Food culture

суббота, 26 июля 2008

20:00

все записи пользователя в сообществе KattyJamison

KattyJamison

So I'm kicking off the Food in the English-Speaking World discussion.

First off, one has to realize that English-speaking world is BIG. Indian cuisine is about as different from Canadian, as Zimbabwean from Turkish. I'll be talking mostly about American, Canadian and British, since I know those best.

American:
Some people think American food is a derivative of English and some think it's hamburgers and French Fries. Neither is exactly true, or even close to truth. Although, yes, Americans do eat pot roast, hamburgers and pound cake.
US is an extremely multi-cultural country, and was multicultural to begin with. Dutch, Spanish, French, British, Italian, Irish, Chinese and Indian foods are all over the place and they penetrated so far into the "national" potluck that most people here don't think of them as "foreign" foods anymore. For example, today in out hospital cafeteria you can get:
Muffins and pound cakes - British
Stuffed halapinos - Mexican
Strawberry parfait - French
Spagetti and meatballs in pineapple sauce - the cross between Italian and Hawaiian, I imagine...
Pizza - Italian
Macaroni salad - American
Apple pie - Dutch
and so on. And I did actualy go down there to check.

So, what that means is you can find anything you want here, as far as food goes, or nearly anything. Including salted cucumbers, сметана, and кисло млeко. But you might have to search for a bit.
Now, "sour cream" is prepared very much like "сметана", except is is done with cream, not milk, and it is never diluted with water or milk. So it looks like Russian творог, thick and smooth, not liquid at all. If you want it to look like Russian smetana you can dilute it with full-fat milk or cream.
"Curd" is not actually творог but a kind of consistency for milk products. "Творог" is "cottage cheese". Cottage cheese can be large curd, small curd, smooth and whatnot else. Most cottage cheese made in the US is made along the Northern European recipies (Skandinavian, Northern French), so it looks chunky (small or large curd). But you can buy cottage cheese that is smooth and a bit sour to the taste, like Russian ones, you just need to go to a farmhouse or specialty Eastern European store.
Salted cucumber (preserved in salted water with spices) and pickled cucumbers (preserved in vineager water with spices) can both be found in the US. But mostly cucumbers are pickled, with a few salted here and there, as opposed to in Russia, where there were a few pickled and mostly salted. Salt was hard to get here for a long while, so people used vineager to preserve pretty much everything.

Last thing for now. Americans pasteurize their foods to the fare-thee-well, probably with a battle-cry of "No bacteria remains crawling!" So if the milk does not go sour for a week and sour cream stays good for a month that does not mean they have preservatives or artificial additives; it just means that they are well-pasteurized. Which is usually a good thing, although cursed inconvenient when you are trying to make sour milk for pancakes.

Questions? Comments? Disagreements? Corrections?

@темы: discussion, that's useful

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