When we look to the actual culinary orientation and content of these many cuisines, we find two basic configurations: traditional cuisines and modern cuisines. Geography largely controls the former. Self-sufficient and selfcontained, the archetypal traditional cuisine neither imports nor exports either people or products. Production and consumption occur in the same place and involve the same agents. However, even the specific meaning of local varies considerably, which is why traditional cuisines have been identified with everything from a single community to a region and even a mega-region such as the Mediterranean. Insofar as the locality coheres around products and a lifestyle, communities throughout the region share similar, simple modes of preparation. For staunch culinary conservatives, this fidelity to the land, this rootedness—what the French call terroir—makes these local or regional cuisines the only true cuisines. Their assessment favors the material ingredient (the food) over the cultural product (the dish or the cuisine), on the implied assumption that the less transformation undergone by those raw materials, the better and the more authentic the cuisine. Its origins in subsistence preparations and its development restrained by a necessary frugality explain the fundamental conservatism of traditional cuisine. For the long centuries when famine was an ever-present possibility and wherever resources have to be carefully husbanded, traditional cuisine dictates culinary practices. In precarious circumstances, it is the only culinary mode that makes sense. Even as traditional cuisine entertains a close relationship to the land, it is also tied to the community on that land. Culinary creativity is a luxury, not only because of material concerns but also because experimentation would damage the connections that traditional cuisine makes within the communities from which it came.3 Of course, this connection, too, becomes part of a cosmopolitan marketing of the local: “Tuscan food,” Saveur peremptorily decrees, “is about clarity of flavor and a sense of the earth. Not innovation or complexity.” Practitioners take pride in the preservation of recipes handed down for generations. The larger culinary culture remains importantly an oral culture, and recipes, when they exist in written form, tend to be imprecise, serving more to jog memory than offer instruction. In the same issue of Saveur, the author of an article on Vermont chicken pie enthuses about her “surge of pride” that she is “now one of the custodians of such a rich tradition.” 4 Saveur works hard to justify the promise it proclaims on its cover, to have us “Savor a World of Authentic Cuisine.”
Cuisine Culture and Intercultural Sense of Food
