According to this analysis, the most popular cuisine in my state is Pakistani. I wonder if people who create these maps ever visit the states they write about. In Chicago, one can find Pakistani food if one really tries but Illinois is enormous and there is a lot more than Chicago in it. I only wish we were sophisticated enough to have bunches of Pakistani restaurants everywhere. Gosh, I’d be happy with just one.
Pakistani Food in Illinois
Clarissa's Blog 
I could understand this if they were looking at the largest ratio of restaurants of x/ people of x as the most disproportionate… but how on earth is it possible with a straight face to say that southern food is disproportionately preffered in the south, or Tex-Mex in Texas. That’s absurd.
That’s like finding it shocking that in Italy, they’re eating a lot of pizza and in Japan a lot of raw fish…
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To be honest, there really isn’t that much difference between Pakistani food and Northern Indian food from Northern Gujarat, Punjab and Rajastan, at least not the dishes you see in restaurants. Just because a border is there doesn’t mean the food changes much. I’ve not seen Pashtun or Balochi dishes ever in restaurants in America.
Do the restaurants you’ve been to highlight that the meat is halal?
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“Do the restaurants you’ve been to highlight that the meat is halal?”
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In Illinois? 🙂 🙂 We got bashed when we published an article saying we hired a teacher of Arabic.
I suspect that people who freak out over the hiring of an Arabic language teacher and the people who eat at Pakistani restaurants are not the same for the most part. I know people who take halal as a byword for “the restaurant used a local butcher instead of going to Costco,and is patronized by Pakistanis, ergo the meat would be better.” The physical process for kosher meat and halal meat seem to be very similar to me.
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Of course, but you mentioned the word “halal ” which would freak people over around here. As for kosher, that’s simply not a word anybody outside of the university would recognize.
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I thought “kosher” was part of General American English but with a meaning more like “proper, done according to the rules, legitimate”.
When I was still iving in the US I often heard non-Jews use it that way. I don’t know if it’s used that way outside the US.
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I’m sure this is the meaning people know. But the meaning of kosher as a special way of preparing food that is used by Jews – if people have no idea who Jews are, how can they understand the whole structure?
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All Americans know who Jews are, they’re the ones who killed Jesus!
(joking, I’m joking though I do remember an elementary teacher saying that Jews didn’t accept Jesus as the messiah because he was poor and Jews care too much about money to accpet a poor man as king).
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“Jews didn’t accept Jesus as the messiah because he was poor and Jews care too much about money to accpet a poor man as king).”
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” it’s good that American Christians care so little about money that they keep voting for billionaires in presidential elections.”
Oh this was way before billionaires became vulgar and started running for office (with the distasteful exception of Nelson Rockefeller).
Another elementary teacher I had may have been (figuring it out in retrostpect) Armenian because she would go on and on about the terrible Turks and the horrible torture they carried out against their enemies (which she went into in more detail than was probably healthy for 10 year olds).
It’s a good thing I never took what they were teaching in school tremendously seriously…..
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Your teachers are eerily similar to my Soviet teachers. Say, did you happen to go to school in the USSR? 🙂
My first grade teacher called us “Disgusting Turks of the Celestial Father” whenever we misbehaved. That was back in 1983. I’m still not sure what the expression means.
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Southern Indian cuisine is far superior to northern in my experience. (extremely limited, yes)
Northern Indian food often seems like an extension of Arab and Turkish dishes on the one hand and Malaysian and Thai on the other. Southern Indian food is a different food universe not really like anywhere else.
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“Southern Indian cuisine is far superior to northern in my experience”
Get a load of this hipster!
“Northern Indian food often seems like an extension of Arab and Turkish dishes on the one hand and Malaysian and Thai on the other.”
The wrongness density here is so high I fear this sentence might collapse into a black hole and prevent light from escaping it. Clarissa, if the blog suddenly goes dark we know what caused it.
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“The wrongness density here is so high I fear this sentence might collapse into a black hole and prevent light from escaping it. Clarissa, if the blog suddenly goes dark we know what caused it.”
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Northern Indian food often seems like an extension of Arab and Turkish dishes on the one hand and Malaysian and Thai on the other.
Ok, I’ll bite. Why do you think that?
The flavor profiles of restaurant Thai food and restaurant North Indian food (and home cooked North Indian food) are NOT similar. I never eat Gujarati/Mughlai/Punjabi food and think “this is super similar in the format of dishes and flavor profiles” to Thai food –ever.
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Let’s see, staple thai food ingredients include fish sauce, lemongrass, kaffir lime, galangal, coconut milk, curry pastes, etc.
Not a single ingredient mentioned above is used in north indian cuisine.
I think Cliffy got confused with the word ‘curry’.
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To explain a leetle bit.
I was thinking of (and should have written) Arab and some African cuisine rather than Turkish and was referring to the idea that distinct cuisines are often points on a continuum rather than discrete entitities. I’ve had food made by West Africans, Afghans and Vietnamese(!) that didn’t seem that far from northern Indian food in concept and made with what tasted like similar spices .
I was also saying that I like the southern Indian food that I’ve had more than the northern. This might be a reflection of the fact that I’ve always been fascinated by Southern India – but Northern India… not so much and that goes to things like Indian classical (and modern) music as well.
If southern Indian food fis a current hipster thing then I’ll just crawl in a hole and die of embarassment at the idea of being inadvertently fashionable.
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