257: Anya von Bremzen

0:28This episode is brought to you by Resi and American Express. The name restaurant is restaurant, and it means restorative broth. It's a dish. As Rebecca Spang, who wrote this seminal book, The Invention of the Restaurant, writes, before it was a place to eat, it was a thing to eat.

0:52This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard.

0:59How cool was it to have Anya von Bremsen in the studio? In this fast-paced episode, we cover Anya's tremendous journalism career, which has brought the journalist multiple James Veard Awards and a handful of reported books that are considered modern classics. These include the memoir, Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking, and her latest, National Dish, Around the World in Search of Food History and the Meaning of Home. Anya and I talk about what makes or doesn't make a culture's national dish and how food writing has undergone great change over the past two decades. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Anya.

1:43Anya van Bremsen, welcome to This Is Taste. Great to be here, Matt. I feel like we've been in circles, we've seen each other at a party, maybe, you know. I know, and I'm a huge fan, so I'm really excited to talk to you. Well, it's kind, and I'm a huge fan of your work, and you've published many books here at Penguin Random House. Your current National Dish we'll talk about at length, but your previous book, the Soviet book, it's in like 20-plus languages now? Something like this, Mastering the Art of Soviet Kripp. Yeah, it was memoir slash political history of the USSR. I mean, you know, I like big subjects.

2:18But you go zoom in and you have great voice and tone with your writing. Thank you so much. We try. Let's jump right in to national cuisines. And you write about how there is a problematic obviousness when defining a country's national cuisine. What do you mean? Well, to start with, there's a problem with defining a country as something that's been around for ages. We kind of assume, okay, France has been around, you know, people speak French. Italy has been around for ages. Actually, the nation itself is a very, very new concept. 1860 in Italy or something like that? Well, there was no Italy until 1860.

2:57But usually we dated to the Enlightenment, to the French Revolution, which kind of articulated the idea of a nation. Because think about it. 1830, Greece, Greek War of Independence, Greece emerges. France emerges after the revolution, 1889, 1789. No Italy until 1860. No Turkey until 1923 when the Ottoman Empire collapses. So how can you have a national cuisine when you actually don't have a modern concept of nation, right? And think about this as well. At the time of Italian unification, how many Italians do you think spoke Italian, standard Italian? Less than 10%. At the end of the 19th century, I think less than 60 % of France spoke standard French.

3:44And you're talking about their dialects. There were definitely permutations of modern Italian, but it was unrecognizable if you were in Naples and in Piedmont, right? Modern Italian was kind of set up to be the Florentine Italian, the language of Dante. So how can you talk about a unified cuisine when you don't have a unified idea of a nation? And cuisine, you know, as the nations construct themselves, and it's always a construct that's kind of artificial, cuisine becomes a very important part of identity, of soft power, of nation building. As I argue, cuisine is as important as a flag or a national anthem.

4:22And these are all also very – I mean, look at what just happened. We're recording this in late June, and we are right in the tails of a state dinner with the prime minister of India and President Biden. And, yeah, problematic in many ways. So problematic. They were using cuisine in many – you know, it's interesting how cuisine was used. It was a plant-based diet. Yeah, exactly. And the chef that established cuisine as part of kind of gastro diplomacy and soft power was Marie-Antoine Carême, a 19th century French chef. He was literally, you know, he was at all the state banquets. Napoleon used him.

5:00So that idea kind of starts in France. And you opened a book, you know, based in France, and the book travels from Paris to Naples to Tokyo to Sevilla, Oaxaca, and Istanbul in little tangents in between. And you write about some of the earliest restaurants in Paris in 1820. And I loved that section because I had never really thought about the first restaurants. You're making the statement, it's cool, the first restaurants were in 1820. Describe those. Actually, earlier, 1820 is when they really flourished. By 1820, there were 3 ,000 restaurants in Paris. It starts before the French Revolution, about two decades, maybe 1760s.

5:43And restaurant, the name restaurant is restaurant, and it means restorative broth. It's a dish. Yeah, it's a dish. As Rebecca Spank, who wrote this seminal book, The Invention of the Restaurant, writes, before it was a place to eat, it was a thing to eat. The restaurant was a restorative broth for rich people, kind of like a shishi urban spa for them because it was kind of fashionable to be sick during the Enlightenment. You know, the Enlightenment era, obsessed with health and also slightly obsessed with consumerism. So you have the intersection of the two, obsession with health and with consumerism.

6:21People go to these shishi places called restaurant to get their little dainty cup of bouillon. It's funny. Health meant wealth back then. We use the term health is wealth, but health meant wealth. Exactly, exactly. And for the first time in history, it's a place where you can have your own separate table, order from a menu with prices, and kind of be alone, but in public. And the idea really took off like crazy. And by 1820, the day that you mentioned, 3 ,000 restaurants in Paris. And you have to mention that it's something very Parisian. It's not just the French phenomenon. It's something associated with Paris.

6:57And by 1820s, already there are like these opulent places with murals and chandeliers and dressed up people and poulet marengo and truffled whatever. So they moved beyond this restorative broth and they went to like a little bit more. That was a very short period. Well, then the revolution happened. And we know what happened to the rich people, right? No one wanted to know about the rich people and the restorative broths because their heads rolled off. Rolled into the pots. Rolled into the pots, yeah. So you have kind of like this reimagination of the whole concept. When Marie Antoinette said let them eat cake, do you know what type of cake that was?

7:31No. What would you guess with that? What would the cake be that she's referring to? Did she say gâteau? I mean, it could be. Gâteau, yeah. I think no. Yeah. I'm just like. Did she even say it? You know, because so much of the stuff that I discover in National Dish in my new book is how like apocryphal and invented these things are. So like, do we even know that she said this? It's true. And in what context did she say it? Yeah, it's true. There's definitely a friend scholar who could probably come on and talk about that. And I just triggered that, triggered my mind. Let's talk about the reporting of this book because it's significant.

8:05And how do you then think about that? How do you think about these countries you're going to visit when you're thinking broadly about the book before you go on these trips? So the idea behind National Dish was to take the narrative of some of the most famous dishes in the world to where it's never been before, really. Because, you know, we write cookbooks. There's a short introduction. Like this dish comes from where and this influences from this. And we write travel pieces, which I've done so much. And again, the same kind of canned history. So I wanted to examine some of our most famous and iconic and by now globalized dishes and look at their actual stories and how their stories reflect the building and the constructions of nations.

8:46So I start in Paris because, as we talked, this is where the whole idea of the nation comes from. This France is the first country that elevates its cuisine to something that's part of its soft power. The terms like chefs, gastronomy, sauces, everything. It has a first cookbook with a national title in it way before the revolution in 1651, which is by La Varenne. It's like Cuisinier Francaise. And believe it or not, there were no national cuisines before that. So it kind of established this idea of a nation and cuisine being a part of a nation. And I investigate pot à feu, which is the rich stew in a broth.

9:27You make it. Yeah, I make it. And in the process, I discovered that Paris is just this utterly globalized city. Yeah. And no one gives a hoot. And everyone is trying to tell me, oh, have you been to this mescal bar? Oh, right. And these baobans, you know, near me are amazing. And chocolate babka, rames supreme. And the hamburger and barbecue in Paris. Oh, yeah. Yeah, all that stuff, too. And maki. Yeah. Anyway, so from there, I go to Naples because Naples is the home of not just pizza, which is a seminal important dish that I look at, but also pasta al pomodoro. This is where basically the carbs met the tomato sauce.

10:07That's a great moment. Crucial, crucial. I want to get to Naples, but before we get into Naples and Neapolitan pizza, I want to just like step back one quick second and ask you about this compulsion that we have. Because you mentioned in passing it was kind of annoying, but like we as food writers have this compulsion to tie a place with a food. But that's like very problematic as you report. It's problematic on so many levels because the foods, like who defines heritage? Who does the food belong to? It can be shared by so many different nations because the borders didn't exist. But somewhere in the book, I say that, oh, authenticity, it's such a monster marketing tool.

10:50Yeah. What is authentic? We project our very essentialist ideas about what is authentic onto other countries. We go to Puerto Rico. We want to see the mom and pops, you know, dancing salsa and eating mofongo. What if they want to have a family outing to McDonald's, not to glorify McDonald's? No, or go to like a barbecue restaurant. Or go to a barbecue restaurant. So we kind of essentialize cultures and we freeze them in place and we want to find the authentic where all the locals go. And of course these places exist and they're amazing. And to be there is a thrill. But we have to kind of let cultures develop as they are on their terms.

11:27Not on our terms of the tourist who wants to see, you know, this kind of sanitized but still, you know, very authentic. We had Alicia Kennedy on and we'll have her on again. And she taught a course about this exact topic, which I think was great scholarship. Back to Naples. Let's talk about what you found there. You shadow with a few chefs. We were just talking with Mike about how Naples and specifically the Spanish Quarter is a pretty dark and historical place. So what did you find there? So many interesting things about pizza. For instance, the one discovery was, you know, pizza margarita, which was named after Queen Margherita after the unification of Italy, who comes to the palace and orders, you know, from the pizzaiolo.

12:09The color of the flag. Esposito, the color of the flag. Yada, yada. Total bull. You can say bullshit, by the way. Oh, okay. Total bullshit. There you go. Total fabrication, for example. The other thing that's fascinating about pizza, we think about it. It's a national dish of Italy, all Italian. And the northern Italians, oh, man, they were so vicious to it. Like either they didn't know it, most of them didn't know it. And like, you know, Carlo Collodi, the author of Pinocchio, he did this like travel tales for Italian children that was taught in schools. And so what can I compare pizza to? Some kind of complicated filth.

12:47Yeah. Real shade towards the southern Italians and those northern snobs. Like being sort of, yeah, Naples is Africa. It's always like dismissals of, you know, the mezzo giorno southern Italy as Africa. So we have this like racially sort of culprit and very disparaging remarks about pizza. So pizza doesn't really become a famous dish and suddenly doesn't become an all Italian dish until the moment when the immigrants start immigrating from Italy because they're really poor and they're mostly from the south. They establish restaurants and home cooking, you know, in South and North America. Yeah, in New York City, in Lombardi's.

13:21And pizza, you could argue that pizza really takes off as an Italian national symbol abroad in the diaspora. So this is the kind of fascinating stuff that I'm discovering in this book. But then we flip back to the neo-Neapolitan movement that happened in New York in the 2010s, and Roberta's centered around there, and you could go and name your favorite, Castell, Industry Pizza, all these places that do Neapolitan and New Neo. And then we look back to Naples and went back and said, this is where the motherland of pizza is. So as food writers, I think we are, it's complicated and we're compromised.

13:54You know, there's a term for this called the pizza effect that I talk about it in the Naples chapter. It was actually coined by a Hindu monk in relation to yoga. And yoga was like no big deal in India. And then abroad, it became this huge phenomenon. And then it returned to India in a reimagined form and kind of was subjected to a new reevaluation. So this is kind of this constant loop between the country of origin and the diaspora and our sort of, you know, millennial projections, gourmet projections. And it's fascinating. I mean, I'm looking a lot of this at a lot of this in national dish and just kind of exposing how interesting and complicated and not one dimensional.

14:37No, and it shows. You think you know pizza? Well, I mean, we don't really. Well, let's transition to Japan. You write about rice, and I would like to hear about that. But I'd like to hear about pizza in Japan because just to transition from Naples, it's pretty good there. Did you find some good pizza in Japan? Yeah. The funny thing is at my last day in Naples, I judged the pizza competition. Yeah. One of the pizaiolas brought me in as a judge. And I go, come in, and there's like all these Japanese cameras, NHKs there, Japanese television. So it's like this big event in Japan. Most of the contestants are Japanese.

15:09And the Neapolitans are going, boh, you know what? We better just go home and retire. These guys are just so good. But in the last five years especially, there's this kind of movement for Japanese pizza. And the Japanese Neapolitan pizza is lighter and smaller. Yeah, of course. And a lot more expensive. It's like over 20 bucks. Yeah. And there's this whole kind of technique of pinching it to create air bubbles and bake it really close to the fire. So to my taste, I'm sorry, it's burnt. Yeah. Yeah. When the leoparding becomes too heavy, it becomes burnt. There's a name for it? Leoparding, you know, with those spots on pizza.

15:49Oh, right. On Nia with those little bursts are called leoparding. Adam Kubin, I think, came up with that. The guy, you know, Adam Kubin, pizza journalist. Right, right. Oh, that's too funny. The leoparding. Yeah, so the leoparding makes it like really burnt. Yeah. So it's burnt, expensive, and small, but it has a huge following. Yeah, it's interesting. And we'll talk about, let's talk about rice because we've covered rice cultivation on taste and we went to a competition in Japan that was strictly for rice cultivation. So what are you talking about when you're talking about rice as a national dish in Japan?

16:17Well, there are two dishes that I look at in Tokyo. It's rice and ramen. Ramen is a borrowed dish from China that became kind of the star of people's cuisine because it fueled the post-war reconstruction as a cheap start. We brought wheat. We, being Americans, brought wheat to Japan. Well, you didn't bring it, but you dumped it. We dumped a lot of wheat in Japan. Correct. Correction. There was not bringing, there was dumping. To avert the red scare, right? But that's a whole other story. Oh, yeah. But ramen is a modern dish in Japan. Right. So, but rice is, in contrast, is imbued with this almost kind of holy meaning as like the expression of the Japanese self.

16:57You know, the rice paddy is a symbol of Japan. Whiteness, you know, like again, we get into racial, you know, territory, you know, during World War II. The rice was the expression of the purity of the Japanese self, you know, the whiteness as opposed to Chinese or whatever. So, like, there's this imperialist thing. The fact is, and rice is the cornerstone of Washoku, you know, the Japanese meal of, like, rice and three side dishes and miso soup. That got UNESCO status and it's considered, like, the classic Japanese meal. The problem is rice consumption is way down. Yeah. Same in Korea as well.

17:37Yeah. Yeah. Because, again, we're dealing with such a globalized context. Why should Japanese be confined to eating rice all the time? They don't want to be. They can eat any starch. What is substituting then? Pasta, for instance. I did a very funny thing. I did some polling. I conducted like this. Amateur poll at the Depachika, the department store for food poll. Which one? Isetan? No, Takashimaya. And I sort of started asking people, well, what do you think is more Japanese rice or ramen or pasta? And they're like, oh, pasta is Japanese. I said, what do you think is more, you know, some ramen chain or McDonald's?

18:16They go, oh, McDonald's is Japanese. Then I say shu, which is shu pastry. Yeah, shu. Or wagashi. They also say wagashi is Japanese. So there's a level of kind of internalization. I mean, we call it cultural appropriation. Some scholars would call it indigenization. for the Japanese, you know, the way that they absorb foreign influences, foreign cuisines, but they make it their own. It's a monoculture there too. When you have a monoculture and immigration is not like many other parts of the world, you can internalize these differences and kind of like own them in a way that is kind of different.

18:49But Japan always internalized the Chinese values. And then after, you know, they kind of started denigrating Chinese in this colonialist way, it became Western values. Yeah. So, and, you know, it prides itself in this genius to absorb other ideas and make them Japanese. So you have this leopard thing on the pizza. Yeah. And like one pizzaiolo told me, oh, you know, I don't need to go to Naples. We Japanese, you know, we make our pizza Japanese and we do it better than them. It's a fine line because you think about pride and you think about self-sufficiency or self-confidence. And sometimes you're like, I don't need to go there.

19:25But ultimately, is there a right answer? Do you have to go to origin to figure out these foods? I don't think so. I think food, everything travels so fast. And who are we to tell the Japanese whether they should go to Naples? This is a problem for me with like if you want to talk about our colonial American gaze, we're not to be, you know. In this book, I do a lot of talking to people. I want to hear their side of the story. I don't judge. Fully agree with that statement that you made. I feel like who are we to judge and we can't say who owns what. And this is truly what the word, I mean, the national dish is the title, but obviously it's a wink, right?

20:05Absolutely. Which is really cool about it. Well, national dish is an idea. It's a powerful idea. It's an idea. It's not a reality. Right. It's a construct. So it does exist and it doesn't. Are you ready to do the media where someone who maybe hasn't read your book is like, so tell us the national dishes of five countries. Oh, they always do. Yeah. Even if they have read the book because. Yeah. So I have six countries there. Yeah. And it was supposed to be longer, but then the pandemic happened. And the whole vaccine nationalism and the whole kind of reinforcement of the border. So it's kind of this nationalistic thing was happening.

20:36Yeah. But I couldn't travel to more countries. So we ended up, which is good because the chapters are long. Yeah, the book is full. And you can tell a real story. Yeah, you did an amazing job just distilling your travels. I want to segue to Mexico. Is there something that just like Americans are missing about the food culture, the food ways of Mexico? And you go to Oaxaca particularly, but I'm just saying broadly as a country. I go to Oaxaca for the maize tortillas, for the corn tortillas and for the mole. I think a very important thing missing is the atole. And it's not quite a food and it's not quite a drink and it's extremely indigenous.

21:16Describe it. It was, you know, atole is essentially a morning drink for the campesinos, for the farmers. And it's thickened with masa. Yeah. And usually aerated and frothy. It's like a little bit more than a porridge, I think. It's between porridge and soup. It's in between soup and porridge, right? And it's kind of a food group of its own. Yeah. And in Mexico, it's becoming really important. Like the whole drinks thing and foamy drinks. Because to the indigenous population, for instance, the Zapotecs had the idea of this vital sacred force called P or P-I. And it came from frothing chocolate, for instance.

21:53So there were religious implications. And it's in the mountains, in remote indigenous communities, it's like the morning pick-me-up. It's really, really important. And no one here is really acknowledging it. Because it's kind of boring, right? You can't construct the whole thing. Yeah, it's tricky because it is so indigenous, and it's not something you're going to see in Epicurious, right? Well, no shade to Epicurious. Maybe they do have a recipe, but you're not going to see most. This really famous Oaxaca cook, Abigail Mendoza, told me, you know, you foreigners, you think of Mexican food as really spicy and racy and whatever, but Atole is the opposite.

22:31And she made something called Chocolate Atole, which is done with this cacao, not really cacao pods, but special pods, nothing to do with chocolate, But that takes so much effort. And you froth it, you aerate it. It's like, you know, you bury the pods. It takes like weeks. And then it doesn't taste like anything. It's just because you appreciate it for the froth, for the refinement. It's more of a textural thing, like a Chinese cooking. You often texture is one of the notes. Exactly. It's like shark's fin or something. Yeah, exactly. Shark's fin is a great example. Or just like frying techniques in China.

23:02Maybe it would fall flat on the American power, but it's about texture. So but in Mexico, you're beginning to see as indigenous labor, indigenous cuisine becomes, you know, revalorized or valorized finally. You see more and more atollerias because you can like flavor it with anything. There's this great book, Bebedas de Oaxaca, the drinks of Oaxaca that a friend of mine wrote because it's like there's so many regional variations. So I'm hoping we're going to see atollerias. I love that choice, Anya. I think that's a really – I knew very little about it having just tried it once. It seems like several of these iconic canonical dishes first surfaced like 100 years ago, around 1920.

23:41We're talking about tapas, Neapolitan pizza, and Moli Poblano. What was it about the 1920s in this kind of zone that created so much of this innovation? I think 1920s, well, in some ways it's random. Like, you know, the Mexican Revolution happened in 1910. So in 1920s, you have the nation building already beginning. Russian Revolution, 1917. The Ottoman Empire collapsed. It's like a lot of stuff, like World War I, a lot of stuff happened in the world. Yeah. The Great Depression. I guess the rowing 20s into the Greatest Depression. Yeah, the Great Depression. But it also has to do a lot with automobile travel.

24:17Yeah. The car travel. That's what I wanted to find out about. You kind of, we talk about national dishes, but people think, okay, national dishes might be invented or kind of constructed, but regional dishes are authentic. No, because the regions were like really being discovered with the car travel, with the guidebook. Think of Michelin. Think of the touring club, Italiano. So suddenly for the car tourists, for the car enthusiasts, all these regions are putting up the show and developing regional dishes. But I think 1920s, these dishes weren't independent in the 1920s, obviously. Well, that's the point of your book, but I think it's more the visibility.