“Who owns borsch?” asks the Russian-American food writer Anya von Bremzen in this dazzlingly intelligent examination of how foods become national symbols. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, borsch is “no longer just soup”, writes von Bremzen in National Dish, “but a solidarity symbol” for Ukrainians against Vladimir Putin’s regime.
A few months into the war, Unesco declared that Ukrainian borsch was “an intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding”. Never mind the fact that, as von Bremzen’s mother (who was born in Odesa) comments: “There are many types of borsch . . . Russian, Polish, Lithuanian, Moldovan . . . and yes, yes, Ukrainian.”
National food, von Bremzen shows, is never a simple question of geography or history. Food, she writes, carries the “emotional charge of a flag or an anthem”. Many national foods are invented to serve political purposes. Consider pad Thai, which was decreed the national street food of Thailand by the dictator Plaek Phibunsongkhram in the 1940s even though this noodle dish was essentially Chinese noodles with added tamarind and palm sugar. Or think (if you can bear to) of the eintopf, the one-pot dish promoted by Hitler as a folksy symbol of a frugal and united Germany.
Some of the stories behind national foods are simply fake. Take Italian pizza. The standard account (which I’d always believed) is that Margherita pizza was invented in 1889 in a particular pizzeria in Naples in honour of Queen Margherita who was visiting the city. Tomato, mozzarella and basil formed the patriotic colours of the flag of the newly unified kingdom of Italy.
The only problem with this story is that tricolour red, white and green pizzas had been eaten in Naples for decades before the queen visited. As von Bremzen comments, the origin story of Margherita pizza is “fakelore” not folklore. It was dreamt up by a clever Neapolitan pizzeria owner in the 1930s who wanted to drum up business.
The puzzle of national foods is why we still care about them so deeply in an age where you can find hamburgers, sushi and cappuccinos in every city of the world. Von Bremzen, author of a series of books on cooking, goes to Tokyo in search of ramen and rice, only to find that in the neighbourhood where she and her partner Barry are staying, “you couldn’t walk without inhaling the scent of charred dough and tomato from yet another wood-burning Neapolitan-style pizzeria”.
Her thesis is that “the compulsion to tie food to place” actually becomes even greater in an era of globalisation, with Starbucks on every continent and what she calls a “global Brooklyn” of craft beers and sourdough everywhere. When so much of our eating is rootless, there is an extra magic in seeking out the authentic foods of a given place.
Von Bremzen suggests that now more than ever, national and local foods offer an emotional “anchor and comfort” that we are deprived of when we nourish ourselves from supermarkets or multinational fast food joints. There is also an economic dimension to the persistence of national cuisine. So far from declining, von Bremzen shows that “nation-branding with food” has become an evermore lucrative business. Peru, South Korea and Mexico are among the countries whose governments have marketed their national cuisines in recent years as a way to boost both tourism and exports.
National Dish, which is just out in the US and will be published in the UK in early September by Pushkin Press, takes the form of journeys to six different cities. In addition to pizza in Naples, von Bremzen and Barry eat tapas in Seville, ramen in Tokyo, mole in Oaxaca and dolma in Istanbul (where she lives for part of the year).
In lesser hands, this could be a shallow tourist guide to the greatest hits of world cuisine. What makes the book so enlightening — as well as so much fun to read — is the way the author goes beyond what someone once called the “problematic obviousness” of national dishes (the way that roast beef or chicken tikka masala is used to sum up the whole character of Britain) to explore where these symbolic foods come from and what they come to mean for cultures and individuals.
Von Bremzen is a superb describer of flavours and textures — “the incandescent orange yolk of supernatural creaminess” of an egg in Japan — but she also understands that food is never just about food.
In Paris, she goes in search of pot-au-feu — the old traditional French stew of meat and vegetables — only to find a cuisine newly receptive to global influences, from Chinese mooncakes and curried Vietnamese chicken bánh mì sandwiches to Algerian couscous. Yet a restaurant expert tells her that there is also a new fondness for the old French bistro food of poule au pot and céleri remoulade. His explanation is that many “people are sentimental again” about an idea of the old France and the world-beating excellence of its cuisine.
National dishes can be a way to impose simple stories on a complex world. The multiplicity of foods actually eaten in any given country is impossible for the brain to compute. So we latch on to stereotypes as a way to get a handle on things and tell ourselves that the many regional dishes of Spain can be reduced to the tapas of Andalucía even though the tradition of bar snacks in Seville only took off in the 1920s with a fashion for serving German sausages with imported German beer.
It’s worth remembering that ideas of what a national dish is can change astonishingly fast. Tomatoes were once unknown in Italy and the fish and chips beloved as part of every British seaside holiday were originally the fried fish of Jewish immigrants in London.
Even the idea of rice as the national food of Japan is a fairly recent invention, von Bremzen discovers. In Tokyo, she meets food experts who despair about the decline of rice and what this means for Japanese national pride. “Bread sales had recently overtaken rice; beer was outselling sake. Japan had fallen to 50th place in the world in per capita rice consumption.” Yet as the author points out, Japan’s fixation with rice only started in the early 20th century when white rice became affordable for the first time. Until then, the Japanese were “polygrain eaters” who subsisted on barley and beans as well as rice and other grains.
By the end of this remarkable book, you see that the question of national food always touches on deeper issues of belonging and control. In Turkey, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan — who had an early career selling watermelons and simit (sesame ring-shaped bread) uses the idea of a single national food culture to gloss over the country’s multiplicity of peoples and cultures.
Erdoğan, von Bremzen writes, “lectures on the merits of köy ekmek (country bread) and declares that Turkey’s national drink is no longer raki but rather the salty thin yoghurt-based ayran (a declaration causing a huge spike in Turkish dairy stocks)”.
Ultimately, von Bremzen shows, there is a never a straightforward answer to questions such as who dolma belongs to, let alone who in eastern Europe first made beetroot soup. But if borsch should belong to anyone right now, let it be Ukraine.
National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home by Anya von Bremzen Pushkin (published in the UK in September) £22, 352 pages/Penguin Press $30, 344 pages
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