[Sca-cooks] Cutting Up Chickens: Was English Food

Lilinah lilinah at earthlink.net
Thu Jul 3 12:35:53 PDT 2008


Audrey Bergeron-Morin wrote:
>I like the Asian style myself. In most of these cultures (I mean
>traditional food, of course, I know they eat with knife and fork when
>they eat Western food) they eat with chopsticks only, so the food is
>expected to be cut to bite-size pieces before it makes it to the
>table. I like that :-)

This is largely because of a lack of fuel for big fires in much of 
China, at least in the past. Food cooks faster when it is cut up 
smaller, and this is, thus, a more efficient use of fuel.

Food is also cut up small to cook quickly throughout Southeast Asia. 
Here's there more fuel, but who wants to be cooking for hours in that 
heat and humidity? But they do not eat with chopsticks. As far as i 
understand, chopsticks are presented to diners in Thai restaurants in 
America because Americans seem to think that all Asians use them.

To the best of my knowledge, however, in most of Southeast Asia the 
traditional eating utensil is the fingers and thumb of the hand. In 
modern times, one uses a spoon, with a fork being used to push food 
onto the spoon. At the most sacred or traditional meals, diners fall 
back to fingers.
-- 
Urtatim (that's err-tah-TEEM)
the persona formerly known as Anahita

My LibraryThing
http://www.librarything.com/catalog/lilinah



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