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Jules Yim | 芊文's avatar

You're quite right that imperial palace traditions were necessary for cuisines to innovate and develop into their respective "haute" variants. Indian and Chinese cuisines owe much of their distinct flavours to ingredients originally from Mesoamerica, so your ranking makes perfect sense to me.

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Tim Allen's avatar

Yes, there are plenty of examples of palace traditions determining national cuisines - Thailand and France are obvious examples of court cuisines. One has to presume that English monarchs never took much interest in food :-).

Java is an interesting case - there certainly are some specifically-Javanese dishes (tumpeng, urap, gudeg,...), but Javanese cuisine has never had the reputation that, say, Thai cuisine does (and to be honest, wouldn't deserve it, mohon maaf sebelumnya kalau ada yang tersinggung). The kratons certainly had a huge influence on other aspects of culture - wonder why the cuisine never quite took off.

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Spencer Wells's avatar

Good question, and in a way it did - more on this in an upcoming post…🙏

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Margot Thompson-Wells's avatar

Love it!

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Spencer Wells's avatar

Thank you!

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Guillermo Perez-Vega's avatar

Great article. Thanks for summarizing what I have been thinking for years. Just one correction. Cacao’s originated in the Amazon basin

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Spencer Wells's avatar

Thanks!

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Aric's avatar

Interesting no African foundational cuisine, sub Saharan at least. Otherwise they correspond to continents, except Australia I guess because of remoteness.

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