“Every tribe,” Judith Thurman writes, “has an ancestral food that its exiles yearn for, and that its children can’t live without.” Thurman is writing about tofu, made according to the traditions of Japan’s Zen temples, but her maxim could apply as well to pozole, or to Sunday gravy, or to your grandmother’s kugel. Everyone has an idea of home cooking, and everyone’s idea is different.
The people in this collection—an appetizer for our forthcoming Travel & Food Issue—are all in search of some form of culinary heritage. For Maksim Syrnikov, the “self-appointed guardian of authentic Russian fare” in Julia Ioffe’s piece, the country’s true ancestral food is not borscht (that’s Ukrainian) and certainly not potatoes (an “American plant”). Instead, it’s shchi, a briny cabbage soup cooked in a wood-fired oven that’s big enough to sleep in during cold winters. For the food historians in Lauren Collins’s “The King’s Meal,” attempting to re-create a dinner in the court of Henry VIII, wood heat is equally important, but the menu is strikingly different: mutton with partridge sauce, crayfish à la crème, and, perhaps, a spit-roasted porpoise.
Tinkering with tradition can be risky. In Carolyn Kormann’s Letter from La Paz, a Danish chef, opening a high-end restaurant in the impoverished Bolivian city, applies trompe-l’oeil technique to the local palmito and papalisa. “The food was sculptural, deconstructed, Technicolor,” Kormann writes. One early patron “recalled that her mother had appraised her dinner and said, ‘This is not food.’ ”
In a penetrating Profile of Anthony Bourdain, Patrick Radden Keefe suggests that, if you don’t like your own traditions, you can find new ones. Bourdain—who cemented his fame with “Kitchen Confidential,” an exposé of the American restaurant business—has had a penitent second career, using his television series to advocate for the food of other tribes. “Parachuted into any far-flung corner of the planet, Bourdain ferrets out the restaurant, known only to discerning locals, where the grilled sardines or the pisco sours are divine,” Keefe writes. Bourdain’s quest keeps him on the road two hundred days a year, seeking out other people’s home cuisines. Increasingly, his motto is “Don’t tell me what you ate. Tell me who you ate with.”
Calvin Trillin, in “My Repertoire,” notes that there are plenty of ancestral foods that children are happy to live without. When his daughters were growing up, in New York, he made them scrambled eggs each day before school. “One morning, they came down the stairs, hand in hand, and announced that they were never again going to eat one of my scrambled eggs.” He stopped cooking at home, but, on vacation in Nova Scotia, he hones a half-dozen dishes of radical simplicity. One is smoked-mackerel pâté, made according to a family recipe: “You acquire some smoked mackerel fillets and you put them in the food processor.”
—Nick Trautwein, senior editor
“Anthony Bourdain had spent the first half of his life preparing food to feed others. He would spend the second half getting fed.” Read more.
“As a self-appointed guardian of authentic Russian fare, the chef and cookbook author Maksim Syrnikov has a problem: Russians don’t hold Russian food in particularly high esteem.” Read more.
“The food entrepreneur Claus Meyer wanted to train a generation of cooks who would educate their communities and redefine the way Bolivians perceive traditional ingredients.” Read more.
“Tofu has been the dietary mainstay of monastic life in Japan for about a millennium and it has never lost the soulful, exalted aura of its provenance.” Read more.
“One way of looking at my Nova Scotia cooking repertoire is that I’m not a kitchen klutz with a limited number of dishes at his disposal but a locavore of such purity that I cook only what can definitely be certified as local and seasonal.” Read more.
“Food and drink are perhaps the most effective of Lucy Worsley’s tools for revivifying the past. Last year, she installed a wine fountain in the main courtyard of Hampton Court Palace, the home of Henry VIII.” Read more.
