Well it was a Tuesday night of My Kitchen Rules that saw contestant Zana
(and her subservient Italian houseboy with the spot of Velcro below his bottom
lip) become a nightmare version of King Midas where everything she touched seemed
to turn to ‘Albanian’. An example being
her attempt to claim paprika and pita. Pita
and paprika are about as Albanian as proportionate facial features and above
average height.
So to prevent this misunderstanding happening repeatedly, I’m
going to clearly outline which dishes belong to five selected nations as well
as another five honourable mentions.
Italian
Any spin on pasta, pizza, garlic bread or risotto, Italians
get to claim. Pizza alone is a brilliant
creation that no one should be allowed to take off you. I mean seriously, it’s a series of delicious
toppings melted together on top of an edible plate! It’s yours and that was clear once a group of
Japanese born ninja turtles
loved their food so much that they decided to take on Italian names. And
full credit to Italians because they don’t so much live by a food pyramid as they do a food leaning tower of Pisa, and it’s leaning
because it’s built completely on the weight of carbohydrates. Sidenote, they’ve also done more for the
consumption of tomatoes than if Mr. Heinz bought the city of Napoli and they’ve
shown that a brilliant way to ensure no one else claims their sauces is to name
them after Italian cities. I’m also
prepared to give you tiramisu, canoli and the stingiest coffee ever that serves
the purpose of outlining who to drop from your friendship group when they
mispronounce it “EXpresso”. Really, the power of Italian cooking is that
a pizza & pasta restaurant in Shepparton can put pineapple, egg and raw
prawn on top of a dish and call it the ‘Aussie Special’ but it’s still an
Italian dish.
French
Here’s what the French get; raw steaks and burnt custards,
unsatisfyingly small portions and unnecessarily long breads as well as pate and
dishes that look more like art instalments than dinner. They get expensive cheeses, oily
oxygen-filled pastries and yoghurts that belong in kids’ lunchboxes more than
on dinner tables. Unless Manu likes
‘Yoplait Petit Miam’, in which case I could be wrong. If you find that at some point during the
preparation of the food you’re using wine more than a Greek dish uses olive oil
and then it takes you 45 minutes to plate it up, there’s a good chance whatever
you’re making is French. FYI Zana,
that’s how you assign credit for a dish.
See even in McDonald's Tirana, I’m pretty sure they still call them French
fries. If the dish ends in a silent
letter, isn’t pronounced how it’s spelled, various ingredients are supposed to
have mould on them before preparation and the dish costs $130 per head, it may
also be French. Technically there’s a
French theme to every meal seeing as we’ve already labelled stages of dining as
hors d'oeuvres and entrée. Meze has tried to
take the monopoly off it so valiant effort.
Asian
There are far too many countries and different dishes in
Asia with richly delicious dishes so it’s only fair that when assigning credit,
we just roll with a general “Asian” label.
If in doubt, go with this logic; the dish’s label goes to the place
where it came from, not from the person making it. It’s probably a key reason why in Dandenong
there are no “Albanian sushi” shops. If
your dish contains a mix of sweet and sour flavours, unless you’ve accidentally
spilled your dessert into your main, then you’ve got an Asian dish on your hands. Anything rice-based, be it noodles, main dish
or alcohol can be claimed by Asia. They
gave us fish that doesn’t need to be cooked, ice-cream that can be fried and
MSG that can go with everything. The
other great thing about Asian cuisine is it’s so popular, identifiable and
comes with its own culturally specific cutlery that it requires little detailed
description here and is pretty much “Zana-proof.”
Greek
If the hero of your dish is a combination of lamb, lemon and
a suspicious absence of lettuce in any of your salads, that’s a Greek dish. The only way it could be more Greek is if it
was served with a side of financial crisis on a bed of yoghurt and a plate made
of an old marble tile. This includes
gyros and moussaka. As for dessert,
galaktoboureko and tulumbe can have the Greek flag planted on top of them
because any dessert that can turn you from ironman to diabetic in one sitting
is decidedly Greek. Worth also
mentioning that Greeks and Serbs get to share a number of dishes including pita
though because we share so much anyway including borders, a religion, a
Cyrillic alphabet and a history of fighting the Turks.
Serbian
This leads me nicely into Serbia. This is a fun one because basically if the
dish caters for approximately 10 times the number of guests you’re hosting, I’d
like to say that it can be claimed as a Serbian dish. If it contains cabbage, a large quantity of
beautifully prepared but proudly un-marinated meat, sausages with no skin on
them, is considered too salty by the Australian dinner guests and anything
where beans are a main dish rather than a condiment, it can be claimed as a
Serbian dish. Cevapi, pljeskavice,
sarma, kajmak, kacamak and proja are stamped with the “4 C’s of ownership”. As for the sweets; look to whatever an old
Serbian baba makes like she went to school for it and you’ll find your
answer. They don’t know how to lie and
take great pride in making exclusively Serbian specialties so you can be sure zito,
oblande, knedle and even Zana’s krofne can be painted ‘red-blue-white’. It’s fair to also say that if there are more
than 1000 calories per square centimetre of the dish you’ve prepared, it’s a
Serbian dish. If the peppers are minced
into a relish, the yoghurt is poured as a drink and the entrée is heavier than
most mains, this is also a good chance it’s Serbian.
**Honourable mentions**
German:
They get
schnitzel, stuffed sausages, pickled everything and heavy beers. The food may not be the best, but the
waitresses serving it often are.
Indian:
Curry,
samosas and just generally food that spends more time going out that coming in.
Mexican:
From
burritos to quesadillas to nachos and tacos as well as jalapenos and salsa, if
the ‘J’ in the dish is pronounced as an ‘H’, the ‘L’ is pronounced as a ‘Y’ and
the final stage of preparation of the dish has to be done by the diners at the
table, you get to claim it.
Spanish:
Tapas,
churros, paella, sangria and chorizo.
From dips and drinks, to dinner and desserts, you can safely plant your
flag on these dishes and rest assured you won’t look like a culinary version of
your homegrown explorer Christopher Columbus.
Australian:
Pies
taken from the English, a cake named after a Russian, biscuits named after
soldiers. Also, meat taken from the
animals on our coat of arms, flavourless wheat-based breakfast biscuits, yeast
extract spread. Coles and Woolworths
snags and burgers aren’t the finest product but apparently they seem hell bent
of bringing them out at every barbecue/celebration/dinner party so it seems
fair to include them as a national dish too.
So my sign-off here is half for Zana and half for the MKR
contestants to come:
To Zana; like a dodgy worker at an even dodgier accountant’s
office, you’re trying to claim way too much!
Your Porsche isn’t an Albanian car just because you drive it, your local
Woolies isn’t an Albanian supermarket just because you shop in it and unless
Jamie Oliver has fallen on extremely hard times and had to start selling his
merchandise from a van in the city of Tirana, I’m pretty sure you aren’t using
Albanian cookware either. The key point
to take away from this is that just because someone in your country makes it,
doesn’t make it a national dish of your country.
To the rest of the contestants: In the end, like a politician making a speech
at a festival and thanking the traditional owners of the land, when you’re
putting that MKR meal on the table, thank the traditional owners of the
dish. Consider giving credit to the
country that’s really responsible for the dish you’re preparing. Something along the lines of; “tonight’s dish
is a Hong Kong salad with Vietnamese noodles, brought to you by Gavin and Karen
from Wangaratta.” Happy cooking!
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