Historical Recipes: Professor Nicolaas Mink on his Life and Floridian Cuisine - Shaping Local Culinary Tastes

What influences have shaped/are shaping local culinary tastes?

Local cuisine—and localism in general—is a funny concept, for usually outsiders are the ones who peer into a given place and characterize a particular food “local.” Even those of us who identify with the local-vore movement eat local largely because we want to proclaim a particular identity to outsiders. Nonetheless, ecology, history, and culture all combine to shape local culinary tastes. Take cheese in Wisconsin.  Most cheese continues to be made in south central and southwest Wisconsin mostly because in the days before adequate refrigeration those were the areas that couldn’t ship their fresh milk to Chicago and Milwaukee without spoilage. Ecologically, most dairy cattle can’t survive a winter in the northern third of our state, so there is little dairying there. Culturally, the immigrants from northwest Europe that populated the southern and central part of the state came with cultural traditions of dairying. In fact, there are a few herds of Brown Swiss in south central Wisconsin that came with immigrants to the United States 150 years ago and have remained in the same families ever since (despite the urging of the USDA to adopt higher yielding breeds such as Holsteins and Guernseys.) You could work through a similar ecology-history-culture exercise with about every local food. Try it. It’s fun.

What role do restaurants have in shaping local culinary tastes?

As consumer spaces that have powerful marketing apparatuses and profound cultural influence, restaurants have played an important role in shaping local tastes.  For one, they take something that is usually a private activity—eating—and turn it into a public display.  Once public, the rituals of eating a particular cuisine help to create a shared identity that extends beyond the private world of the family, an identity that is decidedly local in nature. At the same time, one of the interesting things about restaurants (and one of the big arguments that I’m making in my book) is that after World War II, these institutions emerged for a number of reasons as the great Taste Creators in American food culture.  Before that time, home cooks held this role, and most restaurateurs made a concerted effort to emulate domestic cuisine. Some even went as far as poaching recipes from household magazines and featuring the celebrated dishes of local women on their menus.  This changed after the war for complicated reasons, and the consequences were profound.  More Americans began dining at restaurants to learn new dishes, taste new foods, and try new cuisines. These cuisines, foods, and dishes expanded diners palates and helped to create local tastes that centered on foods served in restaurants.

What do you predict for the future of Floridian cuisine?

Historians are loathe to predict the future, but here’s what I can say: If you asked anyone in the 1920s if they thought a hamburger sandwich craze would sweep the country just a decade later they probably would have laughed at you. The same holds true with a regional cuisine like BBQ, whose spread across the country in the postwar era was remarkable and unforeseen.  Then there’s what super chefs like Rick Bayless, Bobby Flay, and Lidia Bastianich have done in the last ten years—they’ve turned marginalized working-class food into $100 a person gastronomic adventures. They’ve accomplished something that would have been unheard of, even as late as the mid eighties. Cuisines change for unexpected and complicated reasons, and that’s part of the fun of studying them.