No Such Thing As An Authentic Recipe
On occasion, after posting a recipe, I have a look on the Internet for other versions of a dish. The main reason I do this is to see how my blog post page ranks in the search engines compared to similar recipes.
If I have time, I read a few recipes from the first 2 pages of search engine results. What I’ve found, for the most part, is that there’s really no such thing as an authentic recipe, if the dish has been around for over 20 years. For example, my mother’s recipes are extremely popular both in the East Indian and general Canadian communities. No one cooks like her. People even beg her for her recipes then tell others that it’s their own recipe. That’s how different and popular her cooking is.
But a little bit of digging reveals something to me. Depending on whom you believe - my mother or my father - my father initially taught my mother how to cook. But even if that’s not true, my mother’s style of cooking originally stems from my father’s culinary likes and dislikes. However, as far as her recipes go, they are simply a slight variation of older recipes - some going back over a hundred years, handed down from a few generations (my father is 74 now, and many of his recipes were his mother’s, who would be over 105 if she were alive).
From time to time, I come up with a new dish that I think is brand new and authentic, but even if I created it with no influences, I don’t doubt that someone has already come up with something similar.
If you’re faced with the same realization and want to create something unique, then consider original variations of entire meals. Mix starters and side dishes and main dishes from different cultures. Use ingredients from different cultures (aka, fusion cuisine), particularly spices. I regularly use French cooking techniques with East Indian food, and use Japanese presentation, if possible. I also do a lot of fusion between Indian and East Asian (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, etc.) ingredients, spices, and condiments. I find that it is a lot easier to be creative doing “fusion cuisine”.
(c) Copyright 2005-present, Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.curryelvis.com/
tag this
