Authenticity

"Be yourself. Everyone else is taken." - Oscar Wilde

At times I struggle with authenticity when it comes to my cooking. The foods that move me, that I carry with me, revisit, share, dream about and crave are far from the plates of my earliest memory and meals. I've written about the food of my childhood before: wild game, canned soups, box dinners always enough and warm and shared.  Hearty, nourishing, but not refined nor glamorous. I grew up on American Midwest food. Fish fry Fridays, prime rib Saturdays, broasted chicken Sundays.

When I realized I could put my love into form and use it to connect with people and cultures and moments in time I was hooked. Addicted. I'm sure there are some boundaries to evaluate in my relationship with food and cooking but let's leave that untouched like the curly parsley of supper club plates. For now.

~*~

All of the cuisines I've grown to love came later in life. French representing a part of me long waiting for butter and technique to find, Japanese flooding with hominess and sweeping sea-flavored simplicity, Szechuan a bouquet of numbing and floral, Mediterranean exploding like the falafel kabobs of Le Marais, Vietnamese fragrant with herbs and deepened with time, Korean playful with pungency, freshness, fermentation and heat, Ethiopian sour flat bread, New Orleans old penny roux, Chow chow and Hot Browns, and on and on.

I bounce in attention and practice from cuisine-to-cuisine. I'm not focused on perfecting one; my hunger tugging me from one to the next. When I sit quietly and evaluate my voice as a chef I find myself conflicted. I don't have a 'style' yet. I wasn't handed a culinary narrative. A legacy built over generations one set of aging hands guiding the next to intimately know for certain the feel, the taste, the texture. But I do have insatiable curiosity which finds me gathering to my chest techniques and flavors and established methods from far flung corners of the globe. Filling my pockets with borrowed trophy and treasure.

Haunted, I repeat the same questions, "What can my claim and connection to any of them be if they were not inherited? Were not part of me from the beginning?"


But maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point isn't to claim a culinary genre but to be claimed by it. To be consumed while consuming and emboldened while imbibing. To feel at home in the shared human experience that is eating. To continue to define and redefine as each cell is fed and transformed. 

What an honor to step into someone else's food memories. To sit with the chest-aching wish it was yours. To feel the neurons firing and forming with your delayed discovery. That's your connection to it. That moment. The moment of discovery and consumption of curiosity and awe. 

Maybe my voice, my chef's voice, is one of loud admiration and obsessive appreciation. Of imitation as the sincerest form of flattery. Of wanting to bring others to the moment of discovery that so moves me. 

I will likely always envy those with a strong sense of self, culinary or otherwise, and the recognizable flavor combinations that allow an audience to say undoubtedly, "that is [chef]!" But perhaps, if I'm lucky, instead of a signature flavor or pure culinary fingerprint my food leaves a distinctively 'me' feeling. One of curiosity and care. Of giddiness and adventure. Of respect and even authenticity. Wouldn't that be something to savor...