Our Evolving Appreciation of Asian Cuisines

Walk through most grocery stores and you are bound to come across a variety of Asian ingredients, including noodle kits, fish sauce, miso, tofu, fruits and vegetables native to regions in Asia, bottles of soy sauce, and spice blends to make Indian sauces and Thai curries. Restaurants, too, are offering more authentic Asian fare like noodle dishes, dim sum, banh mi sandwiches, and pho. All of this caters to our ever-evolving tastes for new ingredients and new flavors. With the array of Asian ingredients and prepared foods in supermarkets and the number of restaurants—from fine dining establishments to fast casual restaurants—serving Asian cuisine, there clearly is a heightened interest in all things related to Asian cuisine. But it was not always like this. Or was it?

Ken Albala, a history professor and director of the food studies master’s program at the University of the Pacific, San Francisco, Calif., explains that our fascination with Asian cuisines began long ago, so long ago, it can be traced to the rise of Alexander the Great through his military conquests and his control over an area that spread from the Mediterranean to the border of India.

Albala was the opening speaker at the Culinary Institute of America’s 2015 Worlds of Flavor Conference on Asia and the Theater of World Menus: Flavor Discovery, Culture, Innovation, and Style, where he explained how Alexander’s conquests led him to discover a wealth of foods native to South Asia, such as spices like cinnamon and pepper, and citrus fruits. Trade routes sprouted up that connected Rome with China, allowing goods to flow back and forth between the West and the East. “In ancient Rome, as a measure of wealth, one might serve a dish liberally seasoned not only with black pepper, but ginger, vinegar, honey, and a splash of fish sauce,” remarks Albala. He went on to explain that this enjoyment of foods and ingredients from distant lands continued for some time until around the fall of the Roman Empire, which he says greatly limited the availability of Asian ingredients to the West.

Trade and exploration picked up, though, around the year 1000 when spices and other ingredients were transported across vast regions to eventually reach Europe, where wealthy people wasted no time incorporating these “exotic” and expensive ingredients into recipes. “Although European cuisine was more directly influenced by the cooking of Baghdad in the 10th and 11th centuries, the spices were from East Asia, and medieval cooking was undeniably a fusion of Western techniques with Eastern ingredients. Again, that’s an indication of how farflung these trade networks could be,” says Albala, who cites several recipes from cookbooks from the time as sources. These recipes, he explains, show how the cuisine at that time combined sweet, sour, savory, and spicy flavors and featured contrasting colors, textures, and aromas, very much how we characterize Asian cuisines today.

Throughout the 15th and 16th centuries, trade expanded, bringing with it an even deeper appreciation of Asian cuisines by many Europeans. This changed, though, with the development of French cuisine during the 18th century giving rise in the 19th century to French haute cuisine, which involves complementing rather than contrasting flavors and ingredients typical in Asian cuisines.

While the influence of French cuisine on restaurants and cookbooks continued throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, waves of Asian immigrants began arriving in America, bringing their own culinary traditions with them. One of the opportunities available to new immigrants was opening restaurants that served the foods of their homelands, and more importantly, developed recipes that catered to the American palate and offered affordable prices that appealed to a wide range of consumers. In the years that followed, Americans were gradually introduced to more authentic foods and ingredients and regional cuisines from Asia, says Albala, with mass-produced packaged Asian foods available in grocery stores helping to draw attention to Asian cuisine.

This brings us to today at the aforementioned grocery store, where consumers can purchase any number of Asian packaged food products and ingredients, many of which were difficult for the average consumer to find until recently but are now much more common. In fact, Albala points out that Americans are becoming as familiar with kimchi and banh mi sandwiches as they are with pizza and burritos. And this will continue as people delve deeper into the nuances of cuisines from the different regions throughout Asia. As Albala puts it, “The process of discovering either more authentic or even more obscure Asian cooking is never-ending in history.”

Karen Nachay,
Senior Associate Editor
[email protected]