RUSTIC FRUIT RECIPE ON THE WESTERN CHEF TABLE

 

A recipe is nothing more than food history, and nothing says history better than ‘rustic.’

 

Like the discovery of fire, the first food recipe had to be pretty rustic.

 

The top cave chef probably didn’t have as much to work with.

 

No one appreciates recipes more than a history major with twenty years in a history museum. Me.

 

Even my gourmet channeling wife agrees she can trust me to boil water, not cut myself on the chopping block, and create something she saves for later and gets upset when someone eats it.

 

Me, again. But, what about the history part?

 

 

Early chefs had to have burned things and cut themselves fairly often based on my own burning and cutting.

 

Practice makes perfect? More like non-practice makes a pile of mush.

 

If I tossed everything on the verge of expiring or spoiling into a large pot of boiling water without cutting it to similar size, I’d end up with a large pot of “look, dinner,” to unappreciative faces.

 

Not that I intentionally ruined childhoods and put my marriage at risk by cooking slop. It was very healthy slop, just not from a recipe. A caveman could have made it.

 

The learning curve finally leaned by way when I found a recipe I liked from a book I found. It was a Christmas present three years ago waiting on the bench for its big moment.

 

In sensible fashion I created an instant ‘signature dish’ and I was convinced I could make it better than the recipe.

 

Imagine an early cave chef learning new tricks from travelers. How to mix nuts and berries and woolly mammoth meat?

 

If the cave people wanted better food, they learned to make it. If food came through the top chef who didn’t want to change his offerings, the cave people would have replaced him.

 

Unless he had other strings attached.

 

 

What if the top chef had recently learned to cook? That the only reason food came to the cave people through him was because he was also the best hunter, best gatherer, and best talker about his hunting and gathering prowess.

 

Recipes are an historical insight to a deep past, one beyond books, and documents, and what we call western civilization.

 

With the tools and weapons of ancient people in the right hands, like anthropologists and archeologists who explain how the shape of the Clovis Point chipped from chert to jasper shows where it came from, we learn quickly.

 

In other hands, a rock is a just a rock, and a pot of slop is food. Those were my sloppy hands on the pot. My same hands now hold a recipe.

 

 

Experienced chefs say cooking is an art. It makes sense when a recipe includes 1 tsp of fish sauce. My first whiff of it reminded me of old laundry at the bottom of the basket. Yum? Put it in.

 

Chefs who refuse to listen to their diners either cook themselves out of business, or get pushed out the back for a more tuned in, responsive, chef.

 

A recipe is a foundation, a building block to agree on, not a hodge-podge of old ingredients thrown together, then explained away as some sort of ‘fusion.’

 

If I follow the recipe for ‘Lovers Eggplant,’ I’m confident I won’t pull Tamale Pie out of the oven.

 

If a chef showed up at my favorite Thai place and put out omelettes and pancakes instead of Pad Thai and XAO XA OT?

 

If I wanted eggs and pancakes I’d go to Elmer’s. If I wanted slop I’d stay home and thaw one of my old reminders.

 

The difference between the food I crave and the food I cook is growing smaller. I can say a bowl of oatmeal is french onion soup, but I wouldn’t believe it.

 

Neither would you.