re: Cajun And Creole Recipes For Y’all From Food and Wine Magazine

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How badly am I being duped on trying to find recipes for other ethnic/regional food?

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Quite often, badly duped. Unless you're reading a recipe written in the language of the ethnic group, you're likely following a recipe that's intended for a non-native audience. Lots of ingredients just aren't widely available outside of their source regions, or not available to most US mainstream grocery store shoppers...most ppl aren't going to make a trip three towns over to hit a specialty/ethnic grocer for something like phillippine shrimp paste, or karhai (curry) leaves for Keralan cooking, or mustard oil, or whatever.

And then there are the "pseudo" ethnic dishes that are Western restaurant creations never ever consumed in their purported place of origin (like General Tso's chicken, for one example).