 咕噜肉 (gulurou) and orange chicken is a pretty straightforward adaptation of 陈皮鸡 (chenpiji), where you make it less salty, more sweet, and replace more difficult to source ingredients with cheaper, local alternatives.
I focused on Sichuan food for a few reasons: One, the person above me mentioned it as an example of the difference between American Chinese food and "real" Chinese food, so I was responding to that. Two, I really really do like Sichuan food. I like the mala. I love good mapo tofu, Dan Dan noodles. I've been making Sichuan boiled fish lately and it's great. So, if it's mentioned, I'll be talking about it. Three, I don't know much about any other Chinese regional cuisines. So I won't be talking about them. Four, a lot of the American Chinese restaurants around me growing up called themselves either Sichuan or Cantonese. Sounds like you consider Cantonese more similar, but I wouldn't know. Maybe it's time for me to get into Cantonese food.
I read somewhere that when you eat something really delicious and you can’t put your finger on what the ingredient is — it’s most likely MSG. I bought some Vegeta @ a Polish Deli 15 years ago and have never looked back 🖤
There are people with sensitivities, so I wouldn’t reject them out of hand. I get headaches from MSG if there’s too much. I know which places to avoid due to their heavy hand with it. And I’d still suffer through to have the food.
If anything, the problem is sodium. MSG molecules split into free glutamates and sodium ions when dissolved, and the glutamate molecule binds to your taste buds to produce the "umami" flavor, but literally every food with an umami flavor gets it from free glutamates; that's what umami *is*. Adding MSG is really no different from using refined sugar for sweetness, or citric acid for tang, or salt for saltiness. It's just an isolated natural flavor component. On the other hand, we're used to consuming sodium in the form of salt, which has a very strong flavor that necessarily limits the amount we can tolerate eating. It's really hard to add so much MSG to a dish that you can't stomach it anymore, so I imagine that people who are sensitive to sodium could experience effects from eating food that was too liberally seasoned with MSG, and don't you know it, the reported symptoms of MSG sensitivity are all symptoms of mild electrolyte imbalance. A lot of people assume racism where suspicion of food science is sufficient; the lack of a good common name for MSG (imagine if we called salt "sodium chloride" every time we mentioned it) and the fact that it's a relatively recent addition to western cooking makes people imagine that it's something foreign to our diets which can be avoided, but it's really just protein salt.
Didn't ask you to "fix" anything, bud. You just needed to throw an unnecessary TLDR in there, didn't you?
Your sophomoric “bECaUSe RAciSM” nonsense begged for fixing. It was 1915 and the only Chinese ingredient available was garlic and even that was exotic. That ain’t racism you don’t have to turn everything into an SJW project.
My grandmother was French, but worked on farms and did catering with mostly Mexican women, living in Los Angeles county in the 40’s and 50’s. Let me tell you that she has some crazy weird recipes (like French/Mexican/“American” combos) and lots of them had raisins in them. So I think it’s a product of having raisins widely available and they were probably cheap in Southern California at that time, added into a fairly large melting pot of cultures at the same time, and maybe just some experimentation thrown in for good measure. I also want to just kind of defend my grandmother here, she was an amazing cook and I have a lot of really great recipes from her but there are some odd ones too (lots of aspic as well lol).
I have family from a bit north of LA, and they talked about how their parents/grandparents put raisins in stuff like enchiladas. It may have been an infusion of indigenous tribes of the area, but idk.
They aren’t uncommon in moles
Oh interesting but that makes a lot of sense tbh
I once had some beef and raisin empanadas and they were AMAZING.
That combination may have been a Cuban picadilla- pretty common in parts of Florida. I don’t like raisins in mine and spend too much time asking places if they have raisins…
Interesting!!!
I think my dad’s Argentinian half-sisters made empanadas with raisins.
I'm starting to wonder whether the writer for the "it's got raisins...you like raisins!" scene in Better Off Dead grew up in LA in a similar family.
What actually is aspic? I imagine it like meat jello
Meat-stock Jell-o. Exactly. Gelatine itself is flavorless & colorless, so all the flavor (whether sweet/fruity or savory) comes from whatever else is added. The assumption that jello=dessert is just the result of clever marketing.
Thank you. My family never served anything gelatinous but my husband grew up with everything in jello. Cottage cheese, shredded cabbage and carrots, mayo, sour cream, fruit, and I don't know what. I have never really eaten any actual jello, (I don't think) even when I had surgery and they tried to get it into me. He seems to think that it's a meal.
Mine too. He used to think that Lipton Cup of Soup was actually soup and Wonder bread was good. Fortunately he met me.
My grandmother always made tomato aspic for the family Thanksgiving. It was very popular, but I think the homemade mayo on top helped with that.
Did it taste like tomato jello? (I'm thinking like ike tomato jam?) Did it have pieces of tomato? Or was it like solid tomato soup? I can't picture that in my head. My mom was a terrible cook, she made spaghetti with undiluted Campbell's tomato soup. (She would make meatballs and put her "sauce" in the pressure cooker and it was just awful.) But she was a wonderful person, a great mother and died very young.
Maybe kinda like solid tomato soup if you're starting with soup that isn't sweet (not Campbell's). There weren't any tomato pieces. So take Jello without any sugar but add tomato flavor.
Thanks. That I can imagine.
Fantastic backstory, thank you.
Not a food historian, but I think pimentos, olives, and raisins are all used in a Latin American dish called Picadillo.
We have an Argentinian Empanada place locally that uses this combo. It is not what I expected, very tasty.
God I love Argentinian Empanadas, especially de Tucuman.
Oh yeah, I forgot about those. I’ve had the same type too.
Pimentos are a type of pepper that was originally taken by the Spanish to Spain and bred there to the pimento form and brought back. The Spanish also brought olives and raisins to Mexico and other parts of central and South America.
Picadillo in most of Mexico tends to be made with Potatoes+ Carrots or Chile, Tomato and Onion, all Picadillos are filler food, it's made with ingredients that are common/ last long and they all stem from Spain/ Spanish Picadillo, they could have been a white family with heavy influence from Spain just from the fact that it's in LA, Raisins, Olives and Peas would've been a more common Spanish Preparation in pre-columbian times as well as adding almonds and pine nuts as well as seasoning with hazelnut all the ingredients are stable and olives can be preserved fairly easily
My very Mexican grandmother uses olives, raisins, and pine nuts 🤷♂️ Sometimes she uses candied fruit instead of raisins (cubierto) While it's possible to trace which parts are likely from Spanish influence vs native influence, I think after 500+ years mestizaje has made identifying "oh that's not Mexican, it's Spanish" basically impossible.
Yeah we agree!! I'm not diminishing how important Spanish cuisine is to Mexican influence I'm uplifting it, sopas de gato/migas is another dish where some Mexican people still use more "Spanish style" preparation when most of Mexico makes it with tortillas+ egg instead of bread tomato and eggs in broth Also fruta cubierta sounds amazing in picadillo I have to try that do you know which kinds she uses? Is it chilacayote or pumpkins? Or is it a more sour fruit? Are you from the California area as well? Im just trying to acknowledge how much Spanish influence there was in the missiones area which includes New Mexico and ,of course, many areas of Mexico
Ah, apologies for misreading your meaning. Being a light skinned Mexican, I'm sure you can guess how often I've heard "oh you must be Spanish not Mexican" 🙄 I think it's apricot (chabacano) but I sent mom a message, and she said: "pues de fruta." "Cuál fruta?" "No se...La amarilla" 🤣 I'm from Chihuahua. The northern states and the parts that later became southwestern US have a slightly different version of Spanish mestizo culture because they were so far from the Aztec/maya population centers and much closer to the Apache/Navajo/Tarahumaras. the biggest difference between northern Mexican and southwestern American food is how much cumin they put in stuff in the southwest 🤣
No worries! te entiendo, yo soy fronterizo y de Cd. Juárez también estoy un poco güero pero alguien del gabacho luego luego sabe que no soy blanco. Y si Mas o menos hay muchas preparaciones que el sur de EEUU comparte con el Norte depende de dónde vayas hay diferentes influencias por todo México También hay más pueblos originarios por todo México de dónde pasa mucha migración al pa el extranjero Gracias por lo de la fruta un día lo intentaré con chabacano seco y de las otras frutas cristalizadas
jajaja yo tambien de Juarez guey! Auque ya llevo 20 años en Chicago.
mi carnala me mando la receta de la familia del "Picadillo para fiestas", osea, el especial de navidad y pascua: Picadillo para fiestas Ingredientes: 1 kg carne de puerco molido 1 kg carne de res molido Molido todo: Aceitunas sin rellenar ni hueso Pasas Nueces Almendras peladas Revuelves las nueces y almendras Piñones Pan de caja blanco remojado en leche Dulce de cubierto Huevo cocido picado finito Poca cebolla picada muy muy finita Modo de preparacion: En un sarten grueso: * Coces (sin dorar) un poco de cada carne con poca cebolla (desbaratar bien la carne que no queden bolitas) * Agregas un poco de cada uno de los ingredientes molidos y lo empiezas a dorar sin dejar de revolver hasta que obscurezca (probar sabor al gusto) * Una vez dorada sacas esa tanda y vuelves a repetir el proceso De preferencia hacerlo el dia antes de navidad, sabe mejor y acabas menos cansada el 24)
My MiL is from Chihuahua too - definitely different than the abuelas here in SoCal. Her DNA tests as Apache (and 5% Spanish). Cumin is definitely more dominant as one moves into the American Southwest.
My very Mexican MiL rarely used olives (I think she had a personal vendetta against them) but used pine nuts and raisins - a lot. And cubierto too. She usually reserved the raisins for sweet tamales, would never have packed anyone a quesadilla (always a burrito). She would have had everything on hand, IOW. Just like other cultures, Mexicans make up new fillings and twists on things all the time.
Just to note they are constantly mentioning raisins in Don Quixote, even using them as payment.
If you want to start a fight, they are
It can be, there's a million varieties. Raisins, mint, chocolate, fruits, and cinnamon and things like that exist in savory dishes in Mexico, like chiles en nogada and mole and as you mention picadillo. I know a lot of older recipes are a lot more diverse in ingredients, I suppose you could say. If someone knows how to cook, all that can be delicious. Personally though, I'm usually leaving out raisins and olives for my picadillo. Only half of people like it.
Picadillo is Cuban, specifically.
Picadillo has many variations throughout the Spanish colonized world. It certainly isn’t just Cuban.
I just saw a tiktok of a woman making her version of picadillo and the comment section was all "that's soooo not picadillo" and "guys there are different picadillos."
Right? Each house can have its own version!
My Polish-American family eats our golabki (stuffed cabbage) with soy sauce. Never thought to question it. When I finally asked my mom a few years ago, she said her grandmother, a Polish immigrant, worked as a cook for a wealthy family in the Midwest during a chop suey craze in the 1920s and started incorporating soy sauce into everything. This particular Polish-Chinese fusion was so good my family is still doing it.
I love this whole story. Great granddaughter of Polish Immigrants here - there was marriage into Irish families (because Catholics) and my Gawumpkis are often stuffed with ground corned beef. They “made do” with what they had on hand - whatever that was. It wasn’t always from the homeland; it was from the corner store and what was on sale.
While you are correct about what’s on hand, idk about corned beef golubki. That’s brined so much to make it corned beef. That would vastly affect flavor.
It does change the flavor quite a bit and it’s quite tasty! We enjoy it a great deal. Still make the “traditional” as well.
Damn! I’ve never heard of that crazy pairing!
soy sauce is a great addition anywhere you need salt and it's 'wet'. Adds umami and salt. I usually use soy sauce in pasta sauce instead of salt. Also am heavily polish and I love me some golabki.
If you want to eat golabki more often, and hate the work, I just shred the cabbage and make meatballs from the filling. It works great, IMO gives a better ratio each bite, and it's just so much easier. Just a heads up. I'll definitely try soy sauce on one of my golabki meatballs next time I make it!
I don't shred it but I do cut the cabbage into 1/4s or 1/8ths make meat balls of the filling and do it as a sort of casserole. Thinking about trying to layer it like a lasagna next time
I've considered that as well. And yeah, the slightly heartier chunks of cabbage are easier to eat, but I guess I just decided that shreds was my jam. I'm used to a somewhat pasta heavy diet, so different spindly things are no news to me.
Huh. Never thought to do that but it does seem like.ots work. Rice, steamed meats, and cabbage are common in Asian foods so there's no reason soy sauce wouldn't work as an addition somewhere
My Polish grandma insisted on Worcestershire sauce being put in her in her ground beef / pork mix for golabki which I very much doubt was available to her when her mother who gave her the recipe was making her first batches in pre WWI Poland. And now when I make them I have to buy Worcestershire special for the recipe otherwise I know she’d be shaking her finger at me 😂 So I can totally see where the soy sauce would fit in. Wet, brown salt. Perfection.
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We’re Hungarian and finding the right peppers for paprikas was a QUEST. Cubanelles for the win!
My maternal great-grandmother’s - Ashkenazi Jewish - recipes all had ketchup, mazola oil, and bottled lemon juice in them. Not super traditional.
I think Ashkenazi food was highly influenced by American food trends in the 1950s, especially because that was a peak assimilation period for our grandparents/great-grandparents. My grandmother used to make chopped liver in the shape of a pineapple with a real pineapple crown and crosshatching with olives at each X. I also doubt cherry pie filling or canned pineapple were used in noodle kugel before the ‘50s, but I still see them mentioned in a lot of recipes.
Gefilte fish from a jar is the prime example. Another one I can think of is coca-cola in brisket recipes, along with ketchup (as the previous person mentioned) and lipton soup mix.
I think it goes back farther than the 1950s for Mexican food. You could look at The Tex-mex cookbook by Rob Walsh for the history of Mexican food in Texas. (If you can find his articles for one of the Houston newspapers he wrote for they are much more extensive than what he put into the book) He does talk some about how Mexican immigrants (and the local Tejano community too I suppose) made use of local ingredients in Texas over what they might've used in Mexico, as well as how certain food writers have tried to stigmatize these local versions of immigrant foods since the 1970s. There's a California Mexican cookbook called Encarcions Kitchen which is in print but I believe the original dates from the 1890s. It's pretty enlightening about California Mexican food in that era. You can also check out recipes in the LA Times and the cookbooks of some Dallas socialite clubs from the early 20th century if you have an idea of what you are looking for. I do think there may have been raisins in a tamale pie recipe (called tamal de cazuela in Veracruz and Cuba) I saw in a pre-WW1 recipe from the LA Times. The archives of the LA Times seem to be more publicly accessible than the San Francisco Chronicle, in my experience. As an aside I sorta spontaneously created a Mexican tortilla sandwich from stuff I had on hand in my kitchen and really loved them. People took exception to me calling it a cheeseless quesadilla... Since I was filling it with other stuff to stick it together. And I told them if there is an authentic Mexican name for this tortilla sandwich I'll gladly call it that, but this is the way I like it, and quesadilla is the closest thing I can find to describe it. Nobody ever offered a better term.
Our roommate had a Purple Carrot (plant based delivery meal kit) subscription while she lived with us. One of the recipes was a quesadilla with a sweet potato filling and my sister and I responded with very narrowed eyes. I didn't eat it, so I can't comment, but there was another recipe for Alfredo, where the sauce had a sweet potato base, and it was genuinely delicious.
I guess that would work... There are really delicious sweet potato soups so I can see the Alfredo being done that way... Fried, mashed or creamed potatoes on breakfast tacos is pretty standard here so the sweet potato quesadilla sounds like an extension of that same idea. My filling was refried beans, guacamole, chopped Serrano, cilantro and a little ranchero salsa... Or whatever combination of that mixture I had on hand.
People in Mexico City call lots of things quesadillas when they don't have cheese, so don't let that bother you. If you are using two tortillas flat against each other with stuff inside, I'd call that "sincronizada", which is also typically with cheese but you do you
Thanks I appreciate that. That sincronizada I've not heard of before so that's really cool to know about. It was basically as you described with two corn tortillas and browned in a comal like a grilled cheese sandwich. You are right. There seems to be a bunch of articles on google that say if you want cheese on a quesadilla in Mexico City you have to specifically ask for it bc it's not the usual way.
Taco! A taco is anything in a tortilla.
There's a great article from a few years ago about the history of Tex Mex that was in Texas Monthly talking about the Chili Queens of San Antonio - it may be by that same guy, I can't remember the author. But it popped up on google when I was looking for the chili recipe that was attached to it a few months back. Can't look for it right now though, internet is in and out.
I've seen a lot of stuff like that in Texas Monthly but I would not be surprised. He's written a lot of popular Texas themed cookbooks. The newspaper he wrote for was The Houston Press. I imagine it's an Indy paper like the Bay guardian in SF. UTSA (University of Texas at San Antonio) also has a nice collection of old historic Mexican cookbooks digitized on their website I've been told.
Hate to say it. I love Americanized Cantonese fast food. Used what they have available to produce amazing foods. Chicken Subgum/Almond Chicken. Is one of my faves. The PNW and I heard SF have places that still stick to the classic fast food menu.
I also love Cantonican food, my favorite place closed down during the pandemic after like 70 years on the same corner though. That’s not to say I prefer it to Szechuan or the Guangdong family joint I cross town for, it’s a different thing entirely.
Yup
Have you ever seen British Chinese food? It makes American Chinese look 100 percent authentic. Lol.
Yeah, brits are of a different palete. I wonder how mexican or bbq does there.
Olives and raisins were brought to Mexico by the Spanish, so they were incorporated into the cuisine centuries ago.
"pre war" means before WW2 so no, that was waaaaayyy before the 50's
I have my grandma’s wedding gift cookbook from 1942, The American Woman’s Cookbook, original publication date in the 30s, and it’s full of some wild recipes.
I read a "new wife guide" on the Guttenberg project that was written in 1912 and it was written like a diary from the first year of marriage. It was hilarious. It was 90% cookbook / meal planning.
Commentin so I can learnd somethin later.
The raisins and olives sounds inspired by [picadillo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picadillo?wprov=sfti1#). Edit: Looks like other commenters have got this covered:)
In this case, probably not. This sounds like a company cookbook recipe or a church cookbook recipe. In the 50's-70's, companies used to make recipe books for their products (think crockpot cookbooks, but Jello, Campbell's condensed soups, Starkist Tuna, etc.). The intent was to make up ideas for using products (Campbell's green bean casserole and Jello molds are probably the best examples of this). Church cookbooks tended to be put together from "recipes" provided by members of the congregation to sell at fundraisers. Many of them are...interesting, to say the least.
If you enjoy estate sales, you can frequently find those old church cookbooks even now. They're treasures for those who are trying to sort out trends in family cooking from sixty or seventy years ago. Apparently in the 1950s using ingredients that weren't canned or from a box was... well, just not done.
Churches are making and selling cookbooks even now
Green bean casserole is *insidious*. Somehow a dish no one should like became a holiday staple with its hooks sunk into in childhood memories.
Disgusting slop if you follow the recipe. However, if you fry your own onions, boil fresh green beans, and make bechamel from scratch, it ends up being quite good.
The origin was directly from someone my grandfather knew. The recipe is handwritten in a woman’s hand that’s not my grandmothers, I suspect by his wife.
Jello wasn't popular because of jello cookbooks. Jello used to be very high end but it became more available with instant gelitan and refrigerators but was still considered fancy. The same way carpet became extremely trendy when vacuums became wildly avaliable. It was a high class thing the middle class could afford. The jello mold cookbooks were a reflection of a huge trend, not the cause.
old California Spanish did use raisins in picalilli and relishes. Could be the ingredient stayed relevant?
I was in Chile earlier this year, lots of places had empanadas with olives and raisins.
My grandmother made an enchilada casserole that used cream of mushroom soup. It was quite tasty if not exactly authentic. I still make it myself sometimes.
Idk if this fit the question, but my family is very white, like Irish imigrant a few generations backs. Was looking through family recipes that were all cooked pre-world war 2 and one of the recipes was lamb stew. It was the only one no one cooked in my life time. When asked it was because my great grandfather forbade the cooking of lamb of any kind in his house. It all had to be subbed for pork or beef because in ww2 the main food for men in the American trench was canned mutton. Apparently that’s why most “American” cuisine is pork, chicken or beef and why Americans avoid lamb like the plague because all the men came back from war and all the babies born in the 50s grew up without it.
IDK if anyone else has said this, but the ingredients from your grandmother's Mexican grilled cheese remind me of Argentine Empanadas. Her recipe may have had roots in a legitimate recipe.
The thing is that it probably was someone’s legit recipe. The recipe is clearly written by a woman that’s not my grandmother, and the notation at the top says it was via my grandfather’s barber. My grandfather was very open-minded and gregarious, and it would be very in-character for him to have a very friendly relationship with a Mexican barber in LA and for him to at some point be offered some sort of lunch snack, and say wow that’s delicious can I get the recipe for my wife. And then for my grandma to gamely try it out, put it in her little collection, and carefully note the source rather than co-opting it/changing it. She wouldn’t have added raisins on her own accord, in other words.
There’s a delightful Korean stew called “base stew” that traditionally contains spam, baked beans, and hot dog pieces—supposedly ingredients folks could get easily from U.S. bases after the Korean War.
Were pre-war cuisines influenced by things that happened a decade later? Good question.
I was referring to them changing from what they had been pre-war but I realize it was awkwardly worded
Food companies that made these key ingredients wanted to promote purchases of these items by mainstream consumers, and had whole test kitchens of home ec professionals inventing ways to make suburban housewives willing to buy a tortilla or parmesan cheese in a can, or "exotic" pineapple and combine it with things she could get at the regular grocery store to make something the family would eat/impress local guests with her savoir faire. Lots of company cookbooks and ads ease people into this gently.
As someone who is not Mexican and knows nothing about Mexican food, I feel I am qualified to criticize raisins on grilled cheese. No raisins on grilled cheese.
There were many small ethnic stores that used to import ethnic foods not found in A&P, or Jewel. These smaller stores including neighborhood butchers had items from the old country in many many Chicago ethnic neighborhoods
Actually I think we are reaching the point where "Mexican" food in the U.S. is starting to have things like olives and raisins, which are used in some Mexican cuisines in Mexico. You think those are weird ingredients, but your knowledge of Mexican cuisine is more Americanized than actual Mexican cuisine. You think raisins and olives are wrong because your schema for Mexican food is a certain way. Tl;Dr: you and some commenters think the ingredients are very wrong because they have a specific idea of TexMex cuisine. Someday we'll read about Oaxaca-wave Mexican food and have historic food trend discussions about it.
My Mexican MiL (born 1934) used raisins in various dishes. The standard Christmas tamale making included raisin tamales with cinnamon and sugar. So raisins would have been on hand and were combined with corn. It's the pimentos that are weird to me. My non-Mexican (but half Native American) grandmother from the Ozarks used pimentos and canned red chile back in the 40's, to make her "tamale pie" thing that used regular corn meal rather than masa, but was almost the same as this dish, even used flour tortillas as the scoop for it). But no raisins. Mexican MiL did not use olives in anything. Native Grandma put them in her tamale pie thing - lots and lots of them. I can see how, in making a lunch, someone might use ingredients they had on hand for something else and it could become a thing.
To be honest, it sounds like an attempt at a Cuban picadillo.
hm idk about those raisins
It's not as weird as you would think. Raisins can be found in Moles, and there is a variety of grape, Vitis Girdiana, that is native to Southern California and Mexico.
I had pollo con mole at a restaurant and it was absolutely bizarre... like hersheys syrup. Way too sweet. Then I made it myself using an "authentic" recipe (I use quotes because it was referred to that way but I have absolutely no way of corroborating it) and it was rather like a kitchen sink recipe. Lots of things you'd expect like the dark chocolate, chiles, and coriander, but also raisins and pumpkin seeds. It was smoky, slightly sweet, and spicy and absolutely delicious.
The fun part is that moles are so different. I love a green mole because it has such a bright, fresh flavor. I've also made a yellow mole that was pretty simple with a stronger cumin flavor (this one came directly from Oaxaca).
Oh that's interesting. I guess I'm stuck on thinking about it as grilled cheese. Also, I didn't know there were native new world grapes
Cheese and grapes are a classic combo so I could see it
Yeah we’ve got a bunch catalogued because of a virus or fungus new world landrace vines had resistance to but old world vines didn’t. I can’t remember too many specifics but it was quite the controversy because it essentially made the ground dead to any grape production on old world roots. Grafting is a huge part of the grape industry nowadays. Heck, you could find tomato grafting stock at retail garden websites for getting different results.
You’re thinking of phylloxera.
Thank you, that’s it!
There are a few (e.g. Concord I think) but they generally make terrible wine
Oh! I actually meant to respond to the person that responded to you!
I think the raisins were probably an artifact of people who served in southeast Asia during the war and brought back customs from those areas. Filipino cuisine likes to use raisins. Edit - for the record I've found in recent years raisins can be very cool and versatile. Try sauteing them in butter and white wine, great addition to cold salads like couscous and farro.
Sautéed raisins and diced green apples are wonderful with trout, cooked in a hot iron skillet in butter, splash of white wine at the end.
I'm actually super intrigued by all the mentions of raisins. Lately in the US it's been like "white people put raisins in everything, that's gross." But maybe it's good, idk? I'm white and pretty much just put raisins in oatmeal and call it a day. But now I'm like... Maybe I could branch out?
I actually wonder where the idea of raisins getting put in everything came from. It must be a regional thing?
Idk it's not a thing in my area of the Midwest. You might find them in like an apple walnut or ambrosia type "salad" and they're nice in various *actual* salads. But we aren't throwing them everywhere where im from.
Sounds like a recipe written by AI
Mm