Everything Old is New Again

There is much focus, in the culinary world, on the creation of new flavor combinations. Much stock (pun intended) is put in the ability of a chef to show his prowess through novel combinations of common ingredients. It's the sort of drive that leads to the combination of oysters and licorice, coffee and pork. Originality is key. Jordi Butrón, research-cook at the experimental center of the Adrià brothers (of elBulli fame) said in a recent article:

The key thing now for a cook is to develop a library of flavors that you can recall. If I say to you, ‘Apple and cinnamon,’ you would click in immediately. ‘Yes, apple! Yes, cinnamon!’ The library of your mind contains that. But what if I say ‘Apple, asafetida’? Nothing! You have nothing stored there. Now, this is a benefit to the chef, because if I do apple and cinnamon and you don’t like it you think there’s something wrong with me, but if I do apple and asafetida and you don’t like it there’s something wrong with you.

It's tempting to write this off as a modern phenomenon, this idea that originality supersedes merit and experience, but as Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin famously wrote in 1825: "The discovery of a new dish confers more happiness on humanity, than the discovery of a new star." This is not Savarin trying on hyperbole; he really believed. The elevation of novel foods is not new.

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Special Treats

Lamb is not a meat I grew up eating. It's not commonly consumed in the States, as least not as commonly as is beef. In fact, as far as I can remember the first time I ate lamb was when I met my Australian girlfriend. She's never said as much, but I'm certain feeding me lamb was a test, and if I'd failed, she'd not have married me. Australians, you see love lamb, in fact they love it on a scale second only to New Zealanders. Americans do not. By way of comparison, Australians eat about 13.5 kilos of lamb per capita each year, while Americans eat about 0.3 kilos per capita.

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On Forgetfulness

There is something of a joke in my household that it's not possible to host a dinner party without forgetting to serve some small item of food or other at least once in the course of the night. Inevitably, after all your guests have gone home and the dishes are washed and the last of the wine is drunk and you are drunk as well, you open the fridge to find the carefully picked chervil sprigs which were meant to finish your grilled snapper course. I say it's a running joke at home because it happens every single time we have people over. Once, as our last guests walked out the door, my wife asked, eyebrow raised: “How did you enjoy the warm roast vegetable salad?” It was still in the oven, where I'd left it in a warmth holding pattern. This sort of forgetfulness isn't limited to home.

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On Autumn Leaves

I've just returned from a morning excursion to the local park after completing a mission to gather autumn leaves and other such paraphernalia for a craft project of my eldest son's. We'll be using the bits and pieces we collected as stamps, to make leaf-prints and the like. Autumn here in Sydney has only just started to really announce itself visually; the trees which line most of the city streets of my city (plane trees, for those keeping track) have finally acquiesced to the tilt of the Earth on its axis and now present a confusion of green and flame and red and purple and olive and gold and orange and more. The effect is best at a distance, as each leaf is more or less monochrome and is only truly spectacular when viewed as part of the whole. It's chilly, nearly cold, at least by Sydney standards, and red noses and dead leaves have me thinking of my childhood in Wyoming, where autumn creeps in only about six weeks after summer starts.

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A Million Free Eggs

I've mentioned, from time to time, the enormous affect that fundamental necessity has on the foods people consume. People eat, obviously, the foods which are generally available. More precisely, we tend to eat the best of the foods available. In the meanest of times, people will manage to subsist on just about anything. Being human, however, means mere subsistence is rarely enough, and groups of people, given enough time, find ways to make these subsistence foods delicious. Have a thousand years or so to find a use for pigs' blood? The result will be, inevitably, tasty (and boudin noir is delicious). Famine, you might argue, is one of the key evolutionary pressures on flavor. People eventually grow to love these famine foods so much that during good times, they continue to consume them, often elevating them to “delicacy” status. Allow enough time, enough lean time, and you'll build a National cuisine.

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