All food is some kind of fusion. Humans have been cooking for hundreds of thousands of years, and very few communities have been truly isolated in human history. People going on about “true” this, and “authentic” that, just don’t know shit about cooking or culture.
This. Personal favorite example: Tomatoes didn’t appear in Italian food less than a century before modern English started forming. They’re an American vegetable.
I think people vastly underestimate how much people moved around in the past. Not just from mass migrations, but also individuals just ending up in places. An army was basically a moving city making it’s way around for years if not decades. New trade routes opening often meant people moving across the world to either end just to handle logistics. A fad started by one individual eventually turns into a staple, a tradition, a culture.
If you went back to the time of Leonardo DaVinci you wouldn’t find tomatoes anywhere in Italy. Tomatoes are indigenous to Central America yet today it seems almost impossible to imagine Italian food without tomatoes! The introduction of tomatoes to Italian cooking might’ve been more gradual but the transformation was far greater than anything we see now.
All food is some kind of fusion. Humans have been cooking for hundreds of thousands of years, and very few communities have been truly isolated in human history. People going on about “true” this, and “authentic” that, just don’t know shit about cooking or culture.
This. Personal favorite example: Tomatoes didn’t appear in Italian food less than a century before modern English started forming. They’re an American vegetable.
Migration and transplanting of cultures has massively increased in the last 100 years though… Shit changed a lot slower in the past.
I think people vastly underestimate how much people moved around in the past. Not just from mass migrations, but also individuals just ending up in places. An army was basically a moving city making it’s way around for years if not decades. New trade routes opening often meant people moving across the world to either end just to handle logistics. A fad started by one individual eventually turns into a staple, a tradition, a culture.
If you went back to the time of Leonardo DaVinci you wouldn’t find tomatoes anywhere in Italy. Tomatoes are indigenous to Central America yet today it seems almost impossible to imagine Italian food without tomatoes! The introduction of tomatoes to Italian cooking might’ve been more gradual but the transformation was far greater than anything we see now.