this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2023
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Any country has its specialties and these German Meme things are certainly good, but in general German cuisine is not very sophisticated. In Europe by far it is Spanish and in general Mediterranean cuisine. I am from Spain and here the food is worldclass, apart there are also not only the best wines, but also the beer can compete with the German one. The worst cuisine is in Nordic countries and England, this is already off the scale, luckily there are good Chinese and Indian restaurants there that guarantee survival outside of fish and chips.
Nordic countries might have given us lutefisk, but that's just a cover for their top notch baked goods. Fresh krumkake is like the best ice cream cone you've ever had.
Spanish cuisine is great
But French is every bit as good
Outside of Europe? Nobody can compete with America in depth and breadth in terms of incredible food options.
Options a lot, but not in local food and food culture.
This is a dumb take
If you believe this than you are woefully uninformed about American food culture.
You can get good authentic food from every region of the world here, but we also have a culture that deeply loves to create new and incredible things inspired by that foreign influence.
Look at American third wave coffee, for example. American coffee culture was inspired by the Italians, but has seen a renaissance of experimentation that makes it uniquely American. It’s now among the best in the world.
Spain has Italy and France beat "by far"? Probably a bit biased.
Italy has a similar cuisine as Spain, but generally the Mediterranean cuisine is the best, France generally isn't bad, but quite overrated, we found the best Restaurants in Alsace, perhaps, if Seafood is your thing, you can add Marseille. Besides, the wines are good, but the French beer is horrible, it taste like dishwater. I have traveled a lot in Europe and I know what they offer in the culinary world and there is a clear trend of the further north, the worse. Maybe it has to do with the way of life and the climate. When forcefulness and calories prevail over sophistication.
A huge chunk of traditional Nordic food is either dirt-poor peasant food, or food that keeps for months on end so the brutal winter doesn't kill you regardless of whether you're a dirt-poor peasant or a hoity-toity lord (and this is what lutefisk is: usually low-quality dried fish cured in lye to soften it.)
Unfortunately this also means that many recipes are more or less lost, or really only written down in eg. family recipe books. And at least here in Finland we've also stopped using a majority of the local herbs we historically used, in large part because they're not seen as "fancy" (being herbs that dirt-poor peasants gathered from the woods) – not that we were ever that into spices, life being honestly pretty miserable for the majority of the population especially when serfdom was a thing. People had, well, other priorities
The moment I hear someone claim a culture's food isn't sophisticated unironically is the moment im going to shut my brain off. It's such a ridiculous claim no matter who it's directed at.
You like whatever food you like. It's not more complicated than that.