Anyone who has witnessed the resolute delight on the face of a small child as she tastes something new and falls instantly in love with it can see with certainty that discovery is a delivery system for joy.
I've always loved the adage that good health is like money; that we never truly know what it's worth to us until we no longer have it. Food is sustenance, but it can also be an uncomplicated source of pleasure to those afforded the luxury of enjoying it this way.
We combine things we think will taste good, often based on our best intuitive guesses. I'd like to have seen the face of the first person to take a sip of cold milk after biting into a warm cookie. We seek out contrasts in texture, taste or temperature: peanut butter and jam, strawberries and cream, a hot fudge sundae, or, my personal downfall, hot sourdough toast with cold butter and flakes of Maldon salt. The butter has to be not yet completely melted, and the salt has to be crunchy.
There's something very special about the Maillard Reaction, which might as well be another way to describe an Achilles heel as far as I'm concerned: it's the browning process you can thank for the irresistible smell of toasted bread, grilled meat and caramelised onions. These classics exist for the betterment of humankind.
It's said that familiarity breeds contempt – and that necessity is the mother of invention, which sounds like a lose-lose situation for a working chef. At the very least, it puts a lot of pressure on an individual to be original.
I like to think that an "A" for effort is more justly awarded for competence than originality, and that's not to say that the two can't coexist. It does seem, though, that all professionals - whether driven by the simplest creative or more heavy-handed corporate motives - run the risk of getting so caught up in trying to be the first to do something that we neglect to do it well. Why do we place so high a value on originality and uniqueness? My best guess it that it's because you can't modify a superlative, although it helps to keep in mind that "least likely to succeed" is a superlative, too.
While trying to get through the film Biutiful a few days ago, I started thinking about the problem of willing oneself to like something (I hated the film), and the reverse: willing oneself away from something that naturally compels, based on principle alone (such as pairing fish with cheese, a practice that is deeply scorned throughout much of the culinary world, with Italy the mother ship for the veto). There's no official law forbidding certain food combinations, but there are a lot of social and cultural guidelines in place. I'm an offender through and through, having made the incredibly ill-advised decision to order the seafood Alfredo at a Holiday Inn in Missoula, Montana 12 years ago. Missoula is 400 miles from a coastline and the Holiday Inn was a dive.
The thing is, I don't want to watch films that are beautiful but not engaging any more than I want to eat food that is interesting but not delicious. One of my problems with Biutiful was that I struggle with being left deliberately in the dark without a headlamp. I suppose I've always been in favour of a more traditional structure, in both a narrative and on a plate, mostly because I need things to make sense to me a certain way. I want the ingredients listed on the package for full disclosure – no renegade milk proteins in my cheese or hydrogenated fats in my soy milk. How much do you really want to know about what you eat? I believe that teaching children to be curious about their food, and to care about it, is one of the best things you can do.
A restaurant owner and chef I know serves tasty little dinner rolls that have earned him a small cult following over the years. What most people don't know is that the mystery ingredient in the rolls is used coffee grounds. I can't argue against his logic for concealing such a fact from customers. But what I found more interesting was that I didn't like them as much after I found out about the coffee. Suddenly, bitter, old coffee was all I could taste. I could feel the imaginary grit in my teeth and it grossed me out. Eating is synaesthetic: the senses, they merge.
Like a great exposition scene, reading ingredients or a menu description can be an interactive contribution to how we absorb the thing itself in the end. The sensory process of experiencing something before eating it involves looking at it, smelling it, touching it, understanding where it comes from and imagining what it will taste like. We feel satisfaction or disappointment upon tasting something based on the information we receive beforehand.
Then there's the magical place where adaptation meets innovation - and to do that well, you need to know what you're doing in the first place. One of my favourite restaurants of all time, Oleana in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is famous for the way it showcases the multitude of flavours from the entire Arab world and far beyond. The chef and owner Ana Sortun's menu reads like a dream without feeling forced into a tired rendition of fusion cookery.
She serves warm olives with za'atar, spiced carrot purée with dukkah and warm buttered hummus with basturma and tomato. Sortun fearlessly whips feta cheese, and dishes out hot pepper labne with olive oil and dried mint and creates dreamy pastries: trout Greek-style spanakopita with avocado and salmon roe, Moroccan-style bisteeya with pears, leeks, frisée, smoked cinnamon almonds and goat's cheese. She serves sujuk with squid and fried prunes, makes a carrot gyro, and her version of kibbeh nayeh, a sort of Lebanese steak tartare usually made with raw ground beef or lamb, is made from raw tuna, Turkish spices and a pickled onion and herb salad.