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National Dish

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National Dish

Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home

de Anya von Bremzen

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Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, The Guardian, and BBC's The Food Programme
“Anya von Bremzen, already a legend of food writing and a storytelling inspiration to me, has done her best work yet. National Dish is a must-read for all those who believe in building longer tables where food is what bring us all together.” —José Andrés
“If you’ve ever contemplated the origins and iconography of classic foods, then National Dish is the sensory-driven, historical deep dive for you . . . [an] evocative, gorgeously layered exercise in place-making and cultural exploration, nuanced and rich as any of the dishes captured within.” —Boston Globe
In this engrossing and timely journey to the crossroads of food and identity, award-winning writer Anya von Bremzen explores six of the world’s most fascinating and iconic culinary cultures—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey—brilliantly weaving cuisine, history, and politics into a work of scintillating connoisseurship and charm
We all have an idea in our heads about what French food is—or Italian, or Japanese, or Mexican, or . . . But where did those ideas come from? Who decides what makes a national food canon? Anya von Bremzen has won three James Beard Awards and written several definitive cookbooks, as well as her internationally acclaimed memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. In National Dish, she investigates the truth behind the eternal cliché—“we are what we eat”—traveling to six storied food capitals, going high and low, from world-famous chefs to culinary scholars to strangers in bars, in search of how cuisine became connected to place and identity.
A unique and magical cook’s tour of the world, National Dish brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country.

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From the cover INTRODUCTION

Paris: Pot on the Fire

On a gray fall morning in the days sometime before the pandemic, my partner Barry and I arrived in Paris, where I planned to make a pot-au-feu recipe from a nineteenth-century French cookbook. It was for a book project of my own, one that had begun to bubble and form in my mind, about national food cultures told through their symbolic dishes and meals, which I would cook, eat, and investigate in different parts of the world.

Dumping our luggage in our apartment swap in the multicultural 13th arrondissement, we immediately rushed across the wide Avenue d'Italie-to begin sabotaging French national food culture by ingesting a frenzy of calories. Non-Gallic calories.

At a petite dive called Mekong, a stupendous curried chicken banh mi was prepared with something like love by a tired Vietnamese woman who sighed that Saigon was très belle, mais Paris? Eh bien, un peau triste . . . At a halal Maghrebi boucherie there was mahjouba, a flaky Algerian crepe aromatic with a filling of stewed tomatoes and peppers. And a mustached butcher being tormented by a middle-aged Parisienne, prim and imperious. After she departed with her single veal escalope, he exhaled with a whistle and made a "crazy" sign with his finger.

Which pretty much summed up how I'd always felt about Paris.

Ever since my first visit back in the 1970s, as a sullen teenage refugee from the USSR newly settled in Philadelphia, my relationship with the City of Light had always been anxious and fraught. Other people might swoon over the bistros, rhapsodize about first encounters with platters of oysters and crocks of terrine. Me, I saw nothing but despotic prix fixe menus, withering classism, and Haussmann's relentless beige facades-assembly-line Stalinism epauletted with window geraniums.

But right now, onward, for pink mochi balls at a Korean épicerie on the main Asian artery, Avenue de Choisy, after which I frantically stuffed our shopping bag with frozen Cambodian dumplings and three huge Chinese moon cakes at the giant Asian supermarket, Tang Frères. Just nearby, at a fluorescent-lit Taiwanese bubble tea parlor, was where I discovered the Vietnamese summer roll-sushi mashup. Behold the sushiburrito.

It was the happiest Paris arrival I'd ever had. The 13th arrondissement comforted me right back to where I'd just left, my buoyant polyglot New York neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens. The postcolonial profusion of lemongrass, fish sauce, and harissa helped soften my Francophobic unease.

Sending Barry off to settle into our apartment swap-whose tiny cramped kitchen, by some astounding kismet, featured a large poster of Frederick Wiseman’s documentary In Jackson Heights-I carried my purchases to our petite neighborhood park. South Asian and North African kids were kicking a soccer ball by the hibiscus bushes. On a bench, a Koranic old man with a wispy beard and a skullcap put his hand to his heart to greet me: “As-salaam alaikum!”

With this blessing and a test bite of moon cake (funky salted egg filling), I pondered that which had brought me to Paris-a place unbeloved by me, but historically crucial to the concept of a national food culture. My journey could hardly start anywhere else.

National cuisines, one food studies scholar observes, suffer from “problematic obviousness.” The same could be said for the very idea of “national.” Most of us take a view of nations as organic communities that have shared blood ties, race, language, culture, and diet since time immemorial. Among social scientists,...

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Starred review from May 1, 2023
“Never have we been more cosmopolitan about what we eat—and yet never more essentialist,” declares James Beard Award–winning food writer von Bremzen (Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking) in this revealing and richly detailed exploration of six national cuisines. The culinary tour begins in France, which became the site of the “first explicitly national discourse about food” as its cuisine was deemed a “uniquely French cultural product.” However, von Bremzen points out, “Gallic culinary exceptionalism has taken a terrific beating” over the last few decades, thanks to a “cascade of crises” including the “global fast-food invasion.” In Naples, she uncovers pizza’s 18th-century roots as a “dirt-cheap, palatable street food,” and discovers that the origin story of the city’s popularly touted pizza Margherita, which involves a charismatic queen of the same name who favored the “patriotic tricolore pie,” may be a nationalist fiction. Von Bremzen, who emigrated from the U.S.S.R. in the 1970s, concludes with a moving epilogue about borscht—a dish with Ukrainian roots that Russia has claimed as its own—that, in light of the war in Ukraine, vividly illustrates how food “carries the emotional charge of a flag and an anthem” and often belies a more complicated story than meets the eye. Fans of food and travel writing will want to sink their teeth into this.
In a rich tone, Kathleen Gati gives this polyglot audiobook its due. She narrates in French, Italian, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish, and her pace is spot-on. Most importantly, Gati captures the author's voice and personality. Von Bremzen is a food and travel writer who spends weeks in a different locale and shares her distinct opinions on dishes ranging from Neapolitan pizza to ramen and pot au feu. But it is the emotionally charged epilogue that elevates this work. Raised in Russia, she brings up borsch (ending it with a "t" is a Yiddishism) and weighs in on the longtime argument over whether the classic beet soup is Ukrainian or Russian. She takes the Ukrainian side and ends the text with a passionate pro-Ukraine plea. A.D.M. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

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