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Two interesting articles from the NYTimes:

1) Kung Pao? No, Gong Bao, and Nix the Nuts. From the article:

Guizhou province in south-central China is the ancestral home of the dish, and one visit to Guixi, one of Guiyang's most famous restaurants, makes clear that where this popular concoction is concerned pronunciation was not the only thing lost in translation during its migration around the globe. Informed for the first time that something called kung pao chicken is widely eaten in the United States, the restaurant's veteran chef, Wang Xingyun, who was dressed in a white smock, dingy from hours of work with cleaver and wok, expressed his skepticism with the lifting of one weary eyebrow.

"Whatever they are eating there is certainly not authentic," he said.

Of course Mr. Wang, a stickler for ingredients and for technique who has been preparing meals built around the dish for over 30 years, says much the same even about what passes for kung pao chicken in Sichuan, the province right next door, where it is almost equally popular and where the dish began its journey across the ocean to America. "Nowadays it's a mess," Chef Wang announced, leading a visitor on a tour of his busy kitchen. '"Everyone says they can make our food, but they don't even understand its origins."

2) Native Foods Nourish Again. From the article:

American Indian food is the only ethnic cuisine in the nation that has yet to be addressed in the culinary world, said Loretta Barrett Oden, a chef who learned to cook growing up on the Citizen Potawatomi reservation in Oklahoma. "You can go to most any area of this country and eat Thai or Chinese or Mongolian barbecue, but you can't eat indigenous foods native to the Americas," said Ms. Oden, who has been traveling the nation filming segments for a 2006 PBS series titled "Seasoned With Spirit: A Native Cook's Journey."

One item that won't be featured on her show is fry bread, the puffy circles of deep-fried dough that serve as a base for tacos or are eaten simply with sugar or honey and are beloved on Indian reservations. That bread is fast becoming a symbol of all that is wrong with the American Indian diet, which evolved from food that was hunted, grown or gathered to one that relied on federal government commodities, including white flour and lard - the two ingredients in fry bread.

posted by beXn @ 2:33 PM