Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I suppose "authenticity" may be like pornography -- you can't define it, but you know it when you see it.

As for whether or not it matters -- I've been thinking about this all weekend. On the one hand, my first reaction is if it makes my pie-hole happy, I am disinclined to care about it's authenticity. Authentic hot chocolate would be made with cacao, water, and chilies. I prefer some sugar and milk in the mix. On the other hand, how can you tell if you have a good version of an existing dish or an entirely different dish if you don't have some sort of baseline? The northern midwest has some sort of bratwurst fetish. At what point does your blueberry-caraway sausage stop being an interesting version of a brat and become some kind of new sausage?

The authentic dish will always have value, but cuisine is like language and fashion -- fluid. Otherwise we'd still be eating aurochs on a stick.

I personally am interested in food history and regional foods so, to me, it matters. There are others who are more interested in the end result and don't really care about the semantics. I am less interested in some of the science of food. Or I am interested up to a point and then I start thinking of bunnies. I am sure I would be a better cook if I paid more attention to my scale calibration or the relative humidity in my pantry but I wouldn't be as joyous.

So yes it does matter... to somebody.

Mary

Must not forget it also is defined by the one observing, what is "dinner" to a baby...well...you know...

I suppose the authenticity argument applies to them as well. If they could talk, I'm sure they'd be arguing about the bottle versus the breast, not to mention how much garlic Mommy ate for lunch.

We clearly "ain't right"...

As opposed to "authentic pornography" which can be empirically measured using the Heffner-Flynt meter.



Big stick!