a good rant.
As soon as you propose an Italian issue there’s always going to be someone questioning whether the recipes will be ‘authentically’ Italian. That word. The ‘A’ word. I can’t actually stand it. The other day (and not by the lovely people at delicious.), I was asked to write about ‘authentic Thai food’. Authentic Thai food? As opposed to what? Ersatz Thai food? Fake Thai food? And if the latter, what would that be? I was once, for example, served a yum (salad) in a restaurant in Hua Hin that was made with Plumrose tinned sausages. Since it was served in Thailand, made by a Thai cook in a Thai restaurant, does it qualify as ‘authentically’ Thai? Or does the use of tinned sausages somehow render it… something else?
ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCK
Applied to food, the word ‘authentic’ isn’t just irritating – spectacularly so – it’s also meaningless. I often feel, whenever I see the word on a restaurant sign, that the place in question protests too much, so much bad food have I been served under the ‘authentic’ banner. But the problem goes further. It’s often employed alongside a particular form of food fascism that tries to decree there’s only one way to make a particular recipe.