Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 17 - Japan (and a bit of Korea)

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We all know Japan, right? Honshu, Kyushu, Hokkaido, Shikoku. Samurai, haiku, kabuki, cherry blossom. Anime, pachinko and the undisputed pinaccle of human culture, Takeshi’s Castle (1986). Of course given this blog is about food perhaps my list of clichés should have been sushi, miso and katsu. And I should have littered the post with lucky cats and pictures of The Great Wave off Kanagawa just to be extra subtle.

In all seriousness I do find Japanese food particularly interesting, particularly at this phase of our round the world trip, as there is so much less bleeding together of cuisines here than is usual.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 16 - Thailand

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The next country in our around the world trip is Thailand, home of a cuisine that was largely unknown in the West, then became ubiquitous over the course of about fifteen minutes. That’s not a bad thing and not a coincidence - in order to boost the profile of Thailand the Thai government in 2002 initiated the Global Thai programme, aiming to boost the number of Thai restaurants abroad. This included provision of prefabricated restaurant plans and generous loans for food-related businesses abroad.

Broadly recent Thai history seems to be a cycle of democracy, military coup d’état, junta and restoration, despite that this policy was very successful and seems to have stuck through different modes of government, which is actually quite remarkable.

Naturally Thailand has a long and storied history outside of this recent instability, with the current Thai people likely originating from Guangxi in China, migrating out from the 8th century, and the Kingdom of Siam maintaining its independence in the imperial era (at the cost of outlying territory) as a buffer state between Britain and France. But, frankly, even if far less important than any of that, the Global Thai thing is just perfect for an introduction for a food blog. What a cool nugget of history.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 15 - China (Hunan)

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It’s been a little time since my last proper post here, all my cooking was done in late December but no posts since August. Honestly I’m a little worried I’ll forget my assessment of what I made and ate! Fortunately I’m moving directly from one post on China to another so I can skip most of the introduction.

Today’s style of Chinese cuisine is Hunanese - a style known for being particularly hot.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 14 - China (Sichuan)

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So, onto China. We all know what China is and, paradoxically, I think that there’s so much to say limits how much I will say. Typically I’d talk about influences on the cuisine and try to take us around the garden path with some tangentially related history, researched very quickly. But there’s just a bit too much to chew on this time. Suffice to say that Chinese culinary history was influenced by its neighbours and the West (chillies come to mind!) just like anywhere else. But an awful lot of food originated in China, such as the soy sauce that’s so ubiquitous in many cuisines, China’s been a huge influence on the world’s cuisine itself and a lot of its characteristic dishes and ingredients just come from itself.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 13 - Burma/Myanmar

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The next stop on the food tour is Myanmar, or Burma, or, in analogy to Derry/Londonderry’s moniker as “Slash City” I may just call it “Slash Country” to avoid treading on any toes.

As a country between India and Thailand Burma has a combination of traits from those cuisines. For instance the book I use has curry-like recipes - some of which involve typically Indian garam masalas and some of which involve typically Thai nam pla (fish sauce) and lemongrass. Though less frequent in my book there are also heavily Chinese-influenced dishes using soy sauce or Chinese preserved vegetables. Naturally, there are features of the cuisine that aren’t common in any of Burma’s neighbours’ cuisines - such as the flavour combination of pork and mango or the use of laphat - pickled tea leaves (one ingredient it actually is hard to source). It’s a wonderful combination of influences and the food I cooked for this post doesn’t reflect its full diversity.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 12 - India (regions: north-east/Himalayas)

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Well, it’s been a while since the last post here, hasn’t it? This little project isn’t dead - but I was intending a holiday abroad (that the delta variant has prevented) and worked to get ahead on the actual cooking, so I could take a few weeks off this. Leaving me with about four more posts to write about food I’ve already cooked, not counting this one! Had I waited a bit longer to finish this up it’d have been five. Anyway - let’s get past the idea of terrifying backlogs and onto the idea of this selection of food I cooked back in June:

This post covers final region of India before we move further east. The intention was to focus on the north-east, those states near to or east of Bangladesh that do things a bit differently. However the remit of this has extended as, in my ignorance, I didn’t realise how quite a lot of this food is actually Himalayan, rather than specifically north-east Indian. For instance one recipe is specifically from Uttarakhand, and, through careful examination on a map, one can determine that this state is, to use the technical term, nowhere near the north-east.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 11 - India (regions: south and east)

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In this post we’re still on India and its surrounding countries, but now we move to the south and the east of India. Having rambled on about how really this series is on South Asia in general in the last post it’s worth noting that in this case the dishes are all from India proper but there are three dishes with some degree of ambiguity. One is a dish common across south India which is attributed as being Tamil in origin - Tamils live in both India and Sri Lanka, there’s no distinctively Sri Lankan ingredients in the recipe but I wouldn’t have expected any to appear given the specifics of the dish. The other two are Bengali dishes but explicitly from West Bengal (a state in India) rather then East Bengal (all of Bangladesh)..

Unlike my last post there’s a chance a lot of this food will be more unfamiliar with British readers - though some, particularly from the east, will be more familiar. Probably the most well known dish from the south of India in the UK would be the Madras (the old name for Chennai, in the south) - although there’s a lot of back and forth between Indians in the UK and in India itself, to the extent that reportedly the most popular cookery website in India is based in the UK, and it’s unclear whether the origins of that curry are in Chennai, the UK or both. In any case, I’m not making a madras in this post - but I am making dosa, the staple you’d find in any dedicated South Indian restaurant but which is quite rare in a typical curryhouse.

And, as a reminder, I’m using the same books as before so please read the last post if you’re interested in my views on those, I make one additional criticism of one of them but otherwise my views haven’t changed much.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 10 - India (regions: north and west)

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Here we are at the Indian subcontinent, in my view the most interesting part of the world for food - particularly where the Indian food traditions overlap with others. As no country can truly compete with Belgian beer no food region can truly compete with Indian food. Move over Europe, move over the Middle East, move over China, just move over everything.

But, in saying this, I am, if this makes sense, considering India as a region rather than a country. India is at least comparable in diversity to Europe (it just ended up as one country) and what we refer to as Indian food is really a mix of different regional/minority nation cuisines both from within India proper and from nearby countries. Most conceptions of any national foods are a bit of a construct at the best of times but I think is particularly true to the idea of Indian food - where even regional foods cross national boundaries regularly, Bengal comprises of the Indian state of West Bengal and the entirety of Bangladesh so is Bengali food truly Indian in a national sense? A straightforward yes seems ridiculous, but so does a straightforward no. Similar questions can be asked, off the top of my head, about Tamil, Punjabi and Kashmiri food, just as a start. So the conception of “Indian food” is often more a conception of South Asian/Indian subcontinent food - delete as appropriate according to sensitivities, (As an aside, I am aware some people from that area dislike one or both terms but I struggle to find a term that doesn’t upset anyone, is actually regularly used and isn’t totally inelegant. Indeed the “Indian subcontinent” situation seems a near exact parallel to the controversy over the term “British Isles”.)

As such, for this post, and any others on Indian food, although I’m personally not mad on “South Asia” as a term I’ll be considering for the Indian posts food from anywhere within the region. With any geopolitical region (this applies to Europe as well) I prefer the most maximal interpretation in actual use - so, although most recipes will be Indian in every sense, I won’t exclude recipes from Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan or Tibet if they crop up. I will exclude recipes from Myanmar purely because that’s getting its own post later.

Nepal. Bhutan and Tibet may seem surprising, their food is often considered quite distinct from India’s, but in reality their food is closely related to the food of north-eastern Indian states - food from Sikkim, Nepal and Tibet are very much interconnected for instance - so excluding them would be arbitrary. At the time of writing I haven’t picked out my recipes for this region yet but if momos will appear in this blog it’ll be two posts from this one!

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 9 - Mauritius

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We now skip the original post nine, which is delayed until summer, to focus on Mauritius. Why Mauritius? Well, I somehow ended up with a copy of a cookbook on Mauritian food and though it’d be interesting to finally try it. Also Mauritian food was a minor feature of my childhood in the form of sausage rougail with lentils, something I wrongly thought was integral to a rougail. Truth be told I expect this book was intended to end up with my sister, who is from my mother’s first marriage to a Mauritian man, but as it’s in my possession for now I should give it a whirl!

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 8 - Iran/Persia

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These posts now move on from the Eastern Mediterranean to another part of the world with a long past, Iran/Persia. Persians, as a nation, are very old - younger than Greeks but comparably old to Arabs - and doubtless they were interacting with their neighbours with all the implications that has for food culture for all of this long history.

However although a surprising amount of food history exists, if you want to go right to the start and make Sumerian food there are recipes surviving, I expect a proper food historian would be consider joining the fragmentary knowledge we have as a bit baseless. We know Elamite food was stereotyped as being dill-heavy, doesn’t mean any dill-based Persian dish can be attributed to Cyrus conquering that now-forgotten state. We know a fair amount about classical Greek food and how substantially different it is to modern Greek food (such as very different herbs and spices), doesn’t mean anything looking vaguely similar to that is because of Alexander. And so on.

What we can be more confident on are more recent and long-lasting links in Persia’s history. Persia was a superpower in its own right until the Arab Conquests and was part of the first three Caliphates, with Persian culture and bureaucracy being heavily influential in the last of these - so it’s pretty easy to say that Arabic and Persian food, and likely food from elsewhere in said Caliphates, all influenced each other during this time, and likely for a long time after.

Before, during and after this time, like many states from Central Europe all the way to China, Persia has been influenced (read: invaded) by various Central Asian tribes for long periods of its history, even being ruled by various tribes for several centuries. Doubtless this affected their food but it also heavily influenced the culture of these tribes as they settled. Persian kingdoms ruled by various tribes influenced (read: invaded) India, introducing Islam and other aspects of Persian culture and generally having a huge impact on Indian history. One man, Babur, from modern Uzbekistan, which was then heavily Persianised, invaded Afghanistan and then India, taking Persian culture and ideas with him. These were the famous Mughals who, as any good restaurant menu can tell you, were very influential on Indian food culture and, as the preceding power in India before the British Raj, pretty recent.

Overall this means Persian food is heavily influential, and influenced by, its neighbours in all directions. It also helps bridge the gap between Western Asian and Indian foods, continuing this smooth continuum of cuisines bleeding into each other all the way from Greece to East Asia, and this history can explain the presence of some meals originating from very far away in this post!

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 7 - The Levant

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If Turkey is the overlap between the Middle Eastern and European worlds, a statement that may have been more true fifteen years ago, we now go to the Middle East proper - an area where cuisines blend into each other and we take one further step away from Greek food.

I’ve decided to refer to this region as the Levant - this isn’t a perfect descriptor of the area (not least for the fact that Cyprus is in this region and is decidedly not covered today) but I think it’s the least worst shorthand to describe this area of the Eastern Mediterranean where national borders were assigned fairly arbitrarily after the Ottomans fell and, I suspect, most coherent food regions would cross a national boundary.

To some extent this part of the world is still a patchwork, there are many nations both famous (such as the Kurds) or obscure (such as the Assyrians) resident, but broadly the region is part of the wider Arab world. So, unsurprisingly, Arab cuisine, though perhaps not as it would be in Arabia itself (unless you count Jordan as Arabia), is the backbone of this region’s food.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 6 - Turkey

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Across the Aegean, out of Europe and into Turkey! Well, out of Europe unless, by coincidence, everything I cooked is regional to Thrace. We do have one more transcontinental country coming up soon but otherwise these posts will all be Asian or in the Americas (with a possible brief hop over to a country that is technically Africa) until we cross the Atlantic in autumn. Apologies for anyone who wanted an Australasian post!

As for why I cooked Turkish - firstly, I like Turkish food. Also if I’m going west to east immediately after Greece seems about the right time to cook Turkish.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 5 - Greece

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Finally we’re going east! And we’re coming to the end of what is unambiguously Europe, at least until we eventually circumnavigate the globe and loop round again. We’ve a couple of transcontinental countries to try (as a clue: neither are Kazakhstan) but nevertheless after this post we’re onto Asia - in my view by far the most important continent for savoury food.

But today we’re in Greece. Truth be told I don’t think I need to justify this decision - Greek food is a very strong contender for being the best in Europe. It also begins a continuum of food culture that stretches all the way from Greece to Burma/Myanmar, with the food at either end seeming unrelated but with strong commonalities between neighbours all along this imaginary line between the countries, as pilaf slowly morphs into pilau.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 4 - Croatia

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Going south once again we come to a country that was once part of Hungary. Well, most of it, kind of. […]

Anyway, I’m cooking Croatian because I went to Dubrovnik when it was popular but before it exploded in popularity after Game of Thrones really got going and I generally liked the food. At least in Dalmatia it’s a bit like Italian, but not identical. Lots of seafood.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 3 - Hungary

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Another north-south move as we go to Hungary. There’ll be another two of these before we definitely start moving east - as Europe has many countries within only a few timezones whereas Asia often has large countries spanning multiple timezones, so progress will be quicker.

So why Hungarian? Essentially it’s just a very distinctive cuisine and is a bit unusual for its neck of the woods. Heavy on the sour cream like its neighbours, sure, but also with a focus on spice running through the cuisine in a way that’s pretty unusual in Europe (or the West in general) - the cliché about Hungarian food is, after all, paprika. The only reason I’d have skipped it is if I didn’t have a cookbook for it.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 2 - Nordic Countries

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So my cookery project moves eastward. By which I mean pretty much north from Poland. With two recipes from a Finnish book, a Danish recipe and a Norwegian recipe our longitude averages out in Sweden. So we’re heading north from Central Europe into Western Europe in order to go east, make sense?

Although the aim is to “travel” east-west on this project I’m not in a huge rush to do it. There’s a lot of variety in Europe and I don’t mostly be moving north or south until March. After the Eastern Mediterranean and Caucasus states the countries get larger and progress quicker so, all going to plan, we’ll still be nearer the Pacific than Europe in early summer.

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Around the World in 26 Meals: No. 1 - Poland

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Over the years I’ve accumulated an extensive collection of cookbooks - perhaps something that seems a bit odd in the age of online recipes but I do genuinely think there’s an experience to a good cookbook that can’t be replicated by BBC Good Food, the Waitrose website or AllRecipes. Beyond the physical experience of a good cookbook I do find there’s just a level of quality in recipes that can be found in these books that you don’t tend to get online - with a few honourable exceptions.

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