The Myth of Authenticity

One page cookbooks - Core beliefs

All one page cookbooks are based on the following core beliefs. If you don't subscribe to them, One pagers are not for you ! If you do, you might experience how liberating, hassle free and fun cooking can be !

1. Cooking is simple, if you get the big picture straight.  2. Cooking is highly personal – you alone decide what  tastes good.  3. Traditional recipes are general guidelines –    not rigid instructions. 4. “The perfect way” to cook a dish is a myth. Even highly traditional dishes are cooked in many different ways. Recipes are alive and change with time and place. They are meant to be experimented with. 5. Cooking is more about fun, creativity & making healthy food than about fancy techniques, exotic ingredients  and eye popping presentation. 6. Themes are universal. Each cuisine translates them with local Ingredients into recipes. 7. As with one, so with most others. If one flour can be turned into bread/ pasta / noodles / porridge / crepes /dumpling, most other flours can be too. 8.  Anything goes with anything. It is a fallacy to believe that only a select few combinations work.

 9.  Each extra step in a recipe doubles its complexity. Duplicating a recipe is virtually   impossible.   

10. Recipe purity is no different from racial purity or linguistic purity - It just does not exist. What is traditional today was esoteric a few decades back. Cuisines influence each other and evolve all the time.

Building blocks of World Cuisine

The spirit of a cuisine....

Whenever I have a discussion about what authentically belongs to a cuisine and what does not, I remember this quote from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot (page 50) " How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed“? Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.”

This argument holds well for food too! Like religion, people can be very finicky about food - many still believe their cuisines are about using certain ingredients and cooking techniques. It is an immature cuisine which focuses too much on recipes. A mature cuisine does not bother about recipes - it evolves broad themes into which you can slot in any ingredient and cooking technique. For example one broad theme evolved by Indian cuisine is that " Knead an edible flour with a liquid, roll into thin sheets and cook on a hot skillet into a flat bread". The beauty of this theme is that it can slot in flours Indians never knew existed! It is the genius of a cuisine which can make sweeping generalizations like this. The spirit of a cuisine lives in its themes - not in its recipes. Using new ingredients / cooking techniques does not make a recipe unauthentic. When Indians settled abroad, it was natural for them to use fruits / vegetables available in the new lands into their recipes - does it make the recipe unIndian ? No !

The spirit of a cuisine is a reflection of the beliefs of a culture. A recipe becomes unauthentic only if it goes against the spirit of a cuisine. Stick true to the spirit of a cuisine and you don't have to worry about authenticity anymore !

If I had Carl Sagan's way with words, I wish I had said "How is it that hardly any major cookbook author has looked their cuisine and concluded, "This is better than we thought! Our cuisine is much richer than our elders said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. It can even accommodate ingredients and techniques we never knew about. It must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My cuisine is a little cuisine, made only with ingredients and techniques I know and I want it to stay that way !"

Get the big picture straight !

There is a big difference between learning a few recipes and understanding a cuisine. 

To understand a cuisine, you should get the big picture straight. You should know something about the culture, the history, the building blocks and the external influences that have shaped a cuisine.

For example, South Indian cuisine is built on Tamarind, tuvar dal, yogurt and coconut. Almost all the thousands of curries you'll encounter in Tamilnadu, Andhra, Kerala and Karnataka would be just various combinations of these building blocks.

Though most spices used are common, the emphasis on different spices vary between these four states. Each state also has its own set of favourite vegetables and cooking oil. This differing emphasis on the building blocks, spices and different oils lead to completely different set of recipes. However, at their heart, they are all alike, being built from the same four building blocks.

With this big picture in mind, you are less likely to get lost in the mind boggling array of recipes cooked across the south.

Get the big picture for each cuisine, stay true to it and you will find that it is very difficult to goof up a recipe !

The perfect myth

Nothing is perfect. Have you read a perfect story, heard a perfect song or watched a perfect movie ? But we like to believe that perfection exists in the culinary world populated by perfect pizzas , perfect roasts and other perfect dishes. A 'perfect' recipe does not exist. Perfection is a myth. Perfection signifies an end and would actually become boring. It is the constant quest for better taste that is enthralling about cooking.

Perfection is always user defined. What is perfect to you will not be so to me. If something like the 'perfect food' existed, why eat anything else ? In the quest for 'perfect' dishes take care not to miss out on the simple joy of cooking.

Leave poetry to poets

I believe cooking is a basic life skill, like  language. Unlike language, basic cooking can be learnt by anyone, in under an hour. To gain confidence though, it takes time and there is no better way to gain it than to keep cooking. 

Each cuisine can be thought of as a language and I like to think of one page cookbooks as primers teaching the alphabet and the ways they can be  put together. A lucky few among you, dear reader, may later become poets, turning out food poetry. But for the others, just learning to communicate (cook edible food) would be a worthy goal.

This is the reason you won't find poetry in one page cookbooks. There is no place for it in a primer. You are unlikely to bump into lines like " this heavenly sauce with a tantalising undertone of garlic, a whiff of fennel subtly juxtaposed with just a breath of ginger and a kiss of vine ripened tomatoes". I'll leave poetry to poets.

Separate logic from content

One insight that has greatly helped me to cook a variety of dishes is this - The logic is separate from the content. This principle is widely used in many fields, including software programming, where it is a cornerstone of good design.

What this means in culinary terms is this - all recipes are built on a core logic.  For example, all Indian rotis are built around the logic that flour becomes edible when kneaded into a dough, shaped and heated on a skillet / tandoor. This core logic never changes - however the content does. That is, the types of flour used, the kind of shapes they assume, the kind of additives/ flavouring/ stuffing - all can be changed.

I believe it is a cook's job to isolate this core logic, which then can be converted into innumerable recipes. One page cookbooks are built on this concept. Each book is built on a piece of core logic and showcases how different 'content' can be hung on this frame, creating innumerable recipes.

Understanding this principle has changed the way I cook.