I think it's really hard to say much of anything about the influence of different cultures on food, especially anything regarding flatbreads.
Every culture has some form of flatbread. Every culture has figured out "we can put other foods in/on-top of this flatbread". They figured it out thousands of years ago. Once you have the basic mechanic figured out, do the exact inputs matter that much, especially when you consider how varied the inputs can be within a specific, arbitrary category?
There is the common, bad-highschool-history meme of "(The Earl of Sandwich/his personal cook) invented the sandwich". Or, every culture has a tradition of picking up food with bread, for thousands of years, and it's not that big of a deal. A grilled cheese sandwich is just a Western European quesadilla!
One of my favorite ways to get people to scoff at me is to call polenta "grits". Yes, yes, "different strain of corn". But honestly, there are so many other variations in polenta/grits preparations that the specific strain of corn is really a minor drop in the bucket, and mostly amounts to regional availability. I know folks who will go nutso-spendo over "shrimp on a bed of polenta" but think "shrimp and grits" is cheap-food.
Polenta was (still is?) a poor man dish in the past. People got pellagra by eating only polenta all the time (BTW just discovered English and Italian use the same word). Selling it as a fancy food is a really,really good marketing trick.
Yeah, I live in Northern VA. We have a lot more dollars than sense here. We also like to white-wash southern food. Here in the DC area, for how it's prepared in dishes, polenta is definitely "rich-person's grits".
Every culture has some form of flatbread. Every culture has figured out "we can put other foods in/on-top of this flatbread". They figured it out thousands of years ago. Once you have the basic mechanic figured out, do the exact inputs matter that much, especially when you consider how varied the inputs can be within a specific, arbitrary category?
There is the common, bad-highschool-history meme of "(The Earl of Sandwich/his personal cook) invented the sandwich". Or, every culture has a tradition of picking up food with bread, for thousands of years, and it's not that big of a deal. A grilled cheese sandwich is just a Western European quesadilla!
One of my favorite ways to get people to scoff at me is to call polenta "grits". Yes, yes, "different strain of corn". But honestly, there are so many other variations in polenta/grits preparations that the specific strain of corn is really a minor drop in the bucket, and mostly amounts to regional availability. I know folks who will go nutso-spendo over "shrimp on a bed of polenta" but think "shrimp and grits" is cheap-food.