Gastrodome: The Trinity

Monday's Child Is Fair of Face

I’ve been thinking about the three “flavor profiles” I tend to fall back on whether I’m improvising a meal or cooking from a recipe where I have enough of the staple ingredients around most of the time and where I understand how to marinate, season and sauce most of what I’d make.

The first is Japanese/Korean, the second is pan-Mediterranean (Greek, Levantine, North African, Spanish, Italian), the third is Mexican/Tex-Mex/barbecue.

I’ve made a few runs at getting to know several regional Chinese cuisines well enough and for the most part they just haven’t stuck with me. The culinary space feels too big and some of the combinatorial strategies and techniques aren’t second nature. The only thing I can do without having to think about it is fried rice, which I love, and spring rolls/egg rolls, which I also love.

I’ve done a fair amount of trying to get comfortable with South Asian cuisines and I just don’t nail the landing often enough. I underspice, I overspice, I get something blander or goopier than I meant to. I don’t marinate enough, or I marinate too much. I’m not sure why a particular result is less than I wanted or hoped, I just know that it is. I work tightly from cookbooks, I try to improvise.

I can make Creole and Caribbean food pretty well, I just don’t all that often. The same goes for the core of French cuisine—I pull in some of its technical repertoire in terms of sauces and so on, but I rarely make famously French dishes of various kinds. I can make a Filipino adobo and a goodly amount of Thai dishes comfortably but somehow they aren’t in the regular rotation. I love West African food but I don’t know it well enough to rattle off most of the classics easily myself. I don’t really know Ethiopian food enough to even try to cook it.

I try to think about why I go to the wells I do. The first reason is familiarity. Tex-Mex and Mexican are really familiar to me all the way back to my childhood. Japanese also, including sushi, which was maybe the first “sophisticated” food I remember learning to eat as a teenager after finding it weird the first few times I tried it.

The second reason is that I not only know easily what starches and breads to bring into play in a given dish, but also that I know how to make my own quickly and easily—I’ve known how to make pasta, tortillas, pita breads, etc. most of my adult life. I’m comfortable making rice, I know what the difference will be between various Japanese styles of noodles. There’s a compositional grammar about combining vegetables raw and cooked with proteins with starches or carbs that I understand without much conscious thought.

The third is a breadth of experience with eating in different kinds of establishments in each of those cuisines—high-end restaurants, food trucks, little joints in ethnic enclaves, regional variations of the cuisine, the difference between how it’s eaten transnationally or in a diaspora and how it’s eaten back in its place of origin. When I think about it, I realize that I’ve rarely eaten high-end South Asian or Chinese food (though my experiences when I have are great) and the kinds of places where I might pick up either cuisine more casually serve a pretty generic and bland version of it. Every once in a while I come across an accessible chain that does this food really well and I realize that would make the difference if they were really nearby—London’s Dishoom or in the Philly area, Han Dynasty. It’s the repetition combined with exploration—getting to know what you really like, getting a sense of what makes one version good, getting a sense of how ingredients and presentations connect.

Fourth I think is just relative ease when it comes to making strong flavors, which is one part mastering some common ways a given cuisine creates its characteristic tastes and one part easy availability of quality versions of the basic pantry. I know I’m going to be able to walk into any American grocery store and get soy sauce, limes, rice vinegar, sesame oil, fresh ginger, garlic and probably mirin. I know I’ll find some kind of salsa, some chili powder, some premade tortillas, cilantro. There will be dried pasta galore, good canned tomatoes and good pasta sauces, tahini, and so on. And increasingly it’s not hard to get a variety of dried chilis, good quality smoked pimenton, canned chipotles in adobo, preserved lemon, canned tomatillos, and so on.

Fifth I think, as always, is knowing a few dishes so well that are good for everyday service to family but also having a couple of no-fail dishes that are good for impressing guests in the comfort cuisine. I know backwards-and-forwards how to make a pastilla, the layered phyllo dough pie that’s usually made with a spiced-and-saffron chicken, onions and currants, cooked eggs and sugared almonds. I can always do a great chile, I can make a good ramen that’s a big spectacle at table, I can do ssam pork, carnitas or pulled pork easily with a big shoulder, I can make a couple of variations on paella that are a big deal if there are folks coming over. I can do a barbecued brisket in my Weber that stands up pretty well. I always hesitate to cook for guests from a recipe I don’t know well—you just don’t want to do something you’re not sure of. And I understand how all three of these cuisines work if you’re making something vegetarian or vegan in them and you want it to be better than just “a standard, but meatless”.

I guess my question is why this review makes me feel so restless. There are other things in my life where I’m content as I head into old age with not keeping up, and I think my hierarchy is similar to many people. I gave up on music a long time ago—I like what I like and if it’s from the last twenty years, only rarely will I know it at all. I mostly don’t keep up with sports any longer. I watch a narrower range of movies and television. I am trying to keep up with new books, especially in genre fiction, but the slippage gets a bit heavier every day. Mostly I don’t feel guilty about it.

With food, it’s not so much a “fear of missing out”, not about chasing the next new thing. It’s old ambitions that I’ve just never quite turned the corner on that still feel achievable. Maybe it’s the kind of thing that has to wait until the day that we move to somewhere new where the joint around the corner is great everyday South Asian or when Han Dynasty opens a branch in our neck of suburbia and that kicks me into overdrive on doing that kind of food myself. Or maybe it’s just a cognitive ceiling, a gustatory Dunbar’s Number: you can only keep so many kinds of food in mind at once.