Nod to Strega42: The Keys of Taste in cooking

[seawasp]

strega42  has been doing a post on food for those who haven't got much, and who perhaps haven't done much cooking before. This inspires me to offer up what little wisdom I have to offer on the subject, derived originally from some wisdom that my father passed to me.

This was that most classic dishes, and even entire ethnic cuisines, have specific signature tastes or key ingredients that make them what they are. You can change a lot of the other ingredients around, swap out other flavors like a gambler rolling dice, and somehow it'll still have that... flavor. Get everything else right but leave the key out, and it'll just taste wrong.

On the individual level, one of the most clear examples of this I know is the difference between spaghetti (red) sauce and pizza sauce. The signature or key for spaghetti is oregano, the key for pizza is basil. You can make a sauce that says clearly "spaghetti" and another that says clearly "pizza" by just reversing the proportions of oregano and basil and keeping everything else identical. (My spaghetti sauce is very much not pizza sauce in other ways, but a simple red sauce can do both with just slight seasoning tweaks).

On larger cuisine levels, there are very common signature flavors that show up. Mexican food has several, but the two most obvious and crucial in a number of dishes are cumin and cilantro, with corn flavors also playing a large part. Indian (subcontinent) food commonly uses a particular spice mix called "garam masala". Chinese commonly uses ginger and soy.

That doesn't mean those are the only important flavors, or that some dishes won't use those flavors. It just means that those flavors can *evoke* the impression of the cuisine.

Experienced cooks might consider this too obvious, so obvious as to be insulting to tell them, or (quite correctly) oversimplification. But for a new cook, or one who hasn't thought about it, this can be a revelation; it was for me, when my dad told it to me.

THINKING about the flavors is hard to do when you start out, yet if you don't think about it, you won't be able to make dishes that do what you want.

I have to go shopping, but I'll have some more general thoughts about cooking that I've learned over the years. Some will be very useful for new cooks, some perhaps you need to wait until you're either not new, or have more money.

Comments

[baronger.livejournal.com]

My most important and earliest lesson.

Once you put salt in you won't get it out again.

Though I understand there is supposed to be an apple trick.

[martianmooncrab.livejournal.com]

middle eastern puts cinnamon in meat dishes.

[strega42.livejournal.com]

There's a great potato trick, actually. Chunked up potato (large chunks) in an oversalted dish can absorb quite a bit of salt, and possibly save it.

[strega42.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the hat tip, sea wasp! :)

And I'm going to cross link to your post - this was something I didn't learn when I was growing up learning how to cook. Possibly because our family's ethnic background is... a bit muddled. And that is reflected quite a bit in our family cooking, so we had some interesting mixed cuisines growing up. They didn't all work all that well, either. :-p

[baronger.livejournal.com]

I need to try that if that ever happens again.

I think my original solution was the old pollution adage: The solution to pollution is dilution.

In other words I ended up with a lot of spaghetti sauce.

I've always thought that High School should have a mash up basic skills and knowledge course: Everything from basic living, civil rights and law to little tips like that.

Call it stuff you should have learned at your grandparents feet.

[muirecan.livejournal.com]

That is a very good insight for beginning cooks. A lot of people don't know how to use spices or use them much because their parents didn't know how to use them. So for many people it is a learning experience and advice like this helps.

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

I think you have basil and oregano reversed. Or else I make both those sauces wrong.

[jelazakazone.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the same thing. Of course, I can't find our old spaghetti sauce recipe to confirm this as we never eat spaghetti any more.:(

[seawasp]

Oregano = Spaghetti
Basil = Pizza.

This has been true for my entire life. I do not, of course, discount the possibility that other places may have different habits, but that means their spaghetti would taste to me like pizza, because pizza -- everywhere I've been -- has more basil than oregano, while spaghetti (in my experience) is more oregano than basil.

Both, of course, are included in either recipe, and both require garlic. Other spices may appear, such as red (cayenne) pepper, and you naturally require tomatoes of some form (I use puree, some people use tomato sauce, others stew them down from raw (which I might if I had the time, etc.).