#8 | the culinary thinking
#8 | the culinary thinking
a draft on the comprehension of the everyday cuisine as an incidental epistemological construction
this issue was translated by Luciane Maesp 📧 luciane.maesp@gmail.com
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to the Refoscos, kindly.
For a long time, the only avocado I knew about was the Fortuna type. As a child, I've learned how to prepare the fruit the way I liked – and strongly believed it was the only correct way to do it: cut in half, without the pit, with a tablespoon of sugar and half of a lemon squeezed on top. Scooping up and mashing the pulp, using its peel as a bowl, I could transform it into a chunky cream. If there was an avocado tree nearby, I certainly would eat two whole avocados this way. A few years later, I heard for the first time that "Brazil is the only country that eats avocado with sugar", and my convictions were ripened out.
Avocado was not an ingredient for fruit shakes or deserts in the rest of the world. It figures at the main meals such as the Mexican guacamole, the Chilean palta, or even in ceviches and salads in other Latin-American and European countries. As childish as it may sound, this information expanded my understanding of food and its possibilities.
The first time I ate salted avocado was also my first time eating coriander. It was summer in São Paulo, and I was visiting Flora Refosco, my friend since our pre-teens. For 20 years, our lives have been zigzagging between matched and parallel paths. In certain aspects, our history is less unequal and without the tragedies version of Lila and Lenu's – to boot, the alliteration between 'Flora and Flávia' is a coincidence worthy of fiction.
Flora is praxis, I'm theory. Flora tries it, I deduct it. Flora kneads the bread, I buy it ready-made. At 18, Flora cooked what she didn't know just for the pleasure of learning. I preferred to remain on the sidelines, fantasizing that, if I spent enough time watching, I could nail it on the first try. That night, Flora not only made guacamole with coriander but also made wheat and corn tortillas. I may have set up the table.
Our complimentary personalities have always acted as an incentive to each other, or so I like to think about it. Luckily, we met at the beginning of our adolescence, and I can see the soil that she grew up on. With her family, I ate short-grain rice1; seasoned the salad with black pepper twisting a wooden grinder; overdid the sesame salt2 over the beans; and tried a tall piece of filet mignon cooked in butter. What was that way of cooking? I asked myself, fascinated, in the early 2000s.
Despite the meat mentioned in the paragraph above, the food served was essentially vegetarian at Flora's house. Nobody was vegetarian there, and there wasn't a discussion about eating animals or not. It wasn't prohibited, but they seldom ate it. She grew up in an environment where the cooking considered the vegetable ingredients possibilities and its many potential transformations using flour and water. No speeches, things were just like that.
There was a culinary education – and here I'm referring to something learned innately, without systematized technical knowledge learning process – different from mine and what I had seen reproduced around me until then. That was a family with practices so different from those I knew, and today I can identify possible influences that her preceding generation may have incorporated before Flora arrived in the world. There was an influence of vegetarianism, of course, with hints of macrobiotic cuisine. But this isn't an essay on the genesis of the Refosco siblings' different cuisines: this is about what most unsettles me since I met them.
Last year's December, choosing what I would serve on Christmas Eve, I wrote a draft (which I lost) about what I called culinary thinking, a set of unconsciously undertaken truths and reasoning lines that pervades our understanding of food. It's not always evident, nor easy to set apart the individual seasoning of the cultural broth.
This culinary thinking is individual and results from the daily learning within the family, in society, and according to personal interests. A composition that complexifies as someone faces new experiences and limitations. Unlike systematization, which organizes and identifies the knowledge components, culinary thinking is self-guided, disordered, and unconscious.
Culinary thinking consists of gesture repetition, ingredients mashup, the choice of cooking techniques, and what is read as trivial food by the individual. It's not about rational food, chefs' and professional cooks' works, nor about the gastronomy printed in magazines and restaurant guides – a whole universe that, by the way, derives from cooking. It's also not about the cook as a knowledge guardian, who reiterates the meaning of each gesture when reproducing a dish. I'm talking about how you, without thinking too much, select tomatoes and onions in the greengrocers' shop, about what you pick to prepare a salad, and what you made for breakfast this morning.
In Philosophy, epistemology is the area that investigates human knowledge: what is knowledge and how this knowledge is acquired. As all culinary traditions and food productions (including the ultra-processed, produced by the historically recent food industry) are an output of existing knowledge, the assortment of individual thoughts – both in the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic side – are countless. Same about the convergence of solutions and ideas found by different human groups throughout time to solve the same issues: harvesting, picking, grinding, fermenting; hunting, killing, cutting, baking.
There was a parallel development of similar techniques through human evolution. When we perceive this process over a timeline, we can see that the exchange of knowledge and ingredients got more intense as the physical displacement became easier (hello, caravels and spices!), and that this process accelerated for centuries until we reach zillions of recipes available online, marketplaces selling ingredients and imported produces, and the ease of crossing a border carrying wine inside the luggage.
With so many access possibilities, there's a false impression that today we have an epistemological plurality in cooking, and that there's room for all kinds of food. However, as in every cultural space, there are conflicts, overlapping, and narrative constructions.
During the slow fermentation boom in the mid-2010s in Brazil, Italian, French, and North-American-style loaves of breads were spotted on Curitiba's bakeries, without dethroning the traditional rye bread (because of the German colonization in this region during the 19th and 20th centuries). At that time, rye bread wasn't the most common on the shelves, and certainly, the number of people who home bake then must wane year by year.
I live in a south-Brazilian state, far from France in many aspects: distance, climate, the way the land was occupied and worked through the centuries, the kind of social conflict that occurs in the cities and the countryside. Yet, I can find a great pain au chocolat to eat here, and I know more about what makes a good puff pastry than what makes good rye bread. Notice that I'm briefly comparing two commercial products, without getting into the issue of what we know about other food cultures, as the native peoples'.
To make your world view the predominant perspective is a cultural achievement, which ends up pasteurizing and flattening the point of view of those who "lose" this battle. I've already talked about epistemicide and how we face other people's food as if it was unfinished. Searching for my study notes on ontology and epistemology, I found this excerpt about marketing: one of the tools for spreading and conquesting culinary homogeny.
In industrialized countries, food marketing strategies may be more powerful than rational experience or traditional practices in influencing food habits (ABRAHAMSSON, 1979)
(...)
Conviviality associated with meals has lost its importance. The diversity of the types of food adoptions according to the contexts (places, moments, convivialities...) has increased, and as a consequence, the range of expectations regarding the qualitative characteristics of food products has also risen. (LAMBERT, 1997, p.55)
I often think about the products that today seem staple in a pantry but weren't even known 30 years ago. Think about the olive oil, if someone in your family actually used to buy those rectangular cans in the 1990s. Fishes like tuna and salmon, seeds like pistachio, fruits like dragon fruit: none of those were in the repertoire of an average Brazilian 30 years ago, and none of these products was rejected by consumers because they were distinct from what people were used to.
Everything imported became a quality standard for the national production, and everything trivial in cooking became (even more) commonplace. Political and economic events in Brazil facilitated the entrance of imported products. Plus, political decisions and new credit lines launched the production and cultivation of new food products, as phenomena like globalization transformed the possibilities on the Brazilians' table. In recent decades, we have been zigzagging a bit lost and a bit dazzled between the supermarket shelves.
When I started covering gastronomy, between 2012 and 2013, I thought I was then having access to true knowledge, to the right way to cook according to the consecrated traditions – as if the execution technique would guarantee a dish's authenticity. Fortunately, the experience made me get in touch with many cuisines and ways of cooking and serving food. It made me notice that there are many ways to reach the same result and that it's almost impossible to pinpoint the origin of any dish.
I left this restaurants' universe when the pandemic arrived, and I got through thinking more about homemade food, the one for social reproduction, the boring cooking. I had to cook more frequently and handle the time and budget limitations, looking for surprising myself someway. I dug my memory to remember things I've tasted and liked to try those ingredients combinations and apply them in something I could cook myself. I challenged myself to cook with ingredients I had in my pantry but didn't seem to match. When I see myself trapped in a stir-fry looping, now I think: "How would Flora cook it?"
This is one of the rawest texts I've published here. It's an initial idea, questionable, still loosely tied. What I write is not science, so the only thing I expect is that this read raises questions around the education of those who cook and that we advance on the discussion of culinary and gastronomy, understanding them as multifactorial expressions of human development.
Thank you to Eduardo Alves, Philosophy doctorate student at PUCRS, for the off-the-record conversations about epistemology and rational disagreement, which indirectly helped me to shape this essay.
CHALLENGING NEWS
Now, with the opportunity to discuss a postgraduate curriculum in Gastronomy, I was able to have discussions like the one in the essay above when putting together programs and subjects for three courses.
I accepted Renato Bedore's invitation to take the executive coordination of three Gastronomy postgraduate courses at Positivo University: National Chef de Cuisine (370h), International Chef de Cuisine (370h), and International and National Chef de Cuisine (395h). We build a curriculum that reinforces the material and historical matters in the development of food and, consequently, gastronomy. We incorporated one subject about food restrictions and taboos due to different motivations and perspectives (religious, sanitary, political, etc). Also, on the Brazilian cuisine topics, the regional cuisines subjects gave place for an updated approach that considers the biomes we have in the country.
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NT: About that time, and still today, most Brazilians use long-grain rice in their daily recipes, especially white rice and parboiled rice.
NT: As known as gomashio in Japanese and gersal in Portuguese, the blend between roasted sesame seeds and sea salt creates a flavorful seasoning very appreciated by vegetarians, and a staple of the macrobiotic diet – which is not the most common diet in Brazil.