Big Mac Chutney? Curried lutefisk?

August 13, 2007 8:38 AM

What are some foods that come from one country, but seem (by their ingredients, preparation, or other qualities) to come from somewhere completely different?

Kedgeree has all the trappings of an Indian dish, but is actually British. Chop Suey is an american creation.

What other foods have such shared parentages?

posted by Newbornstranger to food & drink (33 comments total)

Chicken Tikka Masala and Balti are both British dishes.
posted by roomaroo at 8:45 AM on August 13, 2007

Orange marmalade is very British (certainly Scottish, I'm not sure about how much they love marmalade in Ireland) but last time I checked they don't grow a lot of oranges in Scotland. Same with Lemon Curd - I got a jar "made in" Scotland once, but really? Lemons in Scotland?

Similarly, I doubt the limes eaten by limey sailors came from England as well.

Newfoundland screech is actually Jamaican rum or at least something that comes out of an old rum cask.
posted by GuyZero at 8:51 AM on August 13, 2007

I'm not sure if it really matches your criteria, but isn't Kimchee basically just spicy Sauerkraut?
posted by ArgentCorvid at 8:56 AM on August 13, 2007

McDonalds outside of Western cultures always has different offerings, like the bulgogi burger in Korea and various teriyaki stuff in Japan. Even in Europe they sometimes have faux-Greek sandwiches.

In Vietnam, there are a lot of dishes that come from French culinary traditions. It's actually said that the Vietnamese didn't eat beef before colonization, but I'm not sure if I believe that. Examples: bò bít tét (coming from whatever the french word for "beefsteak" is), which they took and added fish sauce to the marinade. It's usually served with a fried egg and rice. Another one is phở, the most famous Vietnamese dish, which may or may not have come from the French. I'd take that with a grain of salt (ba-dum tsh), but there you go.
posted by borkingchikapa at 8:56 AM on August 13, 2007

Tomatoes and potatoes both came from the New World, so Italian tomato-based dishes and Irish and German potato-heavy dishes are a fairly recent culinary phenomenon.
posted by occhiblu at 8:57 AM on August 13, 2007

Saganaki (Greek fried goat/sheep cheese) is Greek and looks Greek and tastes Greek, but the name sure sounds Japanese to me.
posted by ootsocsid at 9:00 AM on August 13, 2007

Orange marmalade is very British (certainly Scottish, I'm not sure about how much they love marmalade in Ireland) but last time I checked they don't grow a lot of oranges in Scotland. Same with Lemon Curd - I got a jar "made in" Scotland once, but really? Lemons in Scotland?

Read Oranges by John McPhee for a great introduction to the history of indoor orange cultivation, and why Orange Marmalade is British.
posted by OmieWise at 9:07 AM on August 13, 2007

les croissants have been inspired by the middle-east crescent symbol... their recipe is not french but comes from vienna.
posted by nicolin at 9:13 AM on August 13, 2007

there's a surprising amount of cross-polination of ingredients between asia and central america. e.g., chiles, limes, tomatos, cilantro, and sesame seeds.
posted by chrchr at 9:18 AM on August 13, 2007

Baja-style Fish Tacos, with the battered fried fish (think Tempura), are thought (by some) to be influenced by Japanese fisherman who were brought in to develop a fishing industry in the area. Japanese Tempura is thought to be an evolution of a "dish" brought to Japan by Portuguese traders.

Texas BBQ owes a lot to Czech and German settlers (who also brought the oom-pah in Mariachi music).

I don't know if they actually make anything like kung pow chicken in China, but both the chili and peanut are new world plants.

Somewhere in my brain I've collected a few dozen other examples, but I can't recall them now.

Cuisine is an aspect of culture, and like other aspects of culture, is strongly influenced by the mixing and exchange that comes with trade.
posted by Good Brain at 9:20 AM on August 13, 2007

It's controversial, but some say Lasagne was "invented" in England
posted by Jofus at 9:35 AM on August 13, 2007

Tacos al pastor (marinated pork on a vertical spit) was developed by Lebanese restauranteurs in Mexico City to make shawarma palatable to local tastes.
posted by sacre_bleu at 9:39 AM on August 13, 2007

One of the biggest national dishes of Romania is mamaliga (basically polenta), though its main ingredient (corn) is from the new world. Ditto most Hungarian national dishes, which make plentiful use of paprika, a spice that was not native to Hungary. Pasta, the Italian favorite, was said to have developed after Marco Polo's trip to China, wasn't it?
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 9:43 AM on August 13, 2007

Pasta, the Italian favorite, was said to have developed after Marco Polo's trip to China, wasn't it?

I have a friend who studied Italian culinary history, and he said that (despite claims to the contrary) it probably went the other way, that Marco Polo brought pasta to China.
posted by occhiblu at 9:52 AM on August 13, 2007

Fortune cookies have San Francisco or Los Angeles origins.
posted by junesix at 9:58 AM on August 13, 2007

And based on some of my own Google research, I'm going to retract most of that last statement, since it looks like China had some sort of noodle-like food since 3000 BC or so. But Italy's pasta tradition also goes back to ancient Rome, and possibly the Etruscans. So, most likely it evolved independently in both places.
posted by occhiblu at 10:01 AM on August 13, 2007

Vindaloo is an Indian dish of Portuguese origin.
posted by dseaton at 10:17 AM on August 13, 2007

Another Vietnamese dish that is distinctly French is the Bánh mì, which is type of sandwhich that includes such non-Vietnamese ingredients as the baguette and paté.
posted by furtive at 10:46 AM on August 13, 2007

California Roll is also a Los Angeles creation. All those other rolls that are stuffed with avocado, cream cheese, and/or tempura, rolls with fish on the outside, and the inside-out rolls are American creations as well.
posted by junesix at 10:48 AM on August 13, 2007

A slight derail, but this thread made me think of this.
posted by mkultra at 11:23 AM on August 13, 2007

I lived in Italy for several years and never ran into "Spumoni," which I think is exclusively American.
posted by CunningLinguist at 11:59 AM on August 13, 2007

ah-hem, inside-out rolls are CANADIAN...
posted by Cosine at 12:07 PM on August 13, 2007

California Roll is also a Los Angeles creation.

I think Hidekazu Tojo's claim (of Tojo's, in Vancouver BC) to have invented it is more compelling, IMHO. The anecdotal evidence suggests that they were invented at about the same time by both Tojo and Mashita, but I think Tojo's just being polite. Tojo also invented the BC Roll, Alaska Roll, Spider Roll and a variety of other inside-out rolls, in addition to being the progenitor, in general, of the inside-out roll concept.
posted by solid-one-love at 2:25 PM on August 13, 2007

Pizza was invented in New York, someone once told me.
Damn, thinking about it, did those Italians invent any Italian food?
posted by greytape at 2:30 PM on August 13, 2007

Pizza was not invented in New York.

It did, however, likely come up to the Italian peninsula from the Middle East, but we're talking ancient cultures here.
posted by occhiblu at 3:37 PM on August 13, 2007

Caesar salad was invented in Mexico.
posted by hilker at 3:57 PM on August 13, 2007 [1 favorite]

I have heard a number of times (but can't find anything online to back it up) that Sukiyaki was introduced in Japan by the Dutch.
posted by blackunicorn at 4:06 PM on August 13, 2007

solid-one-love: Apologies about the incorrect attribution on both counts. In any case, certainly not of native Japanese origin.
posted by junesix at 4:41 PM on August 13, 2007

Here's another odd one that's somewhat related to the OP question. Despite the sharing of many foods between China and Japan, curry was introduced to Japan by the British Navy and not Chinese. Thus while Chinese curry reflects a localized version of Indian curry, Japanese curry is actually a localization of British-style Indian curry.
posted by junesix at 5:01 PM on August 13, 2007

Chinese restaurants often serve food that appears Chinese but didn't originate in China. For example see Crab Rangoon and some of the other dishes in the wiki list of American Chinese dishes. In France I've eaten Grenouille Pékinoise and in Sweden sweet and sour meatballs.

[ When I last mentioned Grenouille Pékinoise on Mefi I couldn't find any google hits. Now I can find them on the menu at the Vietnamese restaurant La Perle de Jade in France (with no explanation of what the sauce is), and possibly at 3 Chinese restaurants in France as "grenouille à l'impérial" (Peking is the imperial city). One describes the sauce as "aigre-doux piquant" (sour sweet spicy) which was my initial description of the dish. ]
posted by MonkeySaltedNuts at 9:51 PM on August 13, 2007

Some say they are belgian, some say they're spanish : french fries.
posted by nicolin at 2:55 AM on August 15, 2007

Interesting thread.

And based on some of my own Google research, I'm going to retract most of that last statement, since it looks like China had some sort of noodle-like food since 3000 BC or so. But Italy's pasta tradition also goes back to ancient Rome, and possibly the Etruscans. So, most likely it evolved independently in both places.

I can see the basic gist of pasta (boiled dough) developing independently, but "pasta" is a very broad term. If we're limiting ourselves to noodles, then I have a hard time believing it popped up independently- it's a fairly specialized, labor-intensive technique. What the Etruscans seemed to have was more like an antecedent to lasagne, which intrestingly has no corollary in Asian cuisine that I'm aware of.
posted by mkultra at 8:32 AM on August 15, 2007

Well the traditional techniques for forming noodles in China are very different from those in making pasta in Italy. Chinese noodles are based on a hand-stretched technique whereas pasta is kneaded and cut/formed to shape. If you can believe dough being developed independently, I don't see it as that much of stretch to believing that the long, thin dough forms also developed independently through different techniques.
posted by junesix at 9:36 AM on August 15, 2007