Arri London muttered....


>
> But that's not all that difficult is it? The original versions of
> those recipes are readily available in the home countries for
> comparison. Certainly I can compare American German recipes to the
> originals; we have several German-language cookbooks with classic
> regional recipes and we also get German magazines to see current
> cuisine. Same thing for French and Dutch cooking in our house.
> Fortunately I also have a couple of English language cookbooks from
> other countries which don't modify the recipes in the translation. I
> did check with natives from those countries. Of course without those
> materials I wouldn't have a clue outside my own cultures.
>

In my case I was referring to immigrants who were illiterate or barely
literate and unlikely to have learned from or carried coookbooks. They had
presumably lived with diets limited by modern standards (still accurate
when describing many of the recent immigrants from Mexico living across the
US) and arrived attempting to survive on fare lacking in much variety due
to previous expereience, availability or price. Many dishes from "home"
seem to have been altered to fit new circumstances, and the recipes from
some of the ethnic enclaves (church and lodge cookbooks) around here are
quaint meldings of traditions.

.....Then there's the availability of cheap sugar which seems to have found
its way into every local "Czech" dish....

TMO

TMO