What even is food authenticity? Why we guard carbonara, and flatten chicken rice

> exchanges of ingredients in the Columbian exchange (tomatoes in Italy, potatoes in Russia, chilis in India and Korea, etc.)

For more on this see the book 1493:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...

Many folks are probably familiar with what happened in Europe post-1492, but there's a whole bunch of stuff on the Pacific side of the Americas as well.

In the US, "Burger" generally refers to ground meat patty, "hamburger" can mean either the sandwich or the ground beef itself. If you bought a pound of ground beef at the store, you might say you bought "a pound of hamburger." Turkey burgers, chicken burgers, bison burgers, etc all focus on the idea that it's the ground meat patty that makes them a burger. Most Americans (or at least me) would say a patty melt is a type of burger, because it has beef burger patties, despite not being on a bun.

So chicken sandwiches, pork sandwiches, and steak sandwiches, which are all common here and typically served on buns, aren't considered burgers because the meat isn't ground.

It's so thoroughly thought of this way here that that the product "hamburger helper" doesn't involve bread or sandwiches whatsoever: it's a box of pre-portioned ingredients, maybe with pasta or rice, that you cook with with ground beef in a pot or skillet.

Edit: old timey American cartoons used to refer to "hamburger sandwiches" which were by all accounts the same as burgers today; the "sandwich" part got lost sometime before it got to Australia, i guess.

Adding onions, non-cheese dairy, bacon, chives and/or udon noodles to carbonara sounds delicious. If I am cooking for myself, I care more about that than fidelity to traditional Italian recipes.

It’s ok to admit you can’t tell the difference between real parmigiana and kraft Parmesan. You don’t need get defensive and claim everyone else except you is a phony because of your lack of interest and/or taste.

I find myself leaning into the food authenticity camp. To clarify, I define “authenticity” as follows: a dish is cooked with particular ingredients in a particular way at a particular place.

I don’t mind fusion recipes or substituting with what you have. I have a fusion recipe collection I enjoy, and I substitute ingredients too. But sometimes I want to experience a certain taste that is unlike everything else around: break the pattern, have something how I remember it tasted. I don’t want to eat an “adapted” version of the dish, and it really annoys me that restaurants consistently fail.

Take, for example, pad thai and the way its simplest version is commonly cooked in Thailand today. There’s a set of ingredients commonly used to make pad thai. Some serving sides are optional and maybe uncommon (e.g., banana flower); some ingredients are adjusted individually at the table (e.g., amount of dry chili powder). But you’d always see it with garlic chives and never with mushrooms, for example. So the dish has a certain flavor profile and a feel to it you’ll remember after eating enough of them.

A pattern, and likely the source of annoyance to some, is that restaurants have a tendency to adapt foreign cuisines to the local taste as opposed to preserving the “authentic” taste. I’ll give credit: sometimes a new interesting dish gets created that even appears in the home country: California sushi roll. Oftentimes, though, it results in something that tastes like neither the original nor a distinct new dish. It kind of tastes like the “authentic” but wrong - an uncanny valley. For example, Indian restaurants in Europe tend to significantly underseason their food, making it taste bland to anyone who has tasted the real thing.