Travel, culinary diversity, migration and genealogy

Travel, trip ... Cooking, migration and genealogy go hand in hand!

Voyages are real wealth; They allow you to discover cultures, lifestyles. One of these wealth is the exploration of different culinary traditions in the world. According to their origins, everyone has a family recipe transmitted by their parents, their grandparents ... with us Bretons, it is often the pancakes (even if we grant you, it is not the most complicated recipe in the world) This is a common point between cooking and genealogy: transmission. Another common point: data. Yes, if digital data is often at the service of genealogy, this is also the case for the study of culinary traditions.

Les data dites «  culinaires » permettent d’effectuer une comparaison des différentes traditions culinaires en fonction des zones géographiques. Vous l’aurez sûrement remarqué au cours de vos voyages, il y a beaucoup de similitudes culturelles entre pays voisins, et c’est aussi le cas pour leurs traditions culinaires. C’est ce que montre le réseau de graphe créé à partir de l’étude de Sina Sadjamanesh, effectuée grâce à des listes de recettes en ligne et des bases de données nutritionnelles. Ainsi, les différents pays d’Asie par exemple ont une culture culinaire très proche. Cependant, si l’on analyse le répertoire de recettes du site Yummly, on peut se rendre compte que la cuisine mongole est « gustativement proche » de la cuisine canadienne ! Comme quoi…

Culinary diversity, witness to migration and population movements

Thanks to the geographic analysis of culinary traditions, we can establish a map allowing to highlight the link between the different migratory movements and culinary practices. Each migrant brings with him the culinary practices of his country. These recipes are not intended to stay only on the plates of the ethnicity community concerned, but to spread and enrich the gastronomic culture of the host country. Who has never eaten for example a good couscous, a dish that has become cult in France, and whose industrial version is more and more present on the stalls of our supermarkets? He is actually witness to the colonization of the Maghreb at 19^ecentury, then was re -imported by black feet after the independence of Algeria. But each country has its particularity, even in traditional recipes, as proof, it is enough to look at the recipe for Tunisian, Algerian and Moroccan couscous to realize the plurality of different recipes for the same dish.

The cultural heritage of a country is therefore the witness and the heritage of a migratory and colonial past, transmitted by previous generations and identifiable to travel sandstone. Only one solution to discover this heritage: taste everything!