Im living in Germany. We say “Wiener Würstchen” to some sausages. Wien = Vienna In Vienna/Austria they say “Frankfurter” to the same sausages. Frankfurt is a City in Germany.
Belgium and Northern France have Filet Américain (American Filet). So an American dish right? Well no, it’s raw ground beef, basically the last thing most Americans will ever willingly eat. Here it’s basically the default sandwich topping.
It’s crazy to me that they felt the need to include safety instructions lol. Handmade Filet Américain for sure I’d eat same-day or at most next day, but the store-bought variety uses preservatives and can last for 3 days in the fridge no problem.
Americans be acting like beef is like fugu or something, but if fresh raw beef gives you E. Coli you need to be suing people! My understanding is this pathological phobia of raw meat goes back to the mid-20th century where long supply chains and untrustworthy cold chains led to the advice that all meat had to be done well, but that’s outdated advice that would not develop nowadays. Red meat just can’t go bad that fast at 4°C, so if the supplier is trusrworthy there’s no issue.
Brits have kind of the same thing with electrical plugs in bathrooms, they’re scared to death of them and you can’t convince them it’s safe and that the rest of the world does it just fine. Interesting how there are these localized “fear islands” around certain topics that people take for granted.
As far as I understand it, there is actually a feedback loop as well: the beef is treated with chemicals that kill all bacteria, even the neutral ones, leaving an otherwise open breeding ground for unsafe ones to thrive.
I mean, they’re close enough to French. As a Belgian, it pains me to admit that they probably originated in Paris anyway, though we perfected the recipe (and they’re called French fries in American English for a different reason).
I don’t like to get entangled with some food debate but I thought the common knowledge was that tikka masala is from Punjab. The restaurant owner who claimed to have ‘invented’ tikka masala using canned soup confessed they had spun up a story to entertain journalists.
Could entirely be. I just remember seeing the UK as a country of origin when looking for a slow cooking Tikka masala recipe and being disgusted with myself for enjoying English cuisine. Like there was no warning, no beans involved or anything.
I don’t remember, I just remembered reading that both of those were made by some Chinese immigrant that started a “Chinese food” shop in San Francisco, some time in the 1930s or so. Seemed believable since there were a lot of Chinese immigrants in California as early as the 1850s cause of the railroad
Fortune cookies were originally Japanese, but when the Japanese were sent to the internment camps, the Chinese opportunistically began serving them in their restaurants on the West Coast
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