Cuisines

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In English, the word cuisine is a term used to define the expression of identity and culture through food of people in a particular grouping or in a particular geographic area.

What is the definition of cuisine

Oddly, the two “goto” guides in English for culinary definitions, The Larousse Gastronomique, and the Oxford / Penguin Companion to Food, have no entries on the word “cuisine.”

The OED defines a cuisine as “a manner or style of cooking”. The Macmillan dictionary says, “a particular style of cooking food, especially the style of a particular country or region”.

The notion of a cuisine incorporates ingredients, practices, taste preferences and, sometimes, restrictions, coming from religious or moral prohibitions, or other taboos. These elements come together in a framework of techniques, habits and expectations that form a unique, distinctive, coherent whole that differs from other frameworks that have emerged out of other settings.

Cuisines offer a range of values to diners

Cuisines evolve over time to offer food that is nutritious and safe for the context of the societies in which they emerge. Central American cuisines developed the technique of nixtamalization to release the niacin in corn and prevent pellagra. Cooks in India developed the technique of clarifying butter to make ghee, allowing the safe, long-term shelf-stable storage of butter in a warm climate.

Identification with a cuisine provides people not only a coherent diet for nourishment while providing pleasure, but also supports emotional, spiritual, moral, and even intellectual values they might hold.

Cuisines and geography

When bound with a geographic location, a cuisine is typically considered to be characteristic of that region. Typically, a cuisine is tied to a geographic area, but this is not always the case. Jewish cuisines practised in Europe and the U.S. are now quite distinct from that which is practised in Israel, and vegetarian and vegan cuisines are tied to belief systems, rather than geography. Some cuisines, such as Belgian, can be a merger of cuisines (even if that is far from the case with the linguistic groups they spring out of.)

Many cuisines that we think of as unified wholes such as Chinese, French, Italian or even American are actually umbrella classifications for strong regional cuisines.

Traditional vs emerging ingredients in a cuisine

Typically, cuisines feature traditional food items, but newer cuisines which have appeared (such as vegan) may be quick to embrace new emerging food types such as plant-based meat analogues. Older cuisines can also evolve to absorb new food items made available to them, as many European cuisines did to embrace the potato. And they can lose elements along the way: in the middle ages, English cuisine had a rich plethora of sauces which have mostly been lost and replaced by today’s bottled industrial ones.

One might assume that the ingredients typical of a cuisine would always traditionally have been ones that were produced locally, but that is not always true. While locally produced ingredients will obviously have a core influence for economic reasons (thus in northern Europe, cold-hardy spices such as caraway, dill and mustard would be used in everyday cooking instead of tropical ones such as allspice, cinnamon or nutmeg), trade routes existing for thousands of years can also have embedded the naturalization of a foreign spice into a culture’s cuisine, such as cardamom into Swedish baking and cloves and mace into Acadian meat dishes.

The rise and fall of cuisines

Most cuisines have existed for centuries, and some for millennia, but new ones emerge over time, such as American and Australian. Some die out, such as Roman did.

Some codified cuisines, such as French haute cuisine, are ones constructed at a particular moment in time, drawing on elements that are refined, defined and recorded to enable faithful reproduction of the canon with minimal variances over time, though challenges to the canon will invariably arise.

Other meanings

The world cuisine can also be used to refer to a stylistic range of food. The French phrase “haute cuisine” means very elegant food; “la cucina povera”, an Italian expression, means essentially “poor people’s cooking.”

In French, from where English has borrowed the word “cuisine”, the word holds a second meaning of “kitchen”, as in the physical part of a building in which one does the actual cooking.

A database of cuisines

Acadian Food

Acadian cooking is country-class food, accompanied by lots of bread, with main dishes often being one-pot meals. The Acadians are French-speakers who live in the French-speaking areas of Atlantic Canada. This takes in parts of Nova Scotia,...

American Food

Some food writers say it can be argued that there's no national cuisine in America: rather, it's a collection of regional cuisines. Others counter that you can say that of any cuisine.

Australian Food

No strictly regional foods have developed yet in Australia, though there is the start of an awareness of local products. Many new dishes being created in Australia are a blend of Asian and Mediterranean cooking classes, but there is no new "common...

British Food

Lea & Perrins © Denzil Green North Americans pat themselves on the back for having revolutionised their cooking in the past few decades. Pasta, olive oil and designer sea salts are now taken completely for granted. They feel even more on top of ...

British Wartime Food

Wartime food policies were one of the critical success factors in WW2 for the UK. They kept the military fed and the civilian population working, and resulted in the British population being healthier than at any time before or since in history.

Byzantine Food

This brief discussion on Byzantine food, far from in-depth, is designed to give some background to what is now classed as Greek and Turkish food. Byzantium, later named Constantinopole (in modern times: Istanbul), was a city on a peninsula, surrounded...

Cajun Food

Cajun Food is one of the two major cuisines of the state of Louisiana, the other being Creole. Both cuisines draw on the same ingredients: both use roux a lot as a base, both use rice, seafood, and spice. They differ in preparation methods, Cajun being...

Canadian Food

Potatoes on Prince Edward Island © Denzil Green The roots of English-Canadian cooking are British-American. Ethnic food started came to the fore in Canadian food magazines and kitchens in the 1970s. Still, when Canadians talk about "good old-fashioned ...

Chinese Food

Cooking hasn't been codified into an art or a noble activity in China, the way it became in France. Restaurants might become well-known known, but there is still no equivalent of a "Michelin Star" system in China, Hong Kong or Taiwan, and there hasn't...

Egypt (Ancient)

Ancient Egypt was around far longer than Rome -- several thousand years compared to Rome's short 1,000 years. Ancient Egypt, though, was static compared to the dizzying change of pace of Roman fashions and tastes. Consequently, both what was available...

Food in Ancient Greece

What we know about food in Ancient Greece comes from their literature. No book specifically on food or recipes is extant from that period, but food is talked about a great deal by characters in Greek plays. Greeks had two kinds of symbolism...

French Food

Unlike other cuisines of the world, French cuisine is codified, organized and set out in almost canonical terms -- at least, the "grande cuisine" part of French cooking is. It's owing partly to the politically centralized nature of France itself, and...

Gascony Cooking

Gascony is a region in far southwestern France. Its south side borders Spain; its west side is on the Atlantic coast. [1] It used to be more or less a defined political region, but since the French revolution the area has been parcelled out amongst different...

German Food

Food preferences in Germany aren't universal. In areas closer to the French border, noodles are popular, as well as snails and quiche-like tarts. Wine is used instead of vinegar in sauces and marinades. In areas closer to the eastern Europe borders, people...

Greek Food

Like Chinese food, Greek food in North America has been reinterpreted to meet North American expectations of a food richer in meat and dairy. For instance, Greek Salad is called Horiatiki in Greece. While in Greece the salad has feta and cucumber, it...

Irish Food

It's important not to let images of the Irish potato famine cloud your picture of Irish food, as useful as it is still for beating the British over the head with. The fact is, Ireland is a land of plenty and abundance. Even at the time of the great...

Irish Food (Northern)

Food in Northern Ireland is traditionally food that is simply prepared, served with strong tea. The country of Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom (UK). The Northern Irish have traditionally been heavier consumers of dairy products, meat,...

Italian Food

Perhaps more than any country, it's hard to say of Italy that there is a national cuisine. While it is also hard to say this of France, Italy has had far more history and civilisations roll through it, with each leaving small pockets of themselves...

Japanese Food

Japanese Food is a very elegant cuisine. When anyone debates, "what are the great cuisines of the world", Japanese has to be up there on the list. It even influenced the 20th century movement in France called "nouvelle cuisine", in terms of both...

Jewish Food

Strictly speaking, there is no such thing as "Jewish food", but rather perhaps "Jewish foods." There are different culinary worlds and traditions within Judaism, just as there are for instance within Catholicism -- Scottish Roman Catholics cook very differently...

Lancashire Food

Lancashire is a county on the west coast of England, on the Irish sea. The county is smaller now that it used to be. The size was reduced politically in 1974. It used to include Manchester and Liverpool to the south, and northern bits of it were taken...

Medieval Food

At some point in the early Middle Ages, as Germanic cultures prevailed over southern cultures, the rich abandoned the Greek and Roman custom of lying on sofas at banquets, and sat upright instead. This freed up the other hand for cutting and made...

Mexican Food

Mexican food is fusion food. It's a blend of Spanish, other European and even Mennonite traditions tossed in with the indigenous food and cooking traditions. While Mediterranean food was founded, though, on the trinity of wine, bread and the olive, the...

New Zealand Wartime Food (WWII)

New Zealand (NZ) introduced rationing during the Second War World, largely in order to create a surplus of food that it could use to feed its British and American allies. It was in a way the mirror image of British wartime rationing: in Britain,...

Norwegian Food

About two-thirds of Norway's land-mass is mountains; only 5% of the land is arable. In the north of Norway, the growing season is 100 days; in the south, 190 days. The days are long, though in a Norwegian summer: the sun will rise as early as 2...

Québecois Food

Québec is bordered on the top by the Arctic, on the west by the Canadian province of Ontario, on the east by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the south by the American states of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. It is a very cold climate. In early ...

Raw Foods

Raw Foods is a special lifestyle diet whose adherents eat only uncooked food. The principle of Raw Foods is to ensure that enzymes and electrolytes in the food are eaten alive. You are advised that, given that these enzymes and electrolytes start to...

Roman Food

This entry is about food in Rome, the ancient empire. There will be at some point a separate entry on food in modern-day Rome, the city. Rome was founded, historians believe, by 625 BC (though the Romans themselves believed their city was founded in...

Scottish Food

Scots get tired of their food being summarized as haggis, whisky, deep-fried Mars bars , and shortbread in tartan tins. Yet there is something to it. Haggis is oats and offal , of which the Scots both eat a lot. Scots are very proud of their whisky...

Sicilian Food

Sicily is known for its simple cooking and good street food. Some say the national dish is pasta with sardines ("Pasta con le Sarde.") It is also known for its desserts, particularly its frozen desserts, made possible earlier than in most of the...

Slow Food

Slow Food is a political and cultural food movement that claims to have 85,000 members in 132 countries (as of 2009.) The movement was founded by people who felt that traditional foods were disappearing. It aims to be an international organization, though...

Southern Food

Southern cooking, in American parlance, is generally seen as any food in the US prepared south of the District of Columbia. It's far from a homogenous body of cooking. There are many regional, sub-regional and class differences. The main cities...

Spanish Food

The Romans set the Spanish cooking base of wheat, olives and grapes. The Muslims added almonds, oranges, rice and saffron. The New World tossed in chocolate, corn, peppers, potatoes and tomatoes. Food in general is not spicy, though the use of garlic...

Tex-Mex Food

The name "Tex-Mex" is a combination of "Texas" and "Mexico." It's used to describe a cuisine which is an Americanized form of Mexican cooking -- or more precisely, Mexican food, largely from northern Mexico as it has come to be made in Texas. Or, as some...

Turkish Food

Some people distinguish between Turkish food -- the original nomadic food base from central Asia -- and Ottoman Cuisine, the cuisine that absorbed the riches of Byzantine culture, plus all the other countries that were conquered and absorbed into the...

Tuscan Food

Italian cooking is very regional. The food of Tuscany can be very different from that prepared in the rest of Italy. Yet, even Tuscan food is not monolithic but rather regional within itself as well. Tuscany is divided administratively into the following...