When I was approached to write a piece on South Asian food for this magazine, I jumped at the chance to understand more about a cuisine I’m intrigued by and don’t know enough about. I am a pasty, pasty white person who loves spice and who likes to step out of my bubble of inherited and developed likes and dislikes. It was when I began that I realized not only did I not know enough about South Asian food, I knew barely anything at all. This was a cooking journey that needed to begin with some self-education. Being from Vancouver, I’ve tried South Asian cuisine in fusion form because Vancouver is the First Lady of fusion food cities. However, I don’t recall ever having a traditionally prepared South Asian dish, let alone preparing one myself. I hoped with the available resources I would be able to meet the challenge. So, to Google. This is where I encountered my first set of difficulties. Firstly, no two websites contained the same information on the region, and secondly, there is the inherent difficulty in defining regional cooking at all. A search for “South Asian cuisine” comes back with a lot of results for Southeast Asian, which is a very different thing. Lots of sites will lump together a bunch of cuisines and call it “Asian food” or worse, the wince-inducing “Oriental food.” Getting accurate, nuanced information takes some time and effort, and I realized that people who don’t have the time or inclination to do a deep dive might get misleading information, thanks to search engine efficiency and the urge to amalgamate. At best, it will muddy the waters; at worst, it could breed ignorance and assumption, those tricky twins that sometimes accompany misunderstanding. Adding to the confusion, it seems that each person has a different take on what makes a cuisine authentically regional. At first I found this irritating because I craved one definitive answer, but the more I sat with it, the more I found it interesting. We form ideas around our personal experiences, so one person’s heavy dose of spice is another’s bland fare. When you take into account material circumstances like scarcity versus abundance or a million other factors, you get a million differing definitions. That said, there are non-limiting generalities and guidelines to the cuisine. jaggerylit/issue-3-summer-2014/a-white-girl-makes-bangladeshi-piaju/
Posted on: Mon, 21 Jul 2014 22:12:18 +0000
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