What's More Important in Food - Recipe Authenticity or Flexibility?

An essay (and a quick lunchtime recipe)

Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash

Paid subscribers, listen to the audio version - narrated by me - here

---

After I published my ode to dumplings last week, I got a text from a friend in Malaysia. He told me someone had walked past him reading the article and commented that the picture looked like “white girl” dumplings because they weren’t the traditional shape for potstickers.

That person is correct, they were not the right shape (and I am indeed white). As I mentioned in the article, I suck at pleating, hence the hack.

But it got me thinking about that fine line between sticking to authentic recipes and adapting them to your tastes and what’s in your cupboard. How much should we defend food authenticity? To what extent?

Whilst the shelves in the UK are bare and there are no eggs to be seen in the US and buying every single ingredient for a fiddly recipe is getting more and more expensive, can we still judge people who make substitutions in their cooking? Or do we run the risk of erasing food culture by making it all-American / British / wherever you are from?

***

I have always been a defender of food authenticity. I think most people are because food is both culture and identity.

When I went through a paella phase, I poured over Wikipaella, the authority on this famous rice dish. I traveled to Valencia both for the recipes and to pick up a traditional pan.

When my attention turned to traditional Italian dishes, I spent a lot of time on the Accademia Italiana della Cucina which since the fifties has been Italy’s official repository of traditional recipes.

I loved finding out how to make recipes properly. Like many people, I judged dumbed-down recipe websites for over-simplifying or omitting key ingredients. No one likes it when some upstart recipe writer comes in and tells them to change their Nonna’s ragu or their Abuela’s tacos to make it more palatable for a specific audience. It borders on cultural appropriation.

And yet, I ended up writing The Capsule Pantry - the place for flexible and adaptable recipes.

Why?

Partly, it’s because I’m a realist. Food is getting extremely expensive and yet is still being wasted - on a massive scale - every single day. Tradition is great, but not if it comes at a huge price both financially and environmentally.

Second, it’s because I believe that recipes are living, breathing things that are always being adapted. I mean, try finding two Italian nonnas who can agree on the same ragu or risotto recipe.

My third point can be best described with wine.

A winemaker friend of mine makes these incredible natural wines in South Africa. They’re wild and a little bit funky but always clean and delicious, which can’t be said for every natural wine out there. When I asked him how he did it, he told me that, unlike some natural winemakers who just wing it, he was classically trained in winemaking. As he says, when you know the rules, you know which ones to break.

The same goes for food. There are rules that can be broken - like the shape of a dumpling - and rules that can’t, like skipping the acid in a salad dressing. My job is to know the difference between the two.

***

My respect for food and its place in culture and identity means I will never go completely off the beaten track with my recipes. And I’ll throw in the occasional traditional one that should be followed to the letter (sourdough bread incoming in the next few weeks).

But I truly believe that it is better to have flexibility in your recipe repertoire. After all, it’s your wallet, your ingredients, and your tastebuds. There is no point in following a recipe just because it’s traditional, finding out you don’t like it but sticking to it anyway.

That’s what The Capsule Pantry, in its essence, is all about.

So. Are my dumplings “white girl” dumplings? Yes. But not for the reason that person may have thought. It’s not because I don’t care or because I can’t be bothered or because I want to culturally appropriate potstickers. I LOVE traditionally pleated dumplings, I just can’t do them, however many times I’ve tried.

And I would rather make ugly, non-traditional dumplings twice a week than traditional ones once a year.

---

Speaking of bastardization, here’s today’s recipe:

Huevos Rancheros, TCP-style

I’m embarrassed to call this dish Mexican - or even Huevos Rancheros. About 10 years ago it started that way, with pinto beans boiled from scratch and chipotle chilies and salsa roja. Then it morphed into the dish you see above. A kind of smoky tomato and chorizo salsa-type sauce with eggs baked in on top of what should be a tortilla (but in this photo is a Lebanese flatbread because that’s all I could find at the Romanian supermarket this morning).