Learning to Cook the Globe

Seeking a rigorous education beyond Western cooking

This past Friday I dropped in on a friend’s class at the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts, and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It was the first of a series of classes on the regions of Spain, and our session focused on the northwest regions of Galicia, Asturia, and Cantabria. As a class, we reviewed the ten+ recipes we would collectively prepare—from a stewed chicken chilindrón to a baked tuna pie known as empanada gallega to a crispy batch of baccala croquettes. Then we got to work, each recipe made beginning to end by 1-2 people, and, at the close of class, sat down to the feast. The fundamentals of our culinary approach were derived from the grand European techniques that one might find in the Larousse Gastronomique. For example, we were instructed to sauté vegetables to pull up the fond on the bottom of the pot, to julienne our onions, and to avoid excessive amounts of garlic in our aioli. All of this was second nature to our excellent instructor, but it gave at least a few students an understandable moment of hesitation. If one wasn’t somewhat versed in the fundamentals of French cooking, a formal cooking class—especially one where everyone would eventually taste the results—seemed downright terrifying. Yet as we cooked together, I started to wonder if the problem wasn’t the specificity of the instruction, but the formal Frenchness of it all.

As we hand-charred red bell peppers over the stovetop burners, I thought about the numerous traditions of broiling and roasting chiles across the culinary cultures of Africa, and the impact that the so-called Moors of the Middle Ages, who came from the area of North Africa known as the Maghreb, had on many iconic Spanish dishes. Greek, Arab, Jewish, and Italian cultures have all shaped Spanish cuisine, and one can easily draw connections between the techniques used in Spanish cooking—stewing or slow-roasting in wine-based sauces, the use of fruits and eggs in savory dishes, and the importance of tomatoes and peppers—and those in cuisines around the world. And yet substantive conversations about culinary traditions outside of Europe were entirely absent. And yet I was not surprised by the omission of other culinary styles. Indeed, if one pages through the required reading and foundational coursework of formal cooking school programs such as the Institute of Culinary Education, Johnson & Wales, or the Culinary Institute of America, one would be hard-pressed to find any techniques or traditions from outside the Western cooking canon. European, and most specifically French, culinary knowledge still reigns suprême.

The formalized study of cooking, and its sister study of gastronomy (the relationship between food and culture) are both fairly recent phenomena, dating back only to the nineteenth century and the twin influences of the French writers Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier in formalizing the instructions and foundational recipes of French cooking. Before the twentieth century, most chefs learned their trades via apprenticeships known as stages, and acquired techniques as they moved from home to home, restaurant to restaurant. (Private cooking schools, many with dual tracks for hired household cooks and the “ladies of the house” predated formal cooking schools by almost sixty years in the United States.) In the 150 years of global opportunities for formal culinary training, very little has displaced the iron-clad grip of French cuisine on the terms of culinary excellence. Yet as countless cookbooks published in the last seventy years have shown, the techniques of the many regional Asian, African, and South American cuisines are no less sophisticated or formally articulated than anything Escoffier or Carême put on paper. As Korsha Wilson noted, even in the twenty-first century, the leading American culinary schools are still compressing their non-Western courses into side electives, with some allocating only 48 hours of coursework for all the culinary traditions of Thailand, India, China, and Japan. It begs the question: in an American food landscape where we eat pizza, pad thai, naan, and miso soup far more often than we do poulet rôti or boeuf bourguignon, why on earth are we still centering French culinary knowledge as the foundation of a career in food?

True, there has been plenty of progress, especially in the cookbook marketplace, to push beyond the centrality of the European canon. (Unlike in the restaurant world, it’s Italian and Southern cookbooks that seem to dominate the American marketplace.) Plenty of critics and restauranteurs have noted that the heyday of French cooking is long gone, both in restaurants and among household cooks. The most important factor for the shift away from French technique is the global proliferation of technique-driven resources for home cooks, most notably via social media. Though TikTok took off in the United States in 2018, it was already enormously popular worldwide, and its capacity to feature authors from all across the world and across the gastronomic landscape has transformed how we communicate and receive culinary knowledge. As Alicia Kennedy observed, the draw of TikTok cooking videos is the platform’s inherent diversity and approachability, and its algorithmic promotion of dishes prepared by “folks cooking in their regular homes and apartments with accessible ingredients.” In a pivot away from the tailored channels of YouTube, what can emerge as a culinary phenomenon via TikTok does not have to be filtered through the taste cognoscenti or even the American culinary marketplace. It can be a system of knowledge exchange, shaped and shared in a dynamic exchange between home cooks.

When I was thinking about my culinary goals for this year, I made a mental list of all the dishes I’ve yet to master technically without consulting a recipe: reverse-seared steak, homemade pie dough, a great sauce Robert. But after reflecting on this week’s cooking class, I threw out my list and started again. Instead of steak, I want to master tofu (of multiple textures); I want to build a range of curries (Thai, Indian, Japanese) from scratch; I want to make flatbreads like m’smen and chapati, both prepared in homes across North and East Africa. I want to perfect my rice cooking process, and to become as accustomed to using buckwheat, cassava, and sorghum flour as I am to AP flour. In short, I want to push against the conventions of what constitutes culinary technique, and put my mise-en-place in its rightful place (at the very back of the pantry).

Recommendation: It’s been such a joy this week to catch up on some non-diss work, and I can’t wait to share some of the cookbook coverage I’ve been working on for SAVEUR. Of the packages recently arrived on my doorstep, I’m excited about one in particular: Arielle Johnson’s Flavorama (out in March). I really like Johnson’s approach to discussing the scientific principles of cooking as a way to unlock future improvisations, ingredient substitutes, and even greater creativity in the kitchen. If you were like me and loved working your way through Samin Nosrat’s Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat, this is a great next read.

The Perfect Bite: I loved almost everything we made during the Spanish cooking class, and am so happy to still have the recipes in hand. But perhaps my favorite was the tarta de santiago, a Galician almond cake with a perfectly crackly-crunchy top and fluffy interior. I’m usually not a fan of baking with almond flour, as it veers uncomfortably into marzipan territory, but this recipe was a total delight, and I will be making it again very soon…

Cooked & Consumed: Happy to have had the chance to try out yet another recipe from Molly Baz’s More is More this week, a one-pot dish of a whole roasted, yogurt-marinated chicken over a bed of green lentils and jasmine rice. It’s very similar to the Iraqi dish known as mujaddara, easy (and affordable) to prepare and hugely flavorful to serve up. Seasoned with a final squeeze of lemon juice and a dash of hot sauce, it was a total win, and yielded plenty of delicious leftovers.