Passage II

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Passage A is adapted from “The unified Theory of Gumbo” by Lolis Eric Elie (@2012 by Smithsonian Institution). Passage B is adapted from “The Borscht Belt” by Julia loffe (@2012 by Condé Nast).

Passage A by Lolis Eric Elie

As the Cajun craze had its way with America in the 1980s, I began to hear tourists, visitors and transplants to New Orleans praising this or that gumbo for its thickness and darkness. This was strange to me. Gumbo was supposed to be neither thick nor dark. Even more important, “dark” and “thick” were being used not as adjectives, but as achievements. It was as if making a dark gumbo was a culinary accomplishment on par with making a featherlight biscuit or a perfectly barbecued beef brisket. Naturally, I viewed these developments with suspicion and my suspicion focused on the kitchen of Commander’s Palace and its celebrated chef, Paul Prudhomme.

Prudhomme hails from Cajun Country, near Opelousas, Louisiana. He refers to his cooking not so much as Cajun, but as “Louisiana cooking,” and thus reflective of influences beyond his home parish. For years I blamed him for the destruction of the gumbo universe. Many of the chefs and cooks in New Orleans restaurants learned under him or under his students. Many of these cooks were not from Louisiana, and thus had no homemade guide as to what good gumbo was supposed to be. As I saw it then , these were young, impressionable cooks who lacked the loving guidance and discipline that only good home training can provide.

My reaction was admittedly nationalistic, since New Orleans is my nation. The Cajun incursion in and of itself didn’t bother me. We are all enriched immeasurably when we encounter other people, other languages, other traditions, other tastes. What bothered me was the tyrannical influence of the tourist trade. Tourist trap restaurants, shops, cooking classes, and at times it seemed the whole of the French Quarter, were given over to providing visitors with what they expected to find. There was no regard for whether the offerings were authentic New Orleans food or culture. Suddenly andouille sausage became the local standard even though most New Orleanians had never heard of it. Chicken and andouille gumbo suddenly was on menus all over town. This was the state of my city when I moved back here in 1995.

Passage B by Julia loffe

As a self-appointed guardian of authentic Russian fare, Maksim Syrnikov, who has spent the past two decades studying traditional Russian cuisine, has a problem: Russians don’t hold Russian food in particularly high esteem. When they eat out, they favor more exotic cuisines, like Italian or Japanese. The tendency to find foreign food more desirable is a prejudice that goes back centuries——to a time when the Russian aristocracy spoke French, not Russian. Russian food is pooh-poohed as unhealthy and unsophisticated.

Among the many things that annoy Syrnikov is the fact that a good number of the despised Russian dishes aren’t even Russian. “I did an informal survey of eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds in Moscow and St.Petersburg, and asked them, “Name some traditional Russian dishes,” Syrnikov told me. “What they named was horrible; borscht, which is Ukrainian, and potatoes, which are an American plant. In the middle of the eighteenth century, there were riots because people didn’t want to grow potatoes.” He insists that real Russian food contained no potatoes, no tomatoes, few beets, and dairy, as well as honey, cucumbers, turnips, cabbage, apples, and the produce of Russia’s vast forests——mushrooms and berries. Because of the climate, little of this was eaten fresh; it was salted, picked, or dried for the long winter. Most of Russia ate this way until the twentieth century.

By exploring the Russian food that existed before potatoes, Syrnikov hopes to help Russians reacquaint themselves with the country’s agrarian roots, and to convince them that their national cuisine can be just as flavorful as anything they might find in a sushi bar. He spends his time travelling through the countryside in search of old recipes, trying them himself, and blogging about his experiences. Often, he is brought in as a consultant on projects to make a restaurant authentically Russian. Recently, he hatched a plan for a user-generated database of folk recipes. “My idea is to send out a call across all of Russia,” he told me. “If you have a grandmother who makes shanishki”—disk-shaped pastries—“take a picture of them, write down the recipe. To me, it’s absolutely obvious that, if we don’t wake up and find out from these old women and set it down on paper, in twenty years we don’t have anyone to ask, Russian culture will lose a very significant part of itself.”