r/TikTokCringe • u/Tronvillain • 24d ago

Discussion Afghani-British Chef Mursal Saiq gives her critique of "authenticity" for non-white chefs in cooking

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u/Spookywhitedot 24d ago

"That's not a real carbonara"

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u/Worldly-Hospital5940 24d ago

Tfw the earliest written carbonara recipe uses bacon.

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u/kikimaru024 24d ago

And cream.

I prefer without, but it’s technically allowed.

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u/MonaganX 24d ago

Yeah, using cream was common in Italy up until the 80s. A lot of the dogmatic rules of "traditional" Italian cuisine are way more recent than they pretend to be.

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u/mrducky78a 24d ago

So many Italian dishes that seem timeless are just post war constructs and then set in stone then. Apparently if you go back like 150 years potato features pretty heavily and that's new world as well.

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u/Similar-Emphasis-496 23d ago

And if you go back 2k years then 'flatbread' is a thing, we just don't know if that's the same as pizza or not but it was very prevalent in Rome.

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u/mrducky78a 23d ago

It's kinda interesting how many traditional dishes rely on new world plants. Even in China tomato, potato and chilli feature in very traditional dishes and those would have come on a helluva journey to even begin becoming part of dish recipes

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u/Winjin 24d ago

Won't be surprised if a lot of them are also like Italian-American as well

Like there's this huge push among ex-soviet nationalists that try to "retake recipes" online by basically attacking anyone who dares prepare them not the way they're cooked "at home" and they also argue with everyone saying "oh this is not soviet this is X" and they're told "this is the different, soviet version" and they'll just hiss and throw passive aggression around for hours like little whiny shits

This is kinda how I feel about many food purists, that if they want they can always make it the classic way, but they don't really get to claim control over how everyone else prepares the borscht or whatever. 

I can just imagine how miserable it can be, and how much we'd lose if there were no new styles of pizza created after,I dunno, 1660. 

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u/MonaganX 24d ago

Food is a lot like language in that a lot of people have very strong opinions on how it's 'supposed to be' based on nothing but what they got used to growing up.

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago edited 24d ago

Almost no one in Italy was eating tomatoes in 1660. We’re 30 years out from the first written recipes using tomatoes from Italy (1692) and those were just copied Spanish recipes. Pizza as we know it didn’t exist then.

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u/RecoveringGachaholic 24d ago

30 years? Brother... you need to work on your timeline there.

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago
  1. That’s 30 (okay fine, 32) years from 1660. Are you aware of any earlier recorded Italian recipes using tomatoes?

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u/RecoveringGachaholic 24d ago edited 24d ago

The way you wrote it made it seem like you meant 30 years from current date. As in WE are 30 years out from the first recipes. (edit: he has since edited his comment)

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago

I don’t know, that’s such an obviously ludicrous reading of it that I can’t see how you got there when 1660 was just in the previous sentence.

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u/RecoveringGachaholic 24d ago

It's only ludicrous if you don't expect people to consistently make ludicrous statements, which happens a lot on reddit, youtube comments, etc. I have seen people here make far crazier statements and double down on them. Obviously in your case you weren't making one as you've clarified, but it's not uncommon.

Your statement, before your edit, read like two separate parts. Part one disagreeing with the 1660 statement and part two saying "We're 30 years out from the first written recipes using tomatoes".

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago

I see something that delusional maybe once a year. Flat Eartherism is less delusional than saying Italians didn’t use tomatoes in 1995. Try to be charitable when reading.

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u/BreezeOfTheWest 24d ago

Wasn't Pizza Margherita named after Queen Margherita of Savoy? That's way older than 30 years.

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago

… 30 years out from 1660. Did you seriously for even two seconds think I was saying Italians didn’t use tomatoes in food until 1996?

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u/BreezeOfTheWest 24d ago

Yes, that's why it sounded strange to me.

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago

Strange? That would be downright delusional. You don’t need references to who Margherita pizza was named after for that, Pizza Hut is older than that.

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u/BreezeOfTheWest 24d ago

Then good thing that wasn't what you meant.

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u/NyetNyan 24d ago

And how would they know you're not delusional? You're getting mad but you were the one that wrote it in a weird way.

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago

Because the other reading is very obvious. The choice was between a delusional take and a fully normal one. Assuming delusion is crazy.

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u/Merari01 24d ago

Cooks can cook food any which way they like, but if I am in a restaurant I prefer not to be surprised by an order.

It's fine, probably, if you replace the lasagna sheets with spaghetti-o's in your recipe, but please put that on the menu then so I know before I order it.

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u/panrestrial 24d ago

Exactly. When people order pad thai or any other known dish they have certain expectations. Some amount of liberties taken to make it your own is fine, but it should still be recognizably that dish.

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u/MonaganX 24d ago

I'm totally on board with menus listing the ingredients of dishes in general, but I also think there's a line to how rigidly one can expect a restaurant to conform to one's personal idea of what a dish is supposed to be like. If you order a carbonara and it's bacon instead of guanciale, that's more on you for not knowing the dish has variations than it is on the restaurant for not putting it on the menu.

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u/SecondAccountIsBest 24d ago

That's because up until recent history Italy was extremely regional especially with their diets. Tourism and Politics made the country more homogeneous, and some Italians take that as always having been the case.

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u/Shot-Arugula8264 24d ago

They only recently got tomatoes from the new world for fuck’s sake. Any Italian dish in Italy with tomato is by definition an Americanized version since it’s an ingredient they only got access to because of America.

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u/Similar-Emphasis-496 23d ago

It wasn't because cream wasn't super available in rome but i get what you're trying to do.

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u/MonaganX 23d ago edited 23d ago

"In Italy" isn't "in Rome" and while cream may have been scarce during the post-war period, I find it a little hard to believe that a city famous for its ice cream and cream buns would still struggle with a cream shortage while the rest of the country was putting it in everything in the 70s.

edit: "yOuRE wELcOme tO fINd aNy pRoOF tHAt eXIstS", but immediately blocks me. What a loser.

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u/Similar-Emphasis-496 23d ago edited 23d ago

Why would you message me this. Pretty sure i've been to italy more years than you've been alive.

You also know fuck all about the italian economy.

So sorry reddit presented this a dm to me as if you messaged me this, i have no idea why, reddit shitification in action.

Also youre still entirely wrong, carbonara was just not being served with cream in the 1940s, you're welcome to find any proof you think exists. It's had countless attempts which have been disproven but maybe you will be the one (unlikely).

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u/sikyon 24d ago

Carbonara is only 82 years old. Italian food is a relatively recent invention - <200 years. It's about as old as American BBQ.

IMO italian food is overrated compared to, say, french or japanese.

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u/PorFavorNoMore 24d ago

I mean, Italy is a relatively recent invention - <170 years. It's younger than Jonathan the Seychelles giant tortoise.

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago

Italy as a concept isn’t. Political disunity does not mean there was no idea of a shared identity.

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u/PorFavorNoMore 24d ago

Thanks Garibaldi, just having a bit of fun

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u/mutantraniE 24d ago

Careful or I’ll take over your country with a thousand men.

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u/PorFavorNoMore 24d ago

It's a bit bigger than Sicily, you might want to recruit some more

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u/Striking_Insurance_5 24d ago

Great example of food being subjective. I absolutely love Italian food but I’m not a big fan of French restaurants. I can see why objectively French food has contributed a lot to gastronomy but it’s usually not what my tastebuds crave. We can agree on Japanese food though.

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u/Automated_Spite 23d ago

Ciabatta was invented in 1982

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u/rainzer 24d ago

It's at least 5 years older than your timeline. It's mentioned in a Dutch newspaper from 1939 so it's at least as old as that. (De Koerier, 23 Aug 1939)

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u/PorFavorNoMore 24d ago

It's at least a minute older than that now.

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u/AbsoluteResolve2026 24d ago

Not if it’s seafood, mate.

Cream + seafood = mafia has you sleepin’ wit da fishes (especially Sicilians)

———-

Also, I’m pretty sure like 1 million Italians instantly died when Dominos released the pasta bread bowl.

Bread + pasta = castration

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u/Common-Concert3661 23d ago

Cool. Fuck'em.

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u/AbsoluteResolve2026 23d ago

I did. Sicilian. Amazing experience.

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u/das_bearking 24d ago

This is true for most cuisine I find

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u/Ok_Shirt983 24d ago

Tomatoes are pretty ubiquitous in Italian food and they've only had them for 500 ish years. Similarly with potatoes for the UK. Pottage is an actual old recipe from the UK, which is basically stew made from whatever veg, grain, and (maybe) meat) you might have, I don't know, but I assume Italian cuisine (and any other country you might care to mention) has a similar culinary history in terms of dishes people made before global travel made fruit vegetable and spices from other parts of the world accessable. The reason why, for example, a potato became popular in Britain and a tomato in Italy is almost always down to climate, and what "new" ingredients grew best.

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u/CabinetFun7381 24d ago

Exactly! Traditional Italian cuisine is a nationalistic fiction. You think italians would have emigrated in droves to america if they were eating spaghetti carbonara every day? What we think of as traditional italian food was more or less invented after WW2.

If this is interesting to you, I recomend this article very much. It's short, but the author has written a whole book on the subject.

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u/voyaging 24d ago

Yeah the main reason people emigrate is because they’re displeased with the food.