That is, culinary preparations become a cuisine when, and only when, the preparations are articulated and formalized, and enter the public domain. Although the preparation of food easily accommodates, even necessitates groups as well as individuals, when it is confined to a specific place—say, the kitchen—the group in question will remain small because its foodways and beliefs are dependent upon personal transmission of techniques and practices. Such dependence on connections between individuals renders the cultural status of any practice highly precarious. Thus for any cuisine to reach beyond the originating group, its culinary practices need to be fixed. The written text and the image put cuisine into general circulation by turning culinary practices into cultural phenomena.
Its dual nature as a material and intellectual product distinguishes cuisine as a cultural and artistic product. The element that distinguishes cuisine from other cultural products similarly divided between the material and the intellectual is the utter insistence upon that materiality. Consequently, the intellectualization of culinary discourse necessarily confronts the limits of the material. However much cuisine has to get out of the kitchen to circulate in society, its place, still and all, is in that same kitchen. The comprehensive culinary space of the larger society cannot afford to lose contact with the originating culinary place. Cuisine cannot live by food alone, and neither can it live only by words.
This dependence of the primary cultural product on a secondary intellectual discourse situates cuisine at the opposite end of the production-criticism spectrum from literature, where the original literary work and the critical interpretation make use of the same medium—language. In this respect, cuisine belongs with the performative arts, and as for other such arts, the social survival of the culinary performance depends on words. Recipes make it possible to reproduce the original, or a reasonable approximation thereof. On this continuum, the plastic arts lie somewhere between the literary and the performing arts because although there is a disjuncture between the medium of creation-production and the idiom of criticism, there is a palpable, more or less permanent product. In a paradigm of what cooking is all about, culinary discourse transforms the material into the intellectual, the imaginative, the symbolic, and the aesthetic. This encompassing rhetoric has much to do with shaping the larger culture that envelops every cuisine.
There are probably as many ways to talk about food and cuisine as there are to cook and eat. Whatever the definitions invoked, one cannot fail to be struck by how many of them come in pairs. Rather as if any given culinary mode must be thought of as what it is not as much as what it actually is, each term works off one or more contraries. So we talk about cuisine as fancy or plain, creative or routine, daily grub or festive fare. Regular rhetorical skirmishes these days pit organic foodstuffs against industrialized dishes; homemade dishes against store-bought, canned, or frozen; local, “authentic” products against exotica; oral against written culinary traditions. Then, the charismatic authority of the (customarily and most frequently still male) chef, reinforced by a plethora of military metaphors, sets up against the domestic authority of the (archetypically female) cook, dominated by comforting images of nurturing and the home. Thus, home cooking can be either a term of limitation or an advertisement of authenticity, between the mundane evening supper and the roadside sign enticing the weary traveler to the comforts of home. Plainly, the categories of cuisine are themselves highly heterogeneous. Some refer to the sources or the food served, some to the sites of consumption, others to the occasion, and still others to the producers or consumers. Virtually all of these differences can be traced to the fundamental opposition between cooking (or cookery), with its German roots, and cuisine, with its French flair. The material transformation of food into a culinary product parallels its intellectual mutation into the kind of culinary discourse that we call cuisine. For the latter, even though the imported term entered the English language in the fifteenth century, it retains a certain air of otherness, of distance from familiar indigenous foodways.1 Whereas the practice of cooking supplies a basic template for material transformation, cuisine codifies that practice. The intellectual and cultural metamorphosis of cuisine takes food beyond the strictly culinary and the patently instrumental. Cooking gives us food for thought; cuisine offers thoughts for food. The larger question turns on the relationship between these two kinds of culinary connections. Where does the dividing line fall? Or are we instead dealing with a continuum rather than a dichotomy?
Marvelous Potentialities of Food Tourism
