WHAT'S THE BEST CUISINE?
The Big Question: we have restaurants of every kind on our doorsteps. But there are still distinct national cuisines, each with its own strength. Stephen Schiff, Sandra Gilbert and five others champion their favourite
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine, January/February 2015
STEPHEN SCHIFF American
Most of the world’s great cuisines arise from the principle of mélange. Chinese food is essentially stuff thrown together. Indian, Thai and Ethiopian: curries. French is all about the alchemy of sauces. Italian is delicious flotsam ensnared by grains.
But American cuisine begins with one thing at a time. The hamburger. The hot dog. An ear of corn. A wedge of apple pie. Yes, most of these things derive from other places, as most of us Americans do, but no matter where we come from, we wind up in a culture that we have made our own, a culture of individuals. We are about one thing, then another, then another. We are about procession. We love a parade.
Ah, but don’t we call ourselves a melting pot? It’s a term to be used advisedly. We melt less and less these days. If once we were a patriotic wave, we are now a nation of particles. Yet, like the crowd that spills into the street and mingles after the parade has passed, we eventually come together. That, I suppose, is what we mean when we talk about the New American Cuisine. We now have restaurants that call themselves American, on whose menus you find French food, Thai food, Mexican food, fusions of every variety. What begins as one thing at a time later longs for mélange.
In my neighbourhood, TriBeCa in Manhattan, one of the best restaurants is Marc Forgione, named after the chef who runs it. My favourite dish there is an appetiser, Kampachi Tartare. Not very American-sounding? That’s just the point. It’s a parade of immigrants high-stepping towards you one at a time, combining only at the end, when you feel good and ready.
Each ingredient is mysteriously separated on a big plate; fortunately, the waiter is on hand to give you your marching orders. On one side, nestled on a white Asian soup spoon, sits a Szechuan button, a tiny thing that looks like a caraway seed. You roll it in your mouth before doing anything else, and it makes your palate tingle and buzz. Next there’s another spoon, silver this time, which the waiter will tell you contains “the perfect bite”: raw kampachi (a kind of amberjack), avocado mousse, sprigs of microgreen cilantro. Then you’re allowed a Saratoga potato chip. Finally you can plunge into the thick of it: a big disc of kampachi that sits in a bowl in the middle. Underneath, a bed of avocado mousse; on top, more cilantro microgreen; all around it a citrus honey vinaigrette dotted with a few friendly pine nuts. You mix them yourself, in your own way—you can use the Saratoga chip if you want. Every bite is now the perfect bite.
So: one thing after another, working from isolation towards an ecstatic mixture. It’s not only American cuisine, it’s the American ideal.
Next page Josie Delap on the subtlety and intricacy of Iranian food. Page three Bee Wilson on the wisdom of French food. Page four Fuchsia Dunlop on the variety and versatility of Chinese. Page five Sandra Gilbert on the gastronomic diversity of Italy. Page six Dominic Ziegler on the zinging sushi of Japan. Page seven Katherine Rundell on British food's big heart
Stephen Schiff was one of seven writers to give their view. He has been a staff writer at the New Yorker and Vanity Fair. He co-wrote the screenplay for "Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps"
JOSIE DELAP Iranian
Take some walnuts, no, more—an extravagance, and then some. Pound, grind and toss them in a pan. Gently roast them and toast them to coax the flavour out. Fry onions until their harsh heat has mellowed and they have warmed to gold. Same with some duck legs.
Back to your walnuts. Apply water, heat and an hour’s patience, and their oil will ooze to the surface and give up their flavour. Stir in pomegranate molasses, sticky, sweet and sour. Bring it all together. Hours later the sauce will be ready, thick as paint and dark as chocolate. Finally take your pomegranate, its skin flushed and unyielding. Run a knife around its waist and prise it open. Let the juicy bloodbath begin as you pick through the gleaming seeds and scatter them across the surface. Serve your fesenjan with rice, and let your guests fight over the tah-dig, the crispy, buttery, sun-like disc that clings to the bottom of the rice pan.
Politics has kept Iranian food tucked away in the Tupperware box of the Islamic Republic. Other Middle Eastern cuisines are brazen. Lebanon flaunts its sophistication. Morocco flourishes its tagines, with their fruit and meat, so cleverly combined. Turkey brandishes its breads and flashes its kebabs. Who thinks of Iran?
And yet this is the source of it all. Cultivated over millennia, enhanced by numerous invasions both launched and endured, Iranian food has a subtlety and intricacy unrivalled but unrecognised—at least by outsiders. Who knows of its jewelled rice, studded with ruby barberries, flickers of sour sweetness, amid rice gold-stained with saffron, run through with shards of pistachios? Who has heard of caramelised sohan, a nutty brittle, produced mostly in Qom, Iran’s holiest city, its buttery excess so at odds with the austere piety of its creators? What of kuku sabzi, an omelette thick with fistfuls of coriander, parsley, dill, chives, tarragon, fenugreek? The world is missing out.
Next page Bee Wilson on the wisdom of French food
Josie Delap was one of seven writers to give their view. She is a Britain correspondent for The Economist
BEE WILSON French
In 1931 the food writer Marcel Boulestin was struck by a “blinding” difference between the French- and English-speaking worlds. The Americans printed calories on menus; the British worried whether “they dare risk this dish or that drink”. But the French, Boulestin observed, ate well effortlessly. “We never hear in France all these sermons on vitamins, calories and the like, because the French people of all classes eat as a matter of course this or that food which they grow or buy. They do this instinctively, like a cat who, feeling out of sorts, eats a blade of grass in the garden.”
French cuisine can be seen as passé and unhealthy. Sure, it’s delicious, but who wants to eat all that heavy meat in fancy Escoffier sauces any more? To dismiss it in this way is to neglect the fact that it has always been about much more than Michelin pretension. Its genius can be seen in delicate fish soups with a dollop of fiery rouille; rare onglet steak and salads of green beans; tiny wedges of big-tasting cheese. It’s there in the habit of avoiding snacks between meals, not from self-denial, but because hunger is the best sauce. French cuisine is the best because it’s founded on an understanding of how to square the circle of pleasure and health. It is tragic that, instead of imparting saner ways of eating to the rest of us, the French now seem to be heading down the Anglo-Saxon route of fast food and guilt.
But the wisdom at the heart of French cuisine hasn’t quite vanished. Recently I met a health psychologist working with families in various countries to get children to eat more veg. Across Europe, the only parents she had met who talked about training a child’s palate to enjoy the bitter flavours of vegetables such as globe artichokes were the French. They’re the only ones who see that the way to eat better is to cultivate an enjoyment of everything the table has to offer.
Next page Fuchsia Dunlop on the variety and versatility of Chinese
Bee Wilson was one of seven writers to give their view. She writers the Kitchen Thinker column in Stella magazine. She was written three books on food, including "Consider the Fork"
FUCHSIA DUNLOP Chinese
There’s only one emperor among cuisines: the others are all pretenders. Chinese cuisine is peerless in its range of ingredients and cooking methods, the diversity of its regional flavours and sophistication of its gastronomic culture. It has something to offer every palate and predilection. Partial to French haute cuisine? Try a banquet in Hangzhou, whose food markets dazzled Marco Polo. Keener on pasta? Look no further than the astonishing noodle arts of Shanxi province. The thrilling spiciness of Indian or Thai? Head for Sichuan, where “a hundred dishes have a hundred different flavours”. Aside from its multifarious regional cooking styles, China has Buddhist vegetarian, Muslim and medicinal culinary traditions—not to mention the cuisines of its 55 ethnic minorities.
Many of today’s food crazes have their antecedents in China, including the physical transformations of molecular gastronomy, the esoteric ferments of New Nordic cooking, and the playful wit of Heston Blumenthal. The Chinese make noodles out of fish, ferment overgrown vegetable stalks into relishes and conjure vegetarian banquets resembling meat. They create delicacies out of odds and ends like chicken gizzards and pomelo peel. Outsiders scorn the Chinese for “eating everything”, as if their adventurousness stemmed from desperation. Actually, it comes from passion, discrimination and curiosity that finds pleasure almost everywhere—in particular, in the realm of texture, largely neglected in the Western world.
The Man-Han imperial banquet, a three-day extravaganza featuring whole suckling pigs and bear’s paws, supposedly represents the pinnacle of the Chinese culinary arts. But Chinese cuisine isn’t just for the rich; the love of good food runs like a vein through society, untroubled by the hang-ups about physical pleasure bequeathed to Europeans by medieval saints. China’s street food is just as amazing as its banquets.
And it’s good for you. No other culture lays such an emphasis on the intimate relationship between food and health. The everyday Chinese diet is based on grains and vegetables, with modest amounts of meat and fish, and very little sugar—a model for healthy and sustainable eating. A good Chinese meal is all about balance: even a lavish banquet should leave you feeling shufu—comfortable and well.
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