Comments by "Peter Jacobsen" (@pjacobsen1000) on "Who invented butter chicken? Two restaurants battle it out" video.

I think we eventually all have to acknowledge that many of the dishes we consider to be 'traditional' in any cuisine, may not be that old after all. You'd be surprised to learn how many dishes are entirely recent: Pat Thai was invented in the 1940s, many 'authentic' Italian pizzas are from the 20th century, Sushi is relatively new, most Cantonese dimsum are from the 20th century, Chicken Tikka Masala is recent, and that's not even beginning to take into account that Chili, tomato, potato, eggplant, corn only arrived in the EurAsian continent in the 16th century, after the Spanish sailed to South America. There is probably very little food from before the 16th century that would be recognizable to us today.
2
@chrislee5685 My point is that any nation's cuisine changes quite quickly. As for young countries, they may very well have had people living there before they became a country. Those people still have food culture. As an example, Italy only became a unified country in 1860, but no one can say they haven't had a culture for several thousand years before that.
1
@chrislee5685 Sure, I don't doubt it, but even ancient civilizations had very limited choice of produce compared to today, so the food from just a few centuries ago must have been very different from what we eat today. And people's taste changes all the time. When I arrived in Shanghai almost 30 years ago, Shanghainese people insisted that (yellow) onions and chili were almost inedible foods. That has certainly changed in a big way.
1
@rmot-t9c "2,000-year-old curry" Ok, but it's a curry without chili, without tomato. I suppose a Korma comes close to that description. And of course Europe also had a food culture 1000 or 2000 years ago. But again, almost certainly different from today.
1