this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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That's interesting to me because the French use bread for basically every meal as well and in my mind it serves an equivalent cultural purpose, but they have so much variety it's mind-boggling. Dark, light, using different grains, flours, shapes, temperatures, yeasts, ... Pretty sure wars have been fought over disagreements on flour taste.
That a staple food like that wouldn't have 1000 traditional variations sounds crazy to me. I think it makes complete sense that Europeans would see rice and think "OK now how many possible combinations are there?" because it's just how we rationalize cooking.
Might have something to do with rice being a culture-wide staple and historically tended by an impoverished & exploited workforce — whereas breadmaking was more often lauded as an art form. 🤓
I'm not knowledgeable enough about either to confirm or deny that theory, though I am reminded of the Answer in Progress episode about pasta that concluded that the incredible variety in pasta shapes is because making intricate pasta was a form of creative expression for women.
Different bread though can be made with the same ingredients in different combinations. So of course they're was variety. Rice is grown as is. So unless a culture cultivated different species of rice which could take generations then they wouldn't have multiple types or rice. Different styles of bread could be made with very little extra effort and some probably even happened by accident. It doesn't take multiple generations to produce a new type of bread.
There are plenty of both wheat and rice species though. It's not like China has been eating rice for millennia without growing new kinds, modern rice and wheat are man-made plants anyway.
There is a looot of significance to the ingredients used for bread, and I don't think it's fair to say that rice is inherently not versatile.
I'm not down playing breads significance. I'm disagreeing with your implication that as a staple item rice is as easy to cultivate differences in as bread would be. You implied that when Europeans discovered rice they thought " wow there should be more kinds, we can make this more versitle" like the Asian people cultivating rice for centuries had missed the obvious unlike the bread inventing Europeans.
The whole thread is about Europeans/Westerners who find that there are different kinds of rice that can be mixed, vs Chinese/Asian people who don't view rice that way (what the original commenter said). I'm not passing a value judgement here, I just think it's an interesting cultural difference. Maybe that difference doesn't exist but then you can take it up with the other commenters on this thread, I'm just going off of what they said as I personally never until today thought that there was a problem with mixing different kinds rice. Also maybe it's really just that it's impossible to get tasty mixed rice, but my personal experience would disagree and also obviously if one type of rice takes half as long to cook then I'll put it in the cooker midway through so is there really a problem or is it just a cultural thing? There sure are a LOT of things Europeans get worked up about that don't really matter, for instance I think that dipping fries in ketchup is an abomination but also I recognize that this is just a cultural thing so maybe the same thing is happening here.