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One Cuisine to eat for the rest of your life

Poll Results: Pick one Cuisine to eat for the rest of your life

 
  • 11% (6)
    American
  • 11% (6)
    Chinese
  • 3% (2)
    Eastern European (Polish, Hungarian, Russian etc)
  • 13% (7)
    French
  • 3% (2)
    Indian
  • 19% (10)
    Italian
  • 0% (0)
    Japanese
  • 13% (7)
    Middle Eastern (Greek/Turkey/Arab... Yes, very broad)
  • 13% (7)
    Thai
  • 7% (4)
    Other
51 Total Votes  
post #1 of 33
1/4/08 at 11:48am
Thread Starter 
I've asked this question with good effect of some of my friends. I've also asked it for one restaurant to eat in for the rest of your life and found some sleeper restaurants that are very good.

Anyway, the poll option only gives me 10 types to list so I may not have picked your favorite. I tried to pick major gustatory groups but it's not possible to be complete or plsease everyone with my groupings. Just reply with your favorite in the thread if that's the case.

I'd pick Chinese. A wide range of flavors, textures and food stuffs. Good soups too. Plenty of celebratory holiday fare as well.

Phil
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post #2 of 33
1/4/08 at 12:30pm
American for me....there's Californian heavy in veg and fruits, Pacific NW with shrooms and seafood, Tex Mex, BBQ, Southern in all her glory, Midwest plain eatin', Cajun, Creole, PENN Dutch, NY with it's melting pot....:).....

Feels almost like cheating the quiz by saying USA
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post #3 of 33
1/4/08 at 12:40pm
id have to go with thai food.. really id be content with any asian style cooking but i enjoy spicy food and thai for me reigns supreme... cleans out the colon lol..
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post #4 of 33
1/4/08 at 12:40pm
I don't know if I could really live happily with just one.

And what, exactly, is "American" cuisine?, other than an amalgum of all the listed ones plus others.

In the end, I went with Mid-Eastern. But mentally I include the whole Eastern Meditaranian basin when I say that. With North Africa creeping in as well.
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post #5 of 33
1/4/08 at 1:40pm
Hands down I would choose Middle Eastern......no question about it imo.
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post #6 of 33
1/4/08 at 1:54pm
Thread Starter 
Yes, where to draw boundaries is certainly an issue. Tex Mex and New York for example probably include some dishes I would rule out of American Cuisine to Shroom's consternation.

If one withdrew the greek influences from Italian food and the greek and italian influences from French what would be left? Is that fair to french cuisine which is still different from its influencing sources. So very difficult to draw and quantify boundaries for the question.

And I wouldn't want to limit myself to just one either.

But I think the topic starts some interesting conversations.
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post #7 of 33
1/4/08 at 3:01pm
I'm happy to see my vote for Thai is doing well in the poll and i'm not surprised. Second choice would be middle eastern by the way. Like you KY I'm including Turkish and north African there too
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post #8 of 33
1/4/08 at 4:04pm
It's really tough, but I voted for Italian. There are so many regional differences and so much emphasis on fresh, local foods. And then there's all that wonderful wine!:crazy:
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post #9 of 33
1/4/08 at 5:27pm
I love every cuisine, but I'd really miss the one I grew up with. Chinese.
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post #10 of 33
1/4/08 at 6:16pm
I voted other. Kuan cuisine, a mix of midwestern sensibility, French based stocks and sauces, Asian ingredients and techniques, and Indian spices.
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post #11 of 33
1/4/08 at 8:22pm
Way to go, Kuan! If I could afford a personal chef, I'd give you a call. :smoking:

My lifelong "cuisine" would be... Missouri country ham. :roll:

Mike
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post #12 of 33
1/5/08 at 12:51am
Indian for me. A huge variety between all the regions. A common mis-conception is people tend to think all Indian food is hot but they couldn't be further from the truth.
Here in the UK it has almost become our national cuisine but whenever i'm in the US I have the devils own job trying to get a good curry fix!:(
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post #13 of 33
1/5/08 at 5:49am
I have to vote "Other" as my favorite type of cuisine is kind of hard to describe. The closest would be "high-end flexitarian".

There's a restaurant that used to exist in my home town named Pyewacket that had a predominantly vegetarian menu with a few killer non-veg dishes thrown in. Everything was great! salads, hot veggies in pita, lasagne, grilled fish, everything. The culinary style drew from all nations but was not a mish-mash of everything-it all fit together quite well.

Pyewacket no longer exists, but I make many of the dishes from there at home as my husband used to be a cook there. We toy with the idea of opening a resto in the same style here in NY, but I think I'm just too old to go back to the food service biz.:look:
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post #14 of 33
1/5/08 at 6:31am
I would vote for american, simply because being a melting pot, you can get anything, it;s all been incorporated, so it's kind of cheating to include it in a list of cuisines to eat for the rest of your life to the exclusion of all others. Of course i would choose it - i could eat anything. .

After american, i would have to choose italian. It's the simplest, with good raw materials, healthy, lots of vegetables, starches of various kinds, etc. It's what i cook mainly at home. So i;d have to say italian, but that is with the note that i am thoroughly sick of it. (I would be sick of any cuisine i had to eat exclusively, mind you, and it took a good 20 years to get sick of it, so that;s not bad).
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post #15 of 33
1/5/08 at 6:40am
no consternation.....wasn't defined so figured it would be up to the posters to define whichever country/region's food they'd consume for all time....so of course the broadest explaination seemed appropriate. :smoking:
Global cuisine, we discussed through the years, there's an old thread up now on local cuisine that's pretty diverse......
as Kuan wrote, techniques~ingredients~including seasonings~.....morphing food....look at recent developments in the UK, for years their food was considered stodgy at best, certainly bland & heavy (sorry UKians....) that perception has changed dramatically within the past 5 years....and would Indian be considered part and parcel of UK's cuisine?
Look at Spains awakening to the world....molecular cooking is all over the world so what would that be considered.....? Spainish, or a cuisine technique unto it's own.?
Creole...wow, well 7 countries in several continents melded into one cuisine....
so is it North American?

Phil, can you pull up old past threads that have decent logic in defining a cuisine?

this would be a wonderful essay question for students (especially culinary but any age would benefit), just so open to different paths of rationalization.
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post #16 of 33
1/5/08 at 9:17am
I had to pick "other" There wasn't a Hamburger/French Pastry option. LOL:cool:

Mike
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post #17 of 33
1/5/08 at 10:11am
Chinese for me, so good, flavors and colorfull dishes
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post #18 of 33
1/6/08 at 12:53am
I went with Indian, but if Barbecue had been listed the choice would have been much tougher.

Guess I'll have to see how brisket & pork butt do in a tandoor (or is that even possible? are tandoors high-heat only?)
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post #19 of 33
1/6/08 at 6:28am
I had to pick 'other'. A lot of American food is based on British dishes - think pies, think roasts, think wonderful puddings.
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post #20 of 33
1/6/08 at 7:51pm
Thread Starter 
I'm a bit surprised about who has picked French. I was figuring Cape Chef would certainly pick French but he hasn't voted. Nicko picked French and I was picking him for the Middle East. But I'm surprised in general how much Middle Eastern has been picked. Not that I can argue with that as it's great food.

I'd guess that the most frequently discussed cuisine here at CF is Italian followed by aspects of French (sauces especially). Combined, they don't even have as many votes as Middle Eastern alone. But I don't really read the pro forums so that might have a different skew.
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post #21 of 33
1/6/08 at 10:31pm
If I picked American, would I have to spend the rest of my life eating at KFC, Sizzler and Appleby's ? If I did a standing rib roast, what difference would it make if I did a Yorkshire pudding or not, and what if I topped it with Bearnaise? What is the real, fundamental difference between won-tons and ravioli, or Bechemal and country gravy?

Certainly food for thought.

mjb.

ps: I forgot to mention I picked Eastern European, so I can live out the rest of my life on bratwurst and sauerkraut!
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post #22 of 33
1/7/08 at 6:10am
Thread Starter 
Go Siegfrieds! I suppose you're a frequent diner there?
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post #23 of 33
1/7/08 at 6:45am
Phil, regarding your analysis, I'd say you are correct---Italian and French.

My guess would be that we still think in terms of France and the culinary arts as being synonyms. And Italian is the ethinic push everywhere you turn around, so people discuss, and cook, it too.

But, when push comes to shove, most of us are eclectic in our food preferences. So American and Mid-Eastern provide the broadest range of selection.

If you're gonna lock yourself in, you want the widest number of choices, dontchathink? And those two provide it.
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post #24 of 33
1/7/08 at 9:46am
I was just thinking the other day that I love Asian cooking so much I could eat it ALL the time. But now that you put it to a question I think I would have so say "American". There may be the same wide variety of flavors, textures, et al in many other cuisines but for my taste buds I think that maybe not "American" per se, but the cooking of the United States. Until you figure out how to make Old Bay in another culture it's got to be North America for me.
But thank god I don't have to choose! :bounce:
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post #25 of 33
1/8/08 at 5:54am
picked up, "The Complete Middle East Cookbook" at the library yesterday.....the countries include: Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Yemen, Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Armenia, Turkey, Cyprus, Greece.

what a line up.... it's interesting flipping through the countries to see the differences/similarities.

so a Mediterranean Diet would be:Spain, Southern France, Italian, ????

good thread, thank you for stimulating thought provoking questions.
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post #26 of 33
1/8/08 at 6:37am
Thread Starter 
You could probably cross over to Morocco too for Meditteranean?

Of course the book Street Food of the Mediterranean includes Greece, Turkey, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Egypt as well as Italy and Spain.
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post #27 of 33
1/8/08 at 8:56am
"shroom, would that be Tess Mallos' book? I've had it for some time; since it was new, in fact. A great book---even if many of the pages are dogeared and stained. :lips:

Defining "Mediterranian" get a bit nebulous. Generally speaking, when people say "Mediterranian" they mean the northern tier. That would include the Iberian peninsula, France, Italy, and Greece. Although a lot of people seem to forget that Spain and Portugal are part of that grouping. And, to be fair, a lot of Iberian food does not relate to the Franco/Italian/Greco model.

People with a penchant for North African and Mid-Eastern food have always sort of resented that. The rest of the Meditarranian rim has great cuisine. Plus it greatly influenced those countries on the northern shore, as a result of the Muslim and Turkish invasions and occupations.

Perhaps the ultimate fusion of the northern and southern rims is the cuisine of Malta and its satilite islands. But even Sicilian food has as much Turkish influence as Italian.

I reckon if the survey had merely listed "Mediterannian Rim" as a choice, it would have won hands down.
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post #28 of 33
1/8/08 at 2:24pm
yes, Tess Mallo's the author...and yes if Mediterranean Rim was a response I would have gravitated to that
though miss thai, vietnamese, japanese and chinese
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post #29 of 33
1/8/08 at 2:31pm
Traditional tandoors are all high heat for sure. But then who says you can't bend the rules a bit?
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post #30 of 33
1/27/08 at 9:42pm
If I were on an island (and I was stuck on that island forever) that only had one restaurant then I hope that it would be Mexican restaurant.
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