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practices and tastes. Thus, we select among exotic foods what is similar to national habits. Exoticism is an adaptation to typically French or German food practices and tastes. Parallels with French or German cooking are often made in the magazines to underline the proximity of exotic foods. Magazines mention the proximity of savors or products, and sometimes it is simply the proximity of speech explaining a foreign recipe through a comparison with the national practices. Moreover, magazines try to classify and insert within familiar food habits the unknown plants, products, or animals, replacing them within the French or German culinary culture; this preserves a familiar classification system and makes known a culinary practice that otherwise seems strange, explaining it by culinary analogies. For instance the evangelical expression, ‘the daily bread of North Africa’ (Brigitte, 1998) is employed for couscous. In consequence the same exotic food is constructed differently in France and Germany. Thus, chili con carne is a marker of Mexican food in the two countries but it does not refer to the same dish. In France it is always a meat stew with beans, tomatoes, and chili powder, i.e. the combination of meat and a leguminous plant found in many other French dishes (e.g. lentils and morteau sausage). In Germany the dish refers to something else, mainly meatballs with red bean sauce, tomatoes, and chili powder, which is a typical German way of cooking, as meatballs are a very traditional dish. This selection of what is most similar to one’s national culinary practices explains to a very large part the success of Spanish exoticism in Germany. Indeed, the first marker of this exotic food in German magazines is the term tapas, which are numerous small dishes consumed in Spain with aperitif while waiting for the evening meal. Tapas perfectly fit with the German way of eating Abendbrot, the German word for dinner. Abendbrot is much simpler than in France; it is most often composed of salad, bread and varied delicatessen, and cheeses. As a result, tapas in Germany became a real dinner and represent a variant of Abendbrot.
III.C. Codification of exotic foods Within this framework, the introduction of foreign foods involves the reduction and recombination of foreign culinary practices. This reconstruction is not due to hazard but refers to a logic of metonymy, the rhetorical figure that makes it possible to express a whole by one of its parts. Here, exoticism relies on the use of only one exotic product, and transforms a classical recipe into an exotic one: adding a slice of pineapple changes the traditional recipe to a Hawaiian one, such as the product ‘Hawaiian toast,’ which is toast with a slice of pineapple. The reduction of exoticism by combining a traditional recipe with Hawaiian pineapple relies on the history of the food industry. The first attempts to can pineapple were done in