Popular versus traditional: an antithesis
"You keep using that word, I don’t think it means what you think it means.” Popular is not necessarily traditional, and not all habits are worthy to be persevered.
Here on this blog, I started a specific discussion on the need for writers to reclaim the power of the gastronomic narrative.
This is because, while many food writers have their gaze firmly on the chefs, and others on the food, it is necessary to study those who write about food as well, as part of a systemic environment that can be identified as the gastronomic ecosystem, as it is mediated semiotically by the construction of language and exchange around said food.
If there is a lack of variety in the genre of gastronomic edited and published products, it is perhaps because the reading pool is so insignificant that perseverating in gastronomic print media may not be a good investment, business-wise.
So I was intrigued when a new magazine was announced, some months ago, as a game-changer of the whole gastronomical writing in Portugal.
How exciting, I thought in the hope of finding a collective of writings about the elevation of Portuguese cuisine, away from the nitty-gritty of what this cuisine has evolved into in the past fifty years.
As you can imagine, I did not find any of what I was looking for.
For the sake of this specific issue, let us try to define popular as “can be found everywhere but nobody in the high spheres of gastronomy talks about it”, as it seems to be the main focus of Farta, this magazine about Portuguese food launched last year, and that I found out this week while I was browsing around.
It’s catchy and well-decorated, with good photography and a wealth of young, willing and talented writers populating its pages. It drew me into reading it, but as I started delving into the concept of “popular” and “traditional” cuisine on my own, I ended up not reading it after all.
I felt intrigued by the concept of “popular” they touted, and instead of the paper issues, I went on to read their advertisements and launched interviews and so on.
You know, background research.
Popular could mean famous, or widespread, but also “of the people”, in antithesis with something for the elites.
In Portugal, and elsewhere, popular cuisine is not entirely overlapping with tradition or quality. I was eager to see what the editors found essential to highlight.
In many popular places in Portugal, sadly one can find:
an abundance of carbohydrates and meat-based fats balanced by a lack of variety in vegetables,
usage of cheap, and therefore low-quality ingredients, in the search for quantity over quality,
general disregard for spices (other than often rancid homemade piri-piri, salt and pepper “q.b").
All of the above is not traditional, if we take the span to measure tradition from the moment the Romans started building Evora and Lisbon to their linking, till the moment Dictator Salazar plunged this country into autarchy and poverty.
Spices are traditional, herbs are traditional, surely not like processed pigs in blanket things, and ultra-processed industrial bread and low-quality charcuterie: the main ingredients, incidentally, of the francesinha which was the main topic of Farta’s first issue: a popular dish, in this sense.
Famous, “of the people”, sure.
Traditional, well…somewhat.
Popular does not necessarily mean traditional. Nor implies any intrinsic quality per se.
If we jump back to the times before a dictatorship imposed forced restrictions on gastronomy, and before supermarket convenience smashed homely, careful preparations, the Portuguese cuisine we find is elevated, resourceful, with abundant vegetables and a variety of spices.
Traditional cuisine like the one described in Domingos Rodrigues has nothing to do with the popular cuisine that can be found in any of those restaurants opened in Lisbon’s Baixa, those displaying doubtful pictures of a plate of seabass (farmed) accompanied by potatoes AND white rice for less than 10 euros.
I wish that popular and traditional cuisine would be synonymous!
So instead of finding a “bifinho com batata e arroz” (or grilled chicken or francesinha) I would find, who knows, a preparation similar to blancmanger, or a sopa de beldroegas, or a bacalhau alourado almost everywhere.
But this is not the case.
We are asked by the publication to look into what people eat in abundance, in a country whose diet in the last century has been worsening.
Just to make an example, only a couple of years ago Portugal discovered (in fine dining for the moment) that there are several varieties of potatoes for several preparations. Alas, generally supermarkets and grocers present just one, or two types of potatoes. And hardly write their names or any identifier, on the package.
And this is just an example.
Do we really live in a false mythology where we blindly believe that “the people are inherently right” and that “stiff-necked gastronomers” are ignoring popular dishes because of snobbism, not because some of these plates are the fruit of bad habits and ignorance?
What is behind these plates and products is often the lack of gastronomic culture, sadly.
Not the presence of an elusive gastronomic culture that is being kept a secret whilst everyone in the press focuses on fine dining or other stuff.
Farta launched with this claim: “While applauding modernisms, babbling on about haute cuisine and reinterpretations, we end up facing away from the traditional recipes that have always been on our tables and filled our stomachs.”
“Always”. Well, not so much (if we broaden our gastronomic gaze to the past, beyond the last hundred years).
I do not see much of a race towards the old and ancient cookbooks, procuring traditional recipes and ingredients as they might have been in the (real) past.
I see a general race towards a cheap supermarket able to fill a cart with frozen or ready-to-eat food that can be served in quantity, satisfying patrons whose taste is neither refined nor knowledgeable. I see abiding by Maria Lourdes Modesto's modest take on spices (salt and pepper “q.b.”, as it suffices).
I see the praising of ready-made food and quick, industrially distributed preparations that are the opposite of healthy, clean, and fair.
Quantity over quality. The “popular” take on a “typical” Portuguese plate is something filled with proteins and double carbs (potatoes AND rice, all generally bad). None of it is “traditional”, as we mean it.
Reducing Portuguese cuisine into a dichotomy between popular conflated with traditional and innovative conflated with modernist and haute and reinterpreted is for me not only wrong on many philosophical and interpretative levels but also sloppy on interpretative, semantic, and semiotic levels.
For me, dumbing down a topic is bad because it erases and eradicates from the discourse the complexity of gastronomy as a discipline, and is a systemic and sociological interpretative failure.
An inconsistency I found was the use of highly modernist imagery throughout the issues (in the true sense of this word, see Depero through Almada Negreiros). For a magazine so vehemently vocal against modernism, a bit contradictory. Maybe here too, modernism doesn’t mean what we think we mean and using modernist art is instead a homage to popularised art.
I was super confused at this point. Was modernism good or bad? Or were we lost as well on the meaning of modernism?
But back to the food.
I am not saying that the topic of popular food is not worthy. There is even a magazine for it, right?
What I challenge is the relevance of this phenomenon from a gastronomic perspective.
Let us try an example dear to my heart: talking about extra virgin olive oil.
It is a popular (in this meaning intended throughout this article, both in the sense of “belongs to the people’s customary use” and “it is widely used by the people” ) AND traditional ingredient that is ALSO a fine dining one.
As my Chef friend Andrea Leali says, it is BOTH an ingredient and a kitchen tool.
But where does popular cuisine (in this meaning given by Farta) stand with olive oil?
The popular cuisine “championed by backslapping uncles and loving grandmas” is known to use old bottles, frequently refilled, mainly not extra virgin, frequently 1 euro supermarket oil and surely not of the latest vintage if not cut with other vegetable oils and fats, and chlorophyll.
Or where else did you think those specific flavours of popular dishes sold for a dime came, from using Amor é Cego?
The lauded loving grandmas and backslapping uncles are of a generation that was taught to substitute butter and oil with margarine, whose gastronomic horizon was the supermarket in most cases and that felt in many cases embarrassment for the poor dishes of their own tradition, trying as much as possible to distantiate themselves from a past of hunger and long hours in the garden to tend vegetables and herbs.
Let’s not pretend this is Southern Italy where the specific sociocultural fabric of this society still presents women and men cooking at home heritage recipes that have gone unchanged since before the wars (we have other issues there, and there are cool books by Massimo Montanari to elucidate what Great Lie the Parmigiano ancient history is), accompanied by locally sourced, delightful ingredients.
Portugal is a bit different in this.
Unfortunately, I say.
People eat out more frequently than in Italy, and there is a general dismissal of the schiscetta as something only poor people do.
When you can have lunch (including drink and coffee) often for 5 to 7 euros sitting down in a restaurant, the effort to cook something, pack it and deal with stained Tupperware seems too much.
Even to me.
But look, there surely is more knowledge and understanding about traditional and popular gastronomy in chefs and cooks of this present generation and in the generation to come, than in most of their parents who “did as they do” because they were told to do so.
Let’s not cut their wings with empty issues, purporting trivial eateries as pearls to be preserved.
I, too, was guilty of that.
Blinded by the marvels of Lisbon, I too cried aloud when a historically popular tavern closed down, only to realize with time that everything served there was not really good, nor genuine, nor traditional.
Popular, yes, it was.
But also far, far away from traditional cuisine. And also serving poor quality ingredients, cheap stuff to fill unpretentious bellies.
Instead, we should collectively strive for excellence: fatti non foste per viver (e mangiare) come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza said my illustrious citizen Dante Alighieri. He means that we as a species are designed to pursue virtues and knowledge, not to live like animals.
And he is right today in Portugal as he was in Medieval Florence and in his exile.
I intend to try to discuss gastronomy, and I will strive not to make idols out of gold and clay moulds. We should know how it ends. With all due respect for the authors, producers, and collaborators of the magazine, of course: they can do as they please.
But after reading Farta, I need to say that we agree to disagree on the philosophical implication of popularity and tradition.
And disagree on the concept of needing to preserve the excellence, like SlowFood does, of products and habits, instead of celebrating bad habits that have become popular - like the usage of margarine, or the complete disregard for product quality.
It seemed they also didn’t agree at heart, as their celebration lunch for the launch of one of the editions was…a rather fine dining-ish meal of grilled chicken, the popular dish that was a matter of subject in the edition.
Freudian slip?
I think most of the new generation chefs are heading consistently in this way, even when they prepare popular-and-traditional food like a simple sandwich or their twist on moelas.
Many of them have knowledge, technique, and ambition.
I wish that Portugal could create literature and literacy about gastronomy or even something that can be captured in an Anthology of Culinary Writings as it happened this past year in neighbouring Spain.
Something that can be enjoyed by interested public and professionals alike.
Still, I hope and hope.
I leave you this quatation from the catalan chef Maria Nicolau. I have translated it from catalan to Spanish. I think that it's more than clever: "La cocina tradicional si no es útil, no tiene ninguna razón de ser. No está para ser folclorizada, ni para ser idolatrada, ni defendida como si fuera una especie de ideología. La cocina tradicional es sabiduría acumulada generación tras generación, de ensayo y error, de aprender a medida que se va haciendo, porque así es como se aprende la cocina en casa. Así es como se ha aprendido generación tras generación, y así es como nos llega hoy. Parecía que quizás habíamos perdido esos goznes y ese hilo, que nos habíamos desenganchado, porque en casa ya no tenemos contacto con esas madres y esas abuelas que cocinan y tenemos que encontrar canales distintos. Si Twitter sirve para algo, que sea para esto, ¿no? Para compartir entre todos lo que sabemos y lo que hemos visto en casa: utensilios, trucos, formas de hacer...".
Don't touch my francesinha! How can you not appreciate something that is so deadly and so delicious at the same time? 😄
Joking aside, I completely agree on the whole piece. As a Neapolitan I see this topic as problematic with the fact that a lot of our most popular foods make a deep-fry fest and they're so embedded in our culinary culture that is hard to give up on them. But they're also one of the causes of our high rate of child obesity. And that come from a people that in the past was known to be avid consumer of vegetable. Today we still do it, but most of the time not in a healthy way.