Cuisines

Not a ranking, and not a list of what's trending — the cuisines I keep studying because I still don't fully understand them.

I think of a cuisine less as a fixed set of dishes than as a set of habits: what gets simmered versus seared, what's considered a whole meal versus a garnish, which scraps get treated as ingredients rather than waste. Understanding those habits takes longer than eating well ever does, which is exactly why I keep coming back to a short list of cuisines rather than sampling widely and moving on.

Home cooking over restaurant cooking

Restaurant versions of a cuisine are usually its most polished, least representative face. I spend more time trying to understand what actually gets cooked on a Tuesday — the everyday dishes that never make it onto a menu because they're considered too plain to sell, and are often the most honest thing on the table.

Technique as history

Slow-braising, quick-searing, fermenting, drying — a cuisine's preferred techniques are usually a record of its climate and its scarcities, preserved long after the original reason is forgotten. Learning why a dish is cooked the way it is tends to explain more than learning what's in it.

Where this comes from

Most of what I know about these cuisines I learned in the kitchens described on the destinations page, standing slightly in the way, asking too many questions. The reasoning behind all of this — why I'd rather learn a dish badly at the stove than read about it well from a table — is laid out on the on food and writing philosophy pages.