Sri Racha is a town in Thailand, Sriracha sauce is named after that town and is ostensibly an attempt to replicate the sauce that originated from there - apparently it misses the mark a bit in terms of authenticity, but obviously it is still pretty great.
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I don't think that's accurate
David Tran is not from Sri Racha or Thailand, he's a Chinese-Vietnamese refugee/immigrant to America Sri Racha wasn't his first hot sauce just the most successful. He was trying to make hot sauces especially aimed at local asian restaurants not to perfectly replicate an authentic Thai recipe he was inspired by. It doesn't miss the mark because it wasn't aiming for it
https://www.bangkokpost.com/print/640796/
> “I considered Sriracha a Thai sauce when I made my version,” Mr Tran explained in an email. “There were already Srirachas in the market when I started making my style. I took the original Sriracha and made it enjoyable to my taste.”
The popular Huy Fong Foods product (green cap, roster on bottle) uses red jalapenos as it's primary pepper.
Of course jalapenos are grown in Thailand today, but I'd wager the original sauce used a different, more local pepper.
> Of course jalapenos are grown in Thailand today, but I'd wager the original sauce used a different, more local pepper.
The entire genus of capsicums are new world plants, and would have been unknown prior to the Columbian exchange. The family includes tomatoes, potatoes and bell peppers, which are all native to South America. There is no "local" pepper in Thailand- all of it was imported.
edit: there's black pepper and long pepper, but that's... not the same thing.
There's still cultivars that have been grown for hundreds of years over there, so I would consider them 'local', just not native.
On a side note, there's a bunch of articles claiming peppers have been used in East Asia before the Columbian exchange. Like this one[1] for example. These usually have a bit of a nationalist bend since the implication is that the local chili heavy cuisine has been unchanged for millennia. It's an interesting thought experiment at least.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235261811...!
From the article:
> The recent research states that gochu appeared on the earth billions of years ago [4], and might have been transferred by the birds that ate them
That seems like a rather incredible claim, and I imagine it’s probably untrue.
Yeah, and almost certainly not true.
> These usually have a bit of a nationalist bend since the implication is that the local chili heavy cuisine has been unchanged for millennia.
Why do we have the need to claim that our cultures have been unchanged for millenia? Almost none have, human culture is remarkably adaptive and changing, and every time two cultures meet they change each other, adopt each others food and music etc -- and why wouldn't they?
These days almost all humans/cultures are insisting that their "authentic" culture is unchanged for millenia though. I don't know if it's always been that way (see what I did there haha). I think it's actually a very right-wing sort of thing, harkening back to an imaginary "authentic" past when things were, uh, great.
It's effecting our very understanding of culture, we all think that "real" culture is unchanging forever -- which is not how humans work at all! Or that in some distant past, all culture existed entirely silo'd without interacting or influencing each other, merging with each other and splitting off from each other -- also not how hardly any actually existing human populations have existed through time!
My favorite is when people claim their culture has never changed out of one side of their mouth, and then whine about the new music their kids listen to out of the other.
If you can't consider Chillies local for Asian food then we can't consider tomatoes authentic Italian food either, but then at that point what exactly are you even talking about?
Tomatoes are associated with Italy, but they are not a traditional Italian ingredient. The plant was introduced from Americas in mid-1500's, and became a staple only during the 1700's.
0: https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/noodles/2018/07/03/history-of...
What is your cutoff in terms of time for what is traditional or not?
I would wager that 300+ years is more than enough for any custom to be qualified as traditional.
According to most Europeans I talk to, the cutoff is whatever makes European culture authentic, and American culture shallow. My favorite conversation was between myself, an Austrian, my best friend from China, and a friend from Tyre:
> Austrian: America doesn’t have a culture — it’s only really been around for a few hundred years: my family has chairs older than that! We date back to the 1100s!
> (Best friend from China): my village’s local temple (the core) was more than 500 years old in the 1100s; your culture is still getting started!
> (Friend from Tyre): my house is in the new part of the city built by Alexander in 330 … BC. The old city was established further back in the past from the new city, than the new city is from now. Until your people have lived in a place for at least 2000 years, how can you really say you “own” it?
Then we got a beer & watched “Dancing With the Stars”.
The interesting thing about China now is that they have been actively destroying their remnants of ancient culture to try to speed economic development.
As a consequence their culture is converging somewhat towards the cultural revolution which is only about 70 years old. So they are a young political culture in that regards, and politics dominates due to its military force.
Something that would have been known as age-old by the time the enlightenment started to set in. So that's what, 1300's as the cutoff? 300 years is barely enough to establish a town pub.
For the record, I'm a Finn. By my own definition, there are maybe only three traditional Finnish foods that have survived that long. Carelian stew, särä, and maybe robber's roast (clay-pit mutton).
Whereas something like wine leaf rolls from Greece, Turkey and Lebanon - now those can be properly traditional.
Many other things that I consider integral parts of Italian culture are not much older.
How old does something have to be in order to be "tradition"?
The idea that before some certain point a culture was "frozen" is usually ahistorical. Certainly true for cultures of the Italian penninsula, on the Mediteranean providing easy access to wide swaths of land and peoples, part of a former empire that spanned continents.
How old does something have to be in order to be "tradition"?
Easy: as soon as the people who adopted it into the current form are dead and the adoption forgotten.
My grandmother's cherry island cake was almost certainly copied off the back of a package sometime in the 1920s or 30s; maybe it's an adaptation of a German or Hungarian recipe. Now it's a tradition in my family.
That's a bit ridiculous. 300 years is not old enough to be considered “traditional“?
I actually don't remember eating that many tomatoes last time I was in Italy. I did go to the North, which has a bit more butter eater influence, but even in Rome there weren't that many tomatoes. Olives, cheeses, cured meats abound, but not tomatoes.
I live in South America and buy premium Italian tomatoes for my pizza sauce because they’re that good.
There is a big difference between imported 300 years ago and imported 30 years ago. Especially for capsicums which can be adopted in nearly every climate (for some only indoors, but still). Many countries and regions have their own special peppers and it became an integral part of the culture (the same for potatoes, tomatoes etc).
As to the history of chilli in Asia, there is a very good book The Chile Pepper in China - A Cultural Biography, worth reading http://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-chile-pepper-in-china/97802...
In Thai, chilli peppers are called "phrik" and black pepper is "phrik Thai"[1] so even the common name acknowledges that the former is not indigenous.
[1] at least I think so, my Thai is quite bad.
You're correct.
Funnily enough, black pepper is called Thai pepper in Thai, it being the native kind of pepper (พริกไทย).
I remember watching some video few years ago about how due to some reason, they had to change the peppers or the soil it was grown on or something (I apologize if this is my faulty memory, I could be totally wrong). Are the red jalapeños which Huy Fong Foods brand uses any different from the thai version in terms of taste?
That was my understanding too, maybe I saw the same source. Huy Fong was very particular about the source of their peppers, they were constrained for a while by not being able to get enough of the ones that met their standard.
Is it really that specific?
We have many "<town/village> <foodname>" here, and basiclly every grandma in that town/village, has a slighty different recipe, with a slightly different "secret ingredient" or even with major changes (think chilli vs texas chilli)
Even though the origin of Sri Racha sauce is debated (even in Thailand), it was the recipe used by a small shop named "Sriraja Panich" that became known as the Sri Racha sauce in Thailand. The popularity of Sriraja Panich's recipe inspired other brands in Thailand to make a sauce with similar ingredients and taste. Only after then it became known as a type of a sauce.
Today, even though every sauce brand in Thailand has started producing a Sri Racha-type sauce, many Thais still only considered Sriraja Panich's sauce to be the authentic one.