Your Experience Does Not Negate Mine
Gatekeepers of cuisine (me included) need to chill out and open their minds
It happens to me all the time. I post or talk about a recipe or dish that I have either researched extensively, or have eaten in its “native habitat,” and someone gaslights me, telling me that what I have posted or experienced somehow isn’t real, isn’t authentic.
This is maddening.
Let me be clear: Your experiences do not negate mine, and vice versa.
While dogmatism in cooking and cuisine is not so serious as, say, dogmatism in religion or politics, it can and does bleed into those dangerous waters. Why? For many, cuisine is a marker of membership. Membership in a class, a nation, a people.
I have been guilty of this on both sides. I have definitely said to people that “X” or “Y” dish isn’t really what they say it is because their experiences were radically, sometimes crazily, different from my own. As I age, I have tried to dial back on this almost completely, emphasis on tried; I am not perfect, however, and I know I still slip sometimes.
What changed? Other than being slightly wiser as I reach middle age, as I work on this next cookbook, which is on the essentials of northern Mexican cuisine, I have remembered what scholarship actually is and is not. What’s more, I experience this sometimes genuine anger in the food world on an almost weekly basis.
Any of you who have advanced degrees will likely have gone through what I did as a graduate student at UW-Madison: The first two years of a PhD program, which is what I was in, are almost entirely about how to do proper scholarship.
One book read does not an expert make. Authors have agendas, some overt, some unconscious. Fashion trends exist in scholarship. Only after exhaustive research can you really ever say anything about anything with any degree of certainty, and even then you will (or should) understand that exceptions will exist to whatever it is you just said.
A small case study. A dish variously known as asado de boda, asado de puerco or asado de cerdo exists in Mexico, mostly in the north. At its core, it is chunks of pork cooked until tender in a chile sauce. Usually eaten alongside rice and beans.
While developing a recipe for it, I read several dozen recipes in English and Spanish, both in books and online, and watched I-don’t-know-how-many videos of Mexicans making it. Nearly all of them included something odd: A piece of the pit of an avocado, pureed in with the chile sauce.
It was so unusual I was skeptical, thinking it some abuela’s “secret ingredient” that isn’t “normal” to the dish. But there it was, hueso de aguacate, over and over and over again. So I included it in my recipe. (For the record, don’t use more than half a pit, and a quarter of a pit is best because the flavor is strong and interesting and bitter all at once.)
So, this particular dish is one my friend Patricio grew up with. His family didn’t use the avocado pit. He texted with his Mexican chef friends about its use. Almost no one had heard of it, let alone used it in their versions. So he has, more or less, dismissed me on this.
I am not wrong. But his experience is just as valid. The question, at least to me, is what is going on here? Maybe it’s a class thing? Maybe only older recipes or older people making them, use it? Who knows? Maybe I’ll find out someday.
Another example. I have spent a lot of time in Cajun Country, which I largely define as Louisiana south of Interstate 10. I have had many, many homecooked meals there, and more bowls of gumbo than I can count.
In many of those bowls of gumbo lurks tomato. Anathema to Cajun gumbo, by all accounts — the use of tomato, at least visible tomato, is one of the defining characteristics of Creole versus Cajun gumbo. Yet… Sometimes but not always, I will see a Cajun cook sneak one or two tablespoons of tomato paste into an otherwise tomato-less gumbo. You can’t see it in the finished dish, but its sweetness balances a very dark roux’s bitterness. It’s a brilliant little trick.
So my gumbo includes it. And for that, I might as well have taken a shit on the 50-yard line of Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge. I have received any number of ALL CAPS THREATS calling me a stinking Yankee, and far, far worse.
A few more quick examples:
Sugar in Southern cornbread. Many cooks use a pinch just to bring out the corn’s flavor. But its use is apparently a major sin against the Southern Baptist Church.
Cumin in New Mexican cooking. In my experience eating all over that state, cumin is as common as it is in the rest of the Southwest, which is to say it’s there with some frequency. I got blasted for using it in an enchilada recipe.
Anything Hungarian made by someone not Hungarian. Don’t mess with these people. Seriously. It’s scary.
Beans in Texas-style chili. Basically the same thing as with the Hungarians.
Any herb in New England clam chowder.
So what’s going on here?
Most obviously, it’s when someone’s personal experience with a food that matters deeply to that person is shown to either be 1) a rule with exceptions, or, even more interesting, 2) the actual exception to a rule that person has never experienced.
I once met a guy from Deer Park, Long Island, who swore to Jesus that all pizza had sesame seeds on the crust, and that any that didn’t was bogus. Apparently Deer Park is the only place where they put sesame seeds on pizza. He didn’t get out much.
From my own perspective as a Jersey Boy, when I first saw human beings eating pizza with a knife and fork I was so offended I could spit. Literally no one, anywhere, does this! Well, young Hank, apparently they do. Get over it.
Obviously all this applies to the rest of our lives as well.
You, me and everyone else holds set ideas based on what we have experienced. We believe our experience to be shared by many, so it becomes “normal.” When we find someone with experiences radically, sometimes crazily, different from our own, it’s only natural to think of them as outliers.
Sometimes they are. Sometimes you’re the outlier. The only way to know is to experience more, to listen more, to keep an open mind. Whether it’s beans in chili, avocado pit in asado de puerco, or something much, much more important.
Cooking and cooking styles, ingredients, and the planet (evolution), all evolve and change, frequently. People’s tastes and health evolve, and with that ingredients that go along with a tiny part to a giant part, of cultures.
It’s a no-brainer.
You do you.
I’m happy to try your style, 🙏 and mine.
Thanks for all your work Hank👌😃
Thanks Hank!
Thought provoking. Will keep this mindful as we serve Lobster Rolls - Mayo or Butter!