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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3174 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 14, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In my area of the midwest, many Mexican restaurants serve an almost certainly horribly inauthentic paella. Mexican rice plus fajita vegetables (onion, bell pepper, tomato), chicken, shrimp, and covered in queso. As far as I know, proper paella has no queso. Does that mean I never order paella? No, absolutely not, I love the stuff around here. I am similarly told that a chile relleno filled with liquid-ish queso cheese is also not authentic, and I usually order one of those too.

What is your favorite inauthentic dish that has been mangled by cultural transfer?

As I understand it, paella (which hails from Spain) is not even all that popular in Mexico, and certainly isn't "Mexican" per se. So I think there's an amusing double-layered inauthenticity going on here. In fact I don't think I've ever seen it in a Mexican restaurant, only in Spanish ones (although I live in the Northeast, so neither of us is really getting an authentic picture of Mexican cuisine... the one time I went to Mexico we stayed at a resort, but for what it's worth, the resort had both a Mexican and a Spanish restaurant: the Spanish restaurant had paella, and the Mexican one did not).

Anyway, for me, it has to be American-style spaghetti and meatballs. How could the Italians come up with each of spaghetti, meatballs, and marinara sauce and then not combine them in one dish?

Rural Italy was quite poor. Making spaghetti was laborious. Meatballs were a rare treat to be savoured.

They didn't want to drown all that in tomato sauce.

Seafood pasta dishes are actually more traditional.

Once they started extruding pasta in the 19th century it became a lot cheaper.

Italian-Americans could afford meat and had access to extruded pasta and canned tomato sauce. So they experimented with traditional ideas and new ingredients.

Seafood pasta dishes are actually more traditional.

To be fair, that's also true in Japan- instant noodles (just add water and boil for a while) are convergent evolution.

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