Adrianna Tan
Speaking of Chinese restaurants, there’s a term I like that I see in Hokkien speaking parts of the world. I like it better than ‘authentic’ (also silly to claim you’re an authentic restaurant in Singapore / Taiwan / Malaysia)
They use 古早味 (ancient or nostalgic flavor) to signal that they cook things old school way, or it’s food that reminds you of your childhood. How far back? Nostalgia is a helluva drug so literally what your grandparents ate and no further I think
Adrianna Tan
Like recently I heard a Hokkien podcast talking about how Taiwanese people think the most nostalgic and traditional food is ‘railway bento’ but it’s really from not that long ago and started because of the Japanese occupation
When I think of 古早味 foods in a Hokkien context I think of things like hearty pork rib and shrimp noodle soup for breakfast or like 卤面 stewed noodles
Adrianna Tan
And in a modernizing world, it's also indicative of an effort to cook Chinese food in a way that's done without shortcuts.
Like they will absolutely cook the soup for 12 hours, not 20 min; they will make the fishballs from a whole fish themselves (sometimes even from fish they caught), not buy it from a factory. A lot of the 'decline' in food quality in those parts of the world come from the industrialization of parts of our food chain, too. These people use the term to signal 'craft'
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.