What do you think?
Rate this book
National Dish: Around the World in Search of Food, History, and the Meaning of Home
Named a Best Book of 2023 by Financial Times, The Guardian, and BBC's The Food Programme
“Anya von Bremzen, already a legend of food writing and a storytelling inspiration to me, has done her best work yet. National Dish is a must-read for all those who believe in building longer tables where food is what bring us all together.” —José Andrés
“If you’ve ever contemplated the origins and iconography of classic foods, then National Dish is the sensory-driven, historical deep dive for you . . . [an] evocative, gorgeously layered exercise in place-making and cultural exploration, nuanced and rich as any of the dishes captured within.” —Boston Globe
In this engrossing and timely journey to the crossroads of food and identity, award-winning writer Anya von Bremzen explores six of the world’s most fascinating and iconic culinary cultures—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey—brilliantly weaving cuisine, history, and politics into a work of scintillating connoisseurship and charm
We all have an idea in our heads about what French food is—or Italian, or Japanese, or Mexican, or . . . But where did those ideas come from? Who decides what makes a national food canon? Anya von Bremzen has won three James Beard Awards and written several definitive cookbooks, as well as her internationally acclaimed memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. In National Dish, she investigates the truth behind the eternal cliché—“we are what we eat”—traveling to six storied food capitals, going high and low, from world-famous chefs to culinary scholars to strangers in bars, in search of how cuisine became connected to place and identity.
A unique and magical cook’s tour of the world, National Dish brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country.
“Anya von Bremzen, already a legend of food writing and a storytelling inspiration to me, has done her best work yet. National Dish is a must-read for all those who believe in building longer tables where food is what bring us all together.” —José Andrés
“If you’ve ever contemplated the origins and iconography of classic foods, then National Dish is the sensory-driven, historical deep dive for you . . . [an] evocative, gorgeously layered exercise in place-making and cultural exploration, nuanced and rich as any of the dishes captured within.” —Boston Globe
In this engrossing and timely journey to the crossroads of food and identity, award-winning writer Anya von Bremzen explores six of the world’s most fascinating and iconic culinary cultures—France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey—brilliantly weaving cuisine, history, and politics into a work of scintillating connoisseurship and charm
We all have an idea in our heads about what French food is—or Italian, or Japanese, or Mexican, or . . . But where did those ideas come from? Who decides what makes a national food canon? Anya von Bremzen has won three James Beard Awards and written several definitive cookbooks, as well as her internationally acclaimed memoir Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking. In National Dish, she investigates the truth behind the eternal cliché—“we are what we eat”—traveling to six storied food capitals, going high and low, from world-famous chefs to culinary scholars to strangers in bars, in search of how cuisine became connected to place and identity.
A unique and magical cook’s tour of the world, National Dish brings us to a deep appreciation of how the country makes the food, and the food the country.
351 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 20, 2023
303 people are currently reading
10310 people want to read
About the author
Anya von Bremzen
12 books139 followersAnya von Bremzen is one of the most accomplished food writers of her generation: the winner of three James Beard awards; a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure magazine; and the author of five acclaimed cookbooks. She also contributes regularly to Food & Wine and Saveur and has written for The New Yorker, Departures, and the Los Angeles Times. She divides her time between New York City and Istanbul.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 211 reviews
September 12, 2023
The premise for this book is so hopelessly misguided as to be borderline offensive. Bremzen does a fantastic job of representing the difficult minefield of national identities in the former Soviet Union and the former Ottoman Empire towards the end of the book but glosses over the extremely complicated histories of French, Italian and Spanish identities and it comes across as a caricature. I don't know enough about Mexican and Japanese national identities but I'd venture they're a lot more complicated than she made them out to be. You can't go to one city in a country and figure out who they are.
Speaking as someone born in Barcelona and raised in the Balearic Islands, the fact that she dismissed Catalonia and the Basque Country as the "bougie" areas and then went to Seville, of all places, to immerse herself in "Spanish culture" was something that made me physically cringe. This is a stereotype, of course, but the fact that the entire rest of Andalusia dislikes people from Seville because they have uppity attitudes doesn't sound like they'd be the best choice to speak for the folksy Spanish people. And the jamón from the dehesas comes from Extremadura, which is a completely different province. A bit like telling people you got your Champagne in Bordeaux. You'd get weird looks. The endless vitriol towards Catalan people was never addressed by Bremzen, and when one of the locals blamed "the Catalan independentists for the rise of the extreme right" she made no effort to unpack that at all.
The stupid thing is that nationalism only comes in two flavours: colonialist and reactionary. The Spanish are, as everybody knows, up there with the British for top horrible colonialist people, and the people in the provinces who have a different culture and language, after having been brutally repressed by several dictatorships, are now blamed for inciting the right to "fight back" against their nationalism. There are the oppressors and the oppressed, and their nationalisms are not the same. She does go on a very detailed exploration of Russian and Ukrainian identities but does not extend the same courtesy to other people. Being Jewish is one of those identities uniquely untied to geography, but for some reason, she's still mired down in seeing other people as being tied to theirs.
France has a similar history of assimilation of minority cultures, which is why they only have one national language. I don't think you'll find a lot of Italian people who like anything anybody cooks outside of their general vicinity, whether they're in the same country or not. Cultural identity is a construct that we try to impose on people with politically defined artificial borders, as if people in northern Catalonia have fewer things in common with people from Andorra and southern France than with people in Andalusia. Bremzen clearly knows this, and talks about the artificiality of national dishes and identities, and I still feel she fell down on the job of trying to bring enough nuance to the conversation.
PS: While I have your attention, may I recommend the cinematic masterpiece that is Πολίτικη Κουζίνα (A Touch of Spice, 2003)? It's a sweet and poignant look at the complicated history of Turkey and Greece. There's a lot of food and it's funny. You'll like it.
Speaking as someone born in Barcelona and raised in the Balearic Islands, the fact that she dismissed Catalonia and the Basque Country as the "bougie" areas and then went to Seville, of all places, to immerse herself in "Spanish culture" was something that made me physically cringe. This is a stereotype, of course, but the fact that the entire rest of Andalusia dislikes people from Seville because they have uppity attitudes doesn't sound like they'd be the best choice to speak for the folksy Spanish people. And the jamón from the dehesas comes from Extremadura, which is a completely different province. A bit like telling people you got your Champagne in Bordeaux. You'd get weird looks. The endless vitriol towards Catalan people was never addressed by Bremzen, and when one of the locals blamed "the Catalan independentists for the rise of the extreme right" she made no effort to unpack that at all.
The stupid thing is that nationalism only comes in two flavours: colonialist and reactionary. The Spanish are, as everybody knows, up there with the British for top horrible colonialist people, and the people in the provinces who have a different culture and language, after having been brutally repressed by several dictatorships, are now blamed for inciting the right to "fight back" against their nationalism. There are the oppressors and the oppressed, and their nationalisms are not the same. She does go on a very detailed exploration of Russian and Ukrainian identities but does not extend the same courtesy to other people. Being Jewish is one of those identities uniquely untied to geography, but for some reason, she's still mired down in seeing other people as being tied to theirs.
France has a similar history of assimilation of minority cultures, which is why they only have one national language. I don't think you'll find a lot of Italian people who like anything anybody cooks outside of their general vicinity, whether they're in the same country or not. Cultural identity is a construct that we try to impose on people with politically defined artificial borders, as if people in northern Catalonia have fewer things in common with people from Andorra and southern France than with people in Andalusia. Bremzen clearly knows this, and talks about the artificiality of national dishes and identities, and I still feel she fell down on the job of trying to bring enough nuance to the conversation.
PS: While I have your attention, may I recommend the cinematic masterpiece that is Πολίτικη Κουζίνα (A Touch of Spice, 2003)? It's a sweet and poignant look at the complicated history of Turkey and Greece. There's a lot of food and it's funny. You'll like it.
January 21, 2024
Oh, this book made me happy. It wasn't flawless, but was so much better than most books of its type that I'm rounding up from 4.5 stars. For one thing, von Bremzen can write. Here, she meets a ramen expert in Tokyo and is surprised to learn that he's American:
More on ramen later. Many reviewers of this book have focused one or more of the specific cuisines she addressed (French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Mexican and Turkish) or lamented the ones left out -- nothing about the delicious cuisines of Southeast Asia, North Africa, Persia or Korea, for example. Von Bremzen didn't set out to catalog the national dish of every country, of course. Her intent was to explore the idea of a national dish, and I felt she did this very well. What she found, essentially, were two categories of contenders: First, there were dishes that have been around forever, and now nations are squabbling over who actually invented them.
With a few notable exceptions (China, France, a handful of island nations), the world's current national boundaries just haven't been around for very long. The national boundaries of the United States, India, most of Europe, and much of the antipodean world have been settled only within living memory, making it a bit problematic to claim a dish that's been around for hundreds of years.
Conversely, many so-called 'national dishes' are not nearly as historic as the countries that claim them. Something like pizza has been invented so many times in so many different forms that it seems a bit specious to squabble about where it originated. Naples has as good a claim as any, notes the author, but most of Italy north of Rome is still leery about being associated with anything from that allegedly benighted region of the country.
With charm, wit and and extensive research, von Bremzen lays out the evidence and concludes that people are nostalgic for the recipes their parents and grandparents cooked, and there is generally a high degree of overlap (with variations) within a given region of the world, both for historical and geographic reasons. Italian food didn't have any tomatos and Mexican food didn't have any cumin until trade began between the Old and New Worlds. The people who advocate for national dishes tend to be nationalists, exploiting the nostalgia people feel about food for political purposes. National dishes serve a political and not a cultural agenda.
* * * *
A 1911 food guide to Tokyo described the restaurants in the Chinese neighborhoods as "sad and decrepit places, stinking of pig fat." Eventually, though, the Japanese noticed that the meat, oil, fat and spices in Chinese food filled gaps in their own cuisine. Mirroring the elevation of food trucks in the U.S. to hip eateries, the cheap pork-bone soup with noodles have gone organo- locovore msg-free locally sourced farm-to-table high-priced chic with resident senseis and TV shows and...and then there's the other end, which is the instant ramen market.
Instant ramen was invented in 1958, when a businessman named Momfuko Ando figured out how to dry noodles and have them become springy and stretchy again when immersed in boiling water. In 2007, the year he died at age 94, his company had sold 50 billion packages of instant ramen, ten percent of which were consumed by the Japanese themselves. This led to efforts to create healthier, tastier high-end instant ramen, with considerable success. But....but....with the other 90% being eaten abroad, and it actually deriving from Chinese food, and the Japanese appropriating every type of food on earth...can it really be considered a 'national dish'?
Von Bremzen does the math and figured out that 'kombini' food is, from sheer volume, the actual national food. Kombinis are what in the US would be called mini-marts, and there are three giant national chains -- 7-11, Lawson's and Family Mart. A new one opens in Japan every six hours. Every day, 33% of Japanese pay a visit. I remember my first visit to a Kombini, located somewhere in the bowels of the subway system below Haneda airport, and the surprise I felt watching dozens of commuters leaving their briefcases, backpacks and luggage out in the railway-station hallway, the better to pack themselves inside the store. Thievery is unheard of.
"They say a human body is 60 percent water," writes von Bremzen. "After four weeks in Tokyo, mine was a more impressive 90 percent Kombini."
Kombinis crank out sushi rolls, curry buns, breads, soups and et cetera that the Japanese find irresistable, to the great consternation of high-end chefs. von Bremzen isn't really touting the excellence of Kombini food so much as undermining the whole idea of national dishes.
Her essays about the other countries she visits are similarly interesting and amusing. I won't make you read about them here -- better to consult the source directly. She's a fun dinner date. But it becomes less amusing at the end, when she points to her own unease with her Russian heritage and the arguments between Russia and Ukraine over who invented borsch. "Something that could bring the two peoples together," she laments, "has instead become just another thing that divides us." Enjoy your food, is the message, but don't plant your flag in it.
Tall, broad-shouldered, and in his midthirties, he wore a black Warriors basketball cap -- he's from the Bay Area -- and black jeans extravagantly torn by a designer friend. His deeply semiotic sneakers were beyond my decoding. And I tried not to stare too hard at the lollipop-madness of his big hands' painted fingernails. How would I even communicate with such a forbiddingly out-there, hip hop cool ra-ota? But Abram just said, "Hey, let's go crush some bowls," fed the requisite thousand-yen coins into Mensho's ticket machine, and off we went noodling.Ramen, as it turns out, began life as a dish called 'Shino Soba,' with 'Shino' being a slur against Chinese people -- pork noodle soup could be bought at cheap establishments in Chinese neighborhoods, and was considered poor people's food. In the wake of WWII, the whole country became poor, and was supported by wheat subsidies from the United States, and hey presto, that greasy, hot, salty and cheap soup suddenly didn't look so bad anymore.
More on ramen later. Many reviewers of this book have focused one or more of the specific cuisines she addressed (French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Mexican and Turkish) or lamented the ones left out -- nothing about the delicious cuisines of Southeast Asia, North Africa, Persia or Korea, for example. Von Bremzen didn't set out to catalog the national dish of every country, of course. Her intent was to explore the idea of a national dish, and I felt she did this very well. What she found, essentially, were two categories of contenders: First, there were dishes that have been around forever, and now nations are squabbling over who actually invented them.
So really, UNESCO, what were you thinking when recently awarding dolma to Azerbaijan, Armenia's formerly friendly fellow Soviet republic turned mortal enemy after the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict erupted in the nineties (and reopened just recently)? Upon hearing the dolma news I could just imagine the glee on the face of my Azeri acquaintance Tahir Amiraslanov, author of a book charmingly titled Culinary Kleptomania: How Armenians Plagiarized Azeri Cuisine with a preface by Azerbaijan's kleptocratic president, Ilham Aliyev.The second category are foods that are purported to have existed since the dim mists of time but which, like ramen, are fairly recent inventions, conveniently forgotten by their nationalistic supporters.
With a few notable exceptions (China, France, a handful of island nations), the world's current national boundaries just haven't been around for very long. The national boundaries of the United States, India, most of Europe, and much of the antipodean world have been settled only within living memory, making it a bit problematic to claim a dish that's been around for hundreds of years.
Conversely, many so-called 'national dishes' are not nearly as historic as the countries that claim them. Something like pizza has been invented so many times in so many different forms that it seems a bit specious to squabble about where it originated. Naples has as good a claim as any, notes the author, but most of Italy north of Rome is still leery about being associated with anything from that allegedly benighted region of the country.
With charm, wit and and extensive research, von Bremzen lays out the evidence and concludes that people are nostalgic for the recipes their parents and grandparents cooked, and there is generally a high degree of overlap (with variations) within a given region of the world, both for historical and geographic reasons. Italian food didn't have any tomatos and Mexican food didn't have any cumin until trade began between the Old and New Worlds. The people who advocate for national dishes tend to be nationalists, exploiting the nostalgia people feel about food for political purposes. National dishes serve a political and not a cultural agenda.
* * * *
A 1911 food guide to Tokyo described the restaurants in the Chinese neighborhoods as "sad and decrepit places, stinking of pig fat." Eventually, though, the Japanese noticed that the meat, oil, fat and spices in Chinese food filled gaps in their own cuisine. Mirroring the elevation of food trucks in the U.S. to hip eateries, the cheap pork-bone soup with noodles have gone organo- locovore msg-free locally sourced farm-to-table high-priced chic with resident senseis and TV shows and...and then there's the other end, which is the instant ramen market.
Instant ramen was invented in 1958, when a businessman named Momfuko Ando figured out how to dry noodles and have them become springy and stretchy again when immersed in boiling water. In 2007, the year he died at age 94, his company had sold 50 billion packages of instant ramen, ten percent of which were consumed by the Japanese themselves. This led to efforts to create healthier, tastier high-end instant ramen, with considerable success. But....but....with the other 90% being eaten abroad, and it actually deriving from Chinese food, and the Japanese appropriating every type of food on earth...can it really be considered a 'national dish'?
Von Bremzen does the math and figured out that 'kombini' food is, from sheer volume, the actual national food. Kombinis are what in the US would be called mini-marts, and there are three giant national chains -- 7-11, Lawson's and Family Mart. A new one opens in Japan every six hours. Every day, 33% of Japanese pay a visit. I remember my first visit to a Kombini, located somewhere in the bowels of the subway system below Haneda airport, and the surprise I felt watching dozens of commuters leaving their briefcases, backpacks and luggage out in the railway-station hallway, the better to pack themselves inside the store. Thievery is unheard of.
"They say a human body is 60 percent water," writes von Bremzen. "After four weeks in Tokyo, mine was a more impressive 90 percent Kombini."
Kombinis crank out sushi rolls, curry buns, breads, soups and et cetera that the Japanese find irresistable, to the great consternation of high-end chefs. von Bremzen isn't really touting the excellence of Kombini food so much as undermining the whole idea of national dishes.
Her essays about the other countries she visits are similarly interesting and amusing. I won't make you read about them here -- better to consult the source directly. She's a fun dinner date. But it becomes less amusing at the end, when she points to her own unease with her Russian heritage and the arguments between Russia and Ukraine over who invented borsch. "Something that could bring the two peoples together," she laments, "has instead become just another thing that divides us." Enjoy your food, is the message, but don't plant your flag in it.
February 7, 2023
As said in another review, this book made a perfect marriage of two things that I don't think anyone can really argue with: food, and historical facts that would make Jeopardy! question writers roll in their graves. Every question I had about anything and everything was answered, sometimes even before I realized I had that question. The writing was phenomenal, with an ability to transport me out of my dingy college sublet and into these cities around the world. Travel stresses me out, but for any of these places, I'd be willing to take that risk.
July 29, 2023
(Note: I received an advanced reader copy of this book courtesy of NetGalley)
This was a fantastically fascinating read. In exquisite detail, Anya van Bremzen reveals a range of complexities and myths that lie just beneath the surface of several dishes and cuisines that are held up as emblematic of particular nations. Some are cooked and enjoyed across large regions by multiple countries and numerous, peoples but are fiercely claimed by a particular nation (or nations) as theirs and theirs alone. Others have spent literal centuries being scorned in their home countries as low-class or regional fare not worth considering before they received their current prominence. Meanwhile, more than few were heavily influenced by the cuisines of outsiders, and a shocking amount were pushed to national elevation as part of aggressive top-down affairs. Pardon the puns, but there’s just so much food for thought to mentally chew upon. Not only was I able to learn a tremendous amount of the several cuisines that von Bremzen selected, but it’s given me the foundations for a brand new critical eye, and I've been enjoying myself as I've applied to several otehr national, and even regional dishes.
For lovers of food history, or for those who just love to curl up with a great nonfiction read, National Dish is not a title to be missed!
This was a fantastically fascinating read. In exquisite detail, Anya van Bremzen reveals a range of complexities and myths that lie just beneath the surface of several dishes and cuisines that are held up as emblematic of particular nations. Some are cooked and enjoyed across large regions by multiple countries and numerous, peoples but are fiercely claimed by a particular nation (or nations) as theirs and theirs alone. Others have spent literal centuries being scorned in their home countries as low-class or regional fare not worth considering before they received their current prominence. Meanwhile, more than few were heavily influenced by the cuisines of outsiders, and a shocking amount were pushed to national elevation as part of aggressive top-down affairs. Pardon the puns, but there’s just so much food for thought to mentally chew upon. Not only was I able to learn a tremendous amount of the several cuisines that von Bremzen selected, but it’s given me the foundations for a brand new critical eye, and I've been enjoying myself as I've applied to several otehr national, and even regional dishes.
For lovers of food history, or for those who just love to curl up with a great nonfiction read, National Dish is not a title to be missed!
June 25, 2023
This book is an exploration of national food identities with a dash of travel memoir thrown in.
I found it to be immersive and informative. There were so many moments while reading when I thought, “Oh, I wonder…” only for my question to be answered on the very next page. I feel like I learned something about both food culture and the general history of each place the author described. I appreciated that she took the time to consider each dish from both a historical and modern perspective. Food culture, just like everything else, changes drastically across time and this text dutifully acknowledges that.
My favorite chapters were the ones about Naples and Tokyo. I loved that their national dishes had the ability to be either “high brow” or “low brow”. Of all the places she described, Naples is the one I would most like to visit myself.
Thank you to Penguin Press and Penguin Random House Audio for an Advanced Reader Copy.
I found it to be immersive and informative. There were so many moments while reading when I thought, “Oh, I wonder…” only for my question to be answered on the very next page. I feel like I learned something about both food culture and the general history of each place the author described. I appreciated that she took the time to consider each dish from both a historical and modern perspective. Food culture, just like everything else, changes drastically across time and this text dutifully acknowledges that.
My favorite chapters were the ones about Naples and Tokyo. I loved that their national dishes had the ability to be either “high brow” or “low brow”. Of all the places she described, Naples is the one I would most like to visit myself.
Thank you to Penguin Press and Penguin Random House Audio for an Advanced Reader Copy.
July 28, 2023
a carousel of cliches and stereotypes all the way to the chapters on turkey and borsch
It beats me why this book got so many rave reviews. It is cliche after cliche, the author feels the urge to language drop ten times per page (why say nonna over and over when grandma will do? Why use Spanish at every really simple word which has a perfect translation? It is so unnecessary and obnoxious and ohhhh look she can speak so many languages - except she can’t either but that’s a different topic). The interviewees all speak like overexcited idiots, as she always puts an exclamation mark at the end of their sentences. The chapter on Turkey and borsch maybe are closer to her heart and she stops going around ridiculing everyone she meets as some mamma mia madre de dios arigato stereotype. Utterly bewildering.
It beats me why this book got so many rave reviews. It is cliche after cliche, the author feels the urge to language drop ten times per page (why say nonna over and over when grandma will do? Why use Spanish at every really simple word which has a perfect translation? It is so unnecessary and obnoxious and ohhhh look she can speak so many languages - except she can’t either but that’s a different topic). The interviewees all speak like overexcited idiots, as she always puts an exclamation mark at the end of their sentences. The chapter on Turkey and borsch maybe are closer to her heart and she stops going around ridiculing everyone she meets as some mamma mia madre de dios arigato stereotype. Utterly bewildering.
June 15, 2024
Really interesting concept, but I found the execution lacking. The writing style here was unbearably pretentious--some people will love it, but I couldn't stop rolling my eyes. While I cannot deny the iconic food cultures of the countries chosen--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey (with a bonus mention of Ukraine & Russia the epilogue--and obviously there could only be so many countries in this book, the fact that 3/7 are European countries (0 are African) made this feel a little lopsided; I love Spain, but it easily could have been cut and replaced with Brazil or Morocco or Egypt or Nigeria or Thailand or Indonesia, etc, especially because the focus on "tapas" there was so uninspired. I appreciated the moments of history and the overall concept of exploring what it means to have a "national" dish when so much of food history predates current country lines, the ambition here felt larger than what was delivered. She talks to real people on the ground, who of course all have their own thoughts/opinions/politics, many of which are occasionally fairly xenophobic, and the ways in which she rarely calls that out, and only ever in a sly/coy writing quip felt borderline irresponsible. Literally the last line in the book essentially says "Fuck all Russians" because of the atrocities being committed by Putin/Russian leadership, with absolutely ZERO nuance for the fact that nationality does not equal support, endorsement, or complicity in the actions being taken by corrupt leadership. It just felt like this book had such great, expansive potential and it often ended up feeling very narrow-minded.
July 19, 2023
What a lyrical array of food...
comfort feast plentitude.
I savor,
chewing gritty lingo I waver.
Outshine phony Michelin star;
home cooking the way we're.
Poor or rich,
market economy pitch;
prejudice and pride,
a recipe can take a side;
Define National Dish?
I shun others' political wish.
comfort feast plentitude.
I savor,
chewing gritty lingo I waver.
Outshine phony Michelin star;
home cooking the way we're.
Poor or rich,
market economy pitch;
prejudice and pride,
a recipe can take a side;
Define National Dish?
I shun others' political wish.
August 13, 2023
DNF. The author is insufferable and I can’t take it any more. She’s incredibly pretentious and trying so hard to be “worldly.” Too many generalizations about outside cultures, and some extremely dense parts, made me not interested in continuing.
July 23, 2023
A combined foodie and travel memoir that starts out with the thesis that…French cuisine ain’t all that. And that’s an argument I can fully support. The chapters on Oaxaca and Turkey were my favorite (possibly because both coincide with 2 of my favorite cuisines) and the afterwards on borsch was heartbreakingly prescient.
It would have garnered a full 5 stars but there were no pictures included of any of the dishes.
It would have garnered a full 5 stars but there were no pictures included of any of the dishes.
September 5, 2023
DNFd at 78 pages - while I love and appreciate a worldly and educated woman, this was a touch too condescending and mamma Mia for me.
did-not-finish
June 17, 2024The premise of this book is SO interesting. I can deal with a lot in a book, but I cannot handle a few things about it:
1) The pretentiousness. If you like to hyper-intellectualize everything, then you may not have an issue. I felt like von Bremzen was trying to show off how smart she is; it comes across as snobby.
2) The prose. I remember in fifth grade I learned about what a thesaurus is, so I used it on projects willy-nilly and as a result had a bunch of words used in ways that didn't actually make sense. I get a similar vibe from National Dish.
3) The information (or seeming lack thereof). I learned very little about the dishes the chapters in this book focus on. Instead you get a summary of what the author did during her time in those countries and not a lot of actual information.
4) The editing. Holy shit did this need another editor. I generally don't care when a sentence starts with "and". In this book however, it usually precedes an incomplete sentence and follows a run-on sentence. There's lots of clunky sentences that need either less meat to them or need to be split into separate sentences. As a heavy comma user myself, THERE ARE TOO MANY COMMAS in places that don't need commas. I'm not talking about Oxford commas here- I mean they are just thrown in there at places where there may be a pause while speaking, but they're just not necessary in writing. I don't think I've ever had this hard of a time getting through a book because of these things.
All in all this is a hard DNF for me, which is unfortunate because I was looking forward to learning a lot through this book. It's too difficult to read- just not in any good way.
1) The pretentiousness. If you like to hyper-intellectualize everything, then you may not have an issue. I felt like von Bremzen was trying to show off how smart she is; it comes across as snobby.
2) The prose. I remember in fifth grade I learned about what a thesaurus is, so I used it on projects willy-nilly and as a result had a bunch of words used in ways that didn't actually make sense. I get a similar vibe from National Dish.
3) The information (or seeming lack thereof). I learned very little about the dishes the chapters in this book focus on. Instead you get a summary of what the author did during her time in those countries and not a lot of actual information.
4) The editing. Holy shit did this need another editor. I generally don't care when a sentence starts with "and". In this book however, it usually precedes an incomplete sentence and follows a run-on sentence. There's lots of clunky sentences that need either less meat to them or need to be split into separate sentences. As a heavy comma user myself, THERE ARE TOO MANY COMMAS in places that don't need commas. I'm not talking about Oxford commas here- I mean they are just thrown in there at places where there may be a pause while speaking, but they're just not necessary in writing. I don't think I've ever had this hard of a time getting through a book because of these things.
All in all this is a hard DNF for me, which is unfortunate because I was looking forward to learning a lot through this book. It's too difficult to read- just not in any good way.
July 13, 2023
It was brainy and smart but really fun at the same time, not an easy feat to pull off. I was a fan of Bremzen's Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking since I'm of Russian origin. But this book had amazing scope and was more of a travelog, also combining food history and politics in ways that felt original and surprising to me. I loved her adventures in Naples and Seville and learned so much about Tokyo and Oaxaca, too. Definitely recommended to fans of food and travel and history.
August 1, 2023
Follow the author down a frustratingly interesting rabbit hole about what defines a national dish.
July 9, 2023
Good look at food and culture and how nations adopt or create a "national" food. The author visits various cities to see how iconic foods - pizza in Naples, ramen in Japan can be recognized as emblematic of the place and how they are interpretated today. Easy to read and insightful.
April 29, 2024
really interesting, fascinating to read bremzen think aloud on the page about how nationalist identity & culture is (re/de)constructed through and with food
August 1, 2023
Thought provoking exploration of what makes a national dish via travel to France, Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Turkey. Plus a poignant last chapter reflection on borscht by the Russian emigre author. The writing is a little uneven but the descriptions of pot au feu, pizza, rice and sushi, mole and mezcal, and esp the Turkey chapter worth it. Lots of great history.
July 14, 2023
I bought this book thinking it might have recipes. But it didn't need them!! It read more like a novel, really absorbing. I finished it in two days. It's a journey that takes the author to Naples, Oaxaca, Tokyo, Seville, and Istanbul. And it all starts in Paris. As she travels and meets all kinds of interesting people, she reflects on how nations became nations and how they developed national cuisines and how foods like pizza, ramen, tortillas and tapas came to symbolize their countries. She is a really compelling writer, so funny and smart. Recommend highly.
September 2, 2023
This was an entertaining and informative book not only about the origins of some of the most popular foods in the world, but of how they originated within their cultures and how they fit into those cultures today. Many of them started out as foods that poor people ate, and the stories of how they went from that to gourmet are very interesting. I’m not at all a foodie, but this book immediately made me want to go out for tapas, ramen, and mole as soon as possible.
October 20, 2023
One of the best non fiction books I've read this year. Von Bremzen writing is superb with each subject intricately researched. The established dogma of a "national" dish is turned on its head, exposing such dishes as pot au fue, ramen, and even the ubiquitous Neapolitan pizza and it's most famous iteration the Marguerite. Truly fascinating and great prose.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 14, 2023
thanks to the publishers and netgalley for a free copy in return for an open and honest review
This was an interesting book looking at food through a journey of different places and its history through conversations with cooks and people and somethings you realise food can be weaponised for Nationalism but overall found the book very interesting and informative.
This was an interesting book looking at food through a journey of different places and its history through conversations with cooks and people and somethings you realise food can be weaponised for Nationalism but overall found the book very interesting and informative.
Read
July 23, 2023DNF. I really liked the premise of this book and tried to stick with it. It talks about travel and food, two of my favorite things! But it’s too dense with too many ideas packed together so it jumps around and is hard to follow.
September 7, 2023
Thoroughly delightful stories of the foods of nations and how they evolve. The epilogue about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is devastating in its depiction of Russian and Ukrainian ex-pats and their horror of the war.
September 30, 2023
Delicious and provocative book all around, but the epilogue was powerful.
November 18, 2024
3.75 stars
i enjoyed this book! it was an interesting dive into what a "national dish" means about a country's culture, history, societal issues, etc. and was made particularly interesting with the author's firsthand travel and experience in the countries themselves. she went out of her way to explore the areas she visited and to engage in their food cultures, which i thought offered a lot of unique insights.
some of the negative reviews of this book call out the author for stereotyping or oversimplifying certain countries and cultures, but i personally didn't see this happening a lot (again, just me personally - not trying to dismiss anyone else especially if they're from one of the cultures discussed in this book). i will say that the consistent sprinkling in of random words in the language of the country at hand was not necessary 99% of the time and was a bit of an odd choice, but didn't necessarily take away from the book itself
i enjoyed this book! it was an interesting dive into what a "national dish" means about a country's culture, history, societal issues, etc. and was made particularly interesting with the author's firsthand travel and experience in the countries themselves. she went out of her way to explore the areas she visited and to engage in their food cultures, which i thought offered a lot of unique insights.
some of the negative reviews of this book call out the author for stereotyping or oversimplifying certain countries and cultures, but i personally didn't see this happening a lot (again, just me personally - not trying to dismiss anyone else especially if they're from one of the cultures discussed in this book). i will say that the consistent sprinkling in of random words in the language of the country at hand was not necessary 99% of the time and was a bit of an odd choice, but didn't necessarily take away from the book itself
May 5, 2025
This book had a mixed tone of academic and casual travel journal. We follow the author on her journey allegedly to explore the national dishes of some arbitrarily chosen countries. The product however is a collection of dense facts with a sprinkle of sometimes irrelevant anecdotes thrown in. Some interesting points about globalization, the relationship between colonization and food, the relationship between identity and food, and food as a symbol for national pride but they were lost in the exorbitant amount of detail. I am not sure who this book is for.
September 29, 2024
Skipped the last chapter tbh. The story itself is interesting, but the writing style is very hard to read. It reads very slow, with the use of a lot of foreign words which make you pause. It was less about food rather than culture.
April 3, 2024
Each of the chapters probably warrant an entire book of their own, so they don't really explore an entire nation's food history/identity. To be honest I probably would have enjoyed this more as a TV programme with food and landscapes to enjoy looking at.
September 4, 2024
Took many tries to get into (timing was always wrong I guess?) but this time I was ready. Oaxaca chapter was my favorite
Displaying 1 - 30 of 211 reviews