Cuisine

Cuisine (from French cuisine, "cooking; culinary art; kitchen"; ultimately from Latin coquere, "to cook") is a specific set of cooking traditions and practices, often associated with a specific culture. A cuisine is primarily influenced by the ingredients that are available locally or through trade. For example, the American-Chinese dish chop suey clearly reflected the adaptation of Chinese cuisine to the ingredients available in North America. Religious food laws can also exercise a strong influence on cuisine. For example, Indian cuisine is characterized by its wide varieties of vegetarian dishes because Hinduism discourages consumption of meat.[1]

A traditional cuisine is a coherent tradition of food preparation that rises from the daily lives and kitchens of a people over an extended period of time in a specific region of a country and which has notable distinctions from the cuisine of the country as a whole. Some examples of great regional variance can be seen in the cuisines of France, Italy, Mexico, India and China among others.