Food was a very important part of my childhood as part of the only Indian family in a small Southern town.  When my parents moved to Parsons, Tennessee, they had already lived in New York City, Toronto, Kenya, and of course, India.  After living in major culinary cities, my parents found themselves slightly isolated and surrounded by the unfamiliar surroundings.

My mother turned to food to not only learn about her new home, but also as a way to comfort herself.  When her three daughters were born, it became even more important to her that they learn about their Indian heritage as well as the world around them through culinary adventures in the kitchen.  An early devotee of PBS cooking shows, she would tape the shows and attempt to perfect dishes from all corners of the globe.  When it came to Southern fare, a local neighborhood friend shared her traditional Southern dish recipes with my mother; she quickly learned that both Indian and Southern palates shared a love for all things fried.

Of course, my mother was well versed in making her native Gujarati food.  Cooking since she was 13, she could make an Indian dinner appear in a flash, without using a recipe of any measuring tools – a sometimes frustrating sight for me and my sisters.  My mother raised us to be liberal, educated women, which also meant she never forced us to learn how to make Indian food.  While pizzas, biscuits and apple pies were fun recipes to try, the idea of making traditional Indian food seemed unnecessary and boring.

Fast forward to many years later when my love of food led me to a job in New York, working in the food and wine public relations world.  I still had one culinary roadblock, however and that was an intense fear of cooking Indian food.  The ultimate challenge came when I was coerced by my Sunday night dinner club to cook an Indian dinner.  The first thing I did was call my mother and immediately beg her to help me figure out where to get ingredients and how to wing making Indian food after all these years of avoiding the cuisine.  Of course, my mother was able to provide dishes and ingredients – but no accurate measurements.  Her rule of thumb (literally), was to put in as much spice as she could remember from 40 years of measuring by sight.  While replicating other dishes from my mother’s repertoire was hard, it was still feasible since I could usually find a cookbook author’s recipe to follow.

My “aha” moment happened when a good friend introduced me to The Dance of Spices by Laxmi Hiremath.  At first, the idea of using a cookbook to make foods that I had grown up loving and should somehow inherently be able to create seemed silly, the book was an eye opening experience.  Laxmi seemed to have written this book for me:  tips for a first generation Indian American on how to find ingredients by their English names in grocery stores and accurate measurements and taste tests to determine if my dish remotely like the dishes I had growing up.

My Sunday test came quickly and I decided that becoming reliant on the cookbook instead of my mother was a smart choice – this was a more accurate way of cooking, this was the way it was supposed to be – order amongst the chaos with ingredient lists, measurements and directions.  In the midst of creating a very traditional dish, Palak Paneer, I lost control of the blender and proceeded to dump four hours worth of cooking directly on to the floor.  Of course, I burst into tears and drama, immediately taking this as a sign that I hadn’t inherited the culinary chops of my descendants.  A good friend had the forethought to call my mother.  After laughing hysterically, she calmed me down with tails of how she had ruined countless dishes over the years, unbeknownst to me.  She reminded me that the only reason I was having trouble with the dishes was because of lack of practice and that attempting a 6 course dinner for 12 people was a bit too ambitious for my first try.  And then slowly and quietly, my mother walked me through the rest of the dinner, using my descriptions to help me create a meal that to this day, I am still very proud of making.  I am also proud of my mother, who has taken to documenting her recipes so that her daughters can begin the practice of replicating them.  Each time I return home to Tennessee, she has worked on yet another recipe that now has an ingredient list, measurements and directions.

Below is the dish that I had originally meant to create from The Dance of Spices. Like my mother, feel free to ignore the measurements or create them to your own tastes.

Palak Paneer (Paneer with Spinach)

16 ounces store-bought paneer

¼ cup melted unsalted butter

6 cups packed chopped fresh spinach

½-inch piece fresh ginger

6 large cloves garlic

2 to 4 fresh green Serrano or jalapeno chilis, stemmed and roughly chopped

1 cup water

½ cup grated yellow onion

1 teaspoon ground cumin

½ teaspoon turmeric

½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1 teaspoon salt
Place spinach with 1/4 cup of water in a pot and cook covered until wilted, about 6 min. Immediately transfer the spinach to a bowl of ice water to stop cooking and preserve its color. Let spinach sit for about 5 min. Squeeze spinach gently and transfer to a blender. Add the ginger, garlic, chilis, and 1/2 cup of water. Process to a very smooth and velvety puree.

Heat remaining 3 1/2 tablespoons of desi ghee in a heavy medium saucepan over med heat. Add the onion and cook, stirring until it starts to brown. Add the cumin, turmeric, and pepper and stir for a few seconds. Add the spinach puree, remaining 1/2 cup water, and salt. Bring to a gentle boil, reduce the heat, and simmer until piping hot. Add the paneer and cook until the cheese is heated through. Taste and adjust the seasonings as needed.

Source:  The Dance of Spices by Laxmi Hiremath (Wiley Publishing)

Meatballs are so much more than food to me. They embody a big piece of my childhood, and dear loved ones whose memory I’m able to keep alive each time I cook them.

My father, Serafino, and grandmother, Angelina, moved to the U.S. from Calabria, Italy in the 1950s. Having lived much of their lives in times of war or crisis, for them life in America was a happy escape from a rural, impoverished life. The flavors they kept, however, and for that I’m forever grateful, because 50 years later those tastes and aromas continue to shape our lives as a family.

When I was old enough to learn, I eagerly asked to be taught how to make our family meatball recipe. This is considered an important rite of passage, and an endeavor that must not be taken lightly. But it was not Gramma Angelina who showed me — it was my late brother, Bob. And even now, 25 years after his death, as soon as I begin preparing meatballs I’m transported to an interesting ritual we…”shared.”

Bob was an incredible cook, particularly when it came to Italian food. He spent so much time at the stove, his proclivities earned him the nickname “Meatball.” I spent many a Saturday or Sunday watching him at the stove, carefully rolling out each meatball, then rolling each again before it went into the oil. The smell would fill the house, beckoning me like a wanton lover.

When meatballs were on the menu I was never far away; this was a necessity, as I had to strike at the perfect moment. You might say I have a “thing” for meatballs, but with seven kids in the family, rations were pretty strict. I also like my meatballs without sauce, so if I wanted to sneak one, I had to do it between the time they came out of the frying pan and went into the pot of sauce. The moment my brother turned his back I would spring, grabbing a scorching hot meatball and running for the bathroom, where I would lock myself in and blow on the meatball to cool it and savor each second of its ambrosia-like qualities. Sometimes I was too hasty, and spent the next couple of days with a burnt tongue.

I’ve since become very adept at making them myself, but that perfect combination of flavor and texture somehow eluded me. But I was close…very close. I get a little bit nervous about serving a batch to the family, as we are pretty particular about our flavors, but last year I took them on for my portion of the Christmas prep list. As I rolled each little garlicky orb, I found myself deep in memories of my brother, remembering his love of laughter and his incredible wit. It was as if he were in the kitchen with me.

On Christmas day I placed the bowl of meatballs on the table and headed back into the kitchen (like I said, I get nervous). I noticed that it was very quiet at the table, and hoped they weren’t so awful that everyone was afraid to say something. But I had tasted them the night before, and damn it, they were good. Suddenly my niece popped into the kitchen and whispered to me, “My mom said they taste just like Bob’s.” We instantly sprung into tears, memories vividly assaulting our senses. We had, at long last, reached Meatball Nirvana.

***

This recipe comes from my Gramma Crucciti (dad’s mother), and there are two important secrets: (1) you must use stale bread; and (2) you must not be squeamish. The only way to ensure the meatballs taste good is to sample the raw mix before it goes into the frying pan. You only need a little pinch to taste. The rest is easy, but a lot of the measuring needs to be done on-the-fly, as your taste preferences may differ from mine. Play with the recipe until you get the flavors where you want them.

Actually, there is a third secret: These must be made with love, and so much of it, it fills the kitchen. It improves the taste ten-fold.

Ingredients

2 lbs chopped meat (no more than 80% lean — embrace the fat, it tastes good)
Equal amount of stale Italian bread (approximately 1 1/2 large loaves for 2 lbs meat)
1 egg
1-2 cups Pecorino Romano cheese, finely grated, to taste
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped or pressed
1 Tbsp parsley, finely chopped
Salt, to taste

Vegetable oil for cooking

Preparation

Prepare the bread:
Soak the stale bread in a large bowl of water until the bread is completely soft. Break the bread apart in large chunks, removing the crust. Squeeze each chunk with your hands to get as much of the water out as possible and set aside on a plate.

[Chef's Notes: It is important that you have a 1:1 ratio of bread to chopped meat to achieve the proper texture. Please do not substitute bread crumbs for the squeezed bread, as you will get nowhere near the same results.]

Prepare the meatball mix:
Add the bread to the chopped meat and mix together by hand, squeezing to ensure an even distribution of bread throughout. Add 1 cup of the Pecorino Romano, then the remaining ingredients and mix my hand. Taste a pinch of the mixture to see if the flavors are to your taste. Add more cheese if necessary.

Roll the meatballs:
Using a spoon or your fingers, take a scoop of the mixture and roll it between your palms to form the meatball. (The size is entirely up to you, but a soup spoon usually makes a good guide.) Place the raw meatballs on a large platter in a single layer.

Fry the meatballs:
Half-fill a large saute or cast-iron pan with vegetable oil. Heat under high heat until the oil shimmers. Carefully add the meatballs, re-rolling them if they have fallen out of shape. Fry until a solid brown crust has formed on the bottom half of the meatballs, about 4 minutes, then flip over with a metal slotted spoon. Cook for another 4 minutes. (You can remove one and cut it in half at this point to make sure it’s fully cooked.) Remove to a plate or bowl lined with paper towels to drain the grease.

[Chef's Notes: You can also use a deep-fryer to make these, but you must be careful to load the basket in a single layer at a time or the meatballs will stick together.

You might be inclined to use olive oil for cooking the meatballs, but I don't recommend it. It imparts an additional layer of flavor that is not necessarily ideal, and doesn't play well at high temperatures.]

If you’ve made a pot of sauce (I’ll save that for another recipe), add the meatballs to the sauce and mangia!

Jennifer Iannolo is co-founder and CEO of The Gilded Fork, a multimedia site celebrating the sensual pleasures of food, and home to the Culinary Media Network. Jennifer also muses on food, sensuality and sass on her Food Philosophy blog.

Welcome to Share Your Plate! As the first official post of the site, I wanted to share a dish that’s important to me for many reasons: It’s a very distinctive dish in New Mexico, and it reminds me of my grandmother, who used to make it all the time in the summer. It’s also one of the first recipes I ever blogged about way back in 2005 when I started the ReMARKable Palate blog, and it’s become one of the most popular recipes on our Gilded Fork recipe database!

Like just about everyone, many of my early food memories are around my grandmother. Grandma Ella, my Mom’s Mom, was sweetness personified. So humble and kind, gentle to a fault, and so beautiful.

Here’s how I remember them. It’s their 50th anniversary portrait, taken in the late 70′s. I used to go over to their house and spend most of my days during the summer months, because both my parents worked.

My grandparents 50th Anniversary portrait

Every time I make this dish, I think of Grandma Ella. I miss her.

Calabacitas

serves 8

Santa Fe style Calabacitas is a traditional dish in New Mexico, which the Pueblo Indians taught to the Spanish, is made as a one-dish casserole by baking it and adding chicken or beef. Mine is vegetarian and cooks on top of the stove in 20 minutes.

Ingredients

4 tablespoons olive oil
1 red onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, finely minced
1½ cups yellow squash, sliced
2½ cups zucchini, sliced (or replace the summer squashes with 4 cups winter squash)
2 cups corn kernels (fresh is best, but frozen will do)
2 scallions, sliced
1 cup green chile, chopped
1 cup Roma tomatoes, diced
1 can black beans, drained and rinsed
½ cup cilantro, chopped (you may substitute parsley)
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
Mixed herbs, to taste (oregano, marjoram, and cumin)

[Chef’s Note: This recipe is best with Hatch green chile from New Mexico, which is available fresh in September and October. However, you can find it in cans throughout the year. It’s been roasted with the skins removed for ease of use.]

Preparation

Heat 2 tablespoons of the oil in a large skillet or wok and sauté the onion for about 4 minutes over medium-high heat. Add the minced garlic and sauté 2 minutes longer.

Add the squash and zucchini and sauté 5 minutes more, until softened.

[Chef’s Note: If you’re using winter squash, be sure to dice it in small cubes, about ½-inch. Sauté a little longer than you would summer squash.]

Add the remaining 1 to 2 tablespoons of oil with the corn, scallions, and green chile and sauté 3 minutes longer.

Stir in the tomatoes, cilantro, and beans and heat through, about 5 minutes.

Season with salt and herbs. Serve immediately.

Chef Mark Tafoya is founder of Share Your Plate, and co-founder of The Gilded Fork, a multimedia site celebrating the sensual pleasures of food, and home to the Culinary Media Network. Chef Mark is a personal chef in New York City, and can be found at www.remarkablepalate.com .

This is an article I wrote for the Anthology Food & Philososphy; Eat, Think & Be Merry, originally published by Wiley-Blackwell Press in 2007. A compilation of essays about food by various authors, philosophers, food writers, and chefs. This essay focuses on the link between food and culture, and in it I propose that we can bridge the gap between cultures through exploring each other’s foods. Since this is the central tenet of the Share Your Plate Project, I thought it would be useful to reprint it here. It’s long, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.

-Chef Mark

Diplomacy of the Dish: Cultural Understanding Through Taste

Introduction
How do food and culture inform one another?  Is it possible to gain greater insight and understanding of a culture through its food?  We live in an increasingly multicultural and global society.  We come into contact with people from vastly different backgrounds, and we may not have had any direct experience of them.  Our individual and cultural food tastes and choices say much about who we are and the cultures from which we come.
As a chef, I explore many ethnic dishes and micro-regional cuisines, and present them to my diners, many of whom are discovering these tastes and flavor combinations for the first time.  As the availability of products and cuisines open up, Americans have begun to sample an increasingly wide variety of ethnic cuisines, often without a previous understanding of the root culture.
When we try a new a dish that comes from another land, we have a visceral experience of foreignness brought into our bodies, which begins the process of familiarization which can lead to great understanding of our shared tastes and values.  The act of consuming new dishes can be a powerful leap into the culture from which these dishes come.  I explore the notion that one of the best ways we can learn to understand, and indeed celebrate each other, is through our cuisines. Something as seemingly small as our approach to food can transform the world in ways both small and vast, opening up new paths of understanding between even rivals.

Familiarity
Regardless of who we are, we have been raised with a relatively limited range of familiar foods.  With few exceptions, the local produce, animals and specialties, as well as our ethnic heritage, dictated what we ate as children.  Like our core beliefs, morals, religion, language and clothing, what we eat is generally inextricably tied to our family heritage.  Not only is this cuisine familiar and comforting, but it actually informs our personal definitions of food.  In adulthood, the slightest whiff of particular aromas can evoke strong memories of food we ate as children, and remind us of family members long gone.  Conversely, as a child, who has not had the experience of visiting a friend’s house and smelling the aromas coming from the kitchen, only to be shocked at how strange they seem?  Even among people who grow up in the same broad culture, it can be an odd experience at first to discover how unusual other people’s food seems to us.
Yet it is fair to say that in the so-called “melting pot” of America, we have a core set of familiar foods.  The modern American palate is defined by a general set of foodstuffs that have traditionally been grown here.  We think of these foods as comforting.  They tie us to our heritage, both within the family and with our country as a whole.  We even have a core group of dishes that despite their origin are now considered “All-American”.  We have even enshrined expressions into our lexicon which attest to this.  The phrase “As American as apple pie” springs from an erroneous assumption that apple pie is an American invention.  We know that some form of apple pie was made in many cultures long before it made its way into the American ethos.  Just ask the Tatin sisters, who invented their famous upside down apple tart in France!  It might be more appropriate to say “As American as scrapple, hoe cakes, or molasses baked beans”, but that does not have quite the same ring.  Pizza, roast turkey, hamburgers and mashed potatoes are now  part of our American culinary landscape, and they all have distinct connections in our collective memory.
This culinary familiarity is not limited to the United States, nor is it new to world culture.  In the ancient world, people were largely limited to the foods that could be foraged or grown within a radius of about twenty miles.  Far from being a trendy and eco-conscious fad, the concept of “local and seasonal” was a fact of life for people worldwide until as recently as the last century.  The foods people grew up eating were simply whatever they could grow themselves or trade for with others.  The spices, seasonings and methods of cooking were all dictated by environmental, political and religious circumstances.  In many cases, religious and tribal strictures dictated what was permissible to eat, and what would be restricted or forbidden.   The Jewish laws of Kashrut and the Muslim Halal strictures are perhaps the best known examples of this.  They remind the people who they are and where they come from, binding them in a covenant which dictates what goes into their bodies.

Melting Pots
While the familiar brings comfort and even ties us to our heritage, it can be limiting to us.  This is especially true in an increasingly global society in which we have interaction with people from many different cultures.  There is economic and cultural exchange between nations, as well as direct personal interaction with “the other” in our daily lives.  Very few places on the planet are untouched by this aspect of contemporary life.  Will we be faced with these cultural differences and turn away, retreating into the familiar, and isolating ourselves from “the other”, or will we embrace the differences, seeking out novel experiences, and discovering the familiar within the unusual?
Our modern world, seemingly small, brought together by advances in technology, is not the first era to see a melding of traditions and cultures.  It has happened frequently throughout history, when great advances in technology, and the power which comes with it, bring people from different places and traditions together, willingly or not.  Ancient Rome is a paradigmatic example of such a period in history.  At one time the saying “all roads lead to Rome” was not simply a hyperbolic expression; it was true.  Through its military dominance the Roman Empire conquered many lands, and as a result, Rome itself was among the most cosmopolitan and diverse cities ever known.  At its height, Rome had a population of nearly 5 million people.  No modern city would even come close in size until London’s population boom in the Industrial Revolution.
This population was largely composed of slaves from the far flung regions of the empire, people of widely divergent backgrounds.  Along with the tribute, gold, and riches, Roman soldiers brought back with them the foods and animals of conquered lands, and surely the slaves brought with them the cooking methods and traditions of their homelands.  Romans were voracious for the exotic, made evident by tales of coveted plants and animals being transported at great expense from North Africa or Gaul to the city for special feasts for rich citizens of Rome.  Likewise, Rome had great influence on the places it conquered, and the commerce that came with empire increased the movement of interesting foodstuffs throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East.  This commerce started a long tradition of trade between east and west which over time influenced cuisine worldwide.  The great food traditions of Europe would arise from the marriage of these various styles and cultures.
The practice of sitting down together at table and breaking bread is one of the most ancient forms of contract negotiation, sealing a deal, or promising a betrothal.  Long before the Roman Empire, and before the written word and courts of law, humans used food to cement a bond.  The taking of another’s food into one’s body is a symbol of accepting their offer, or signifying that you trust their word.  In Ethiopia, the practice of “giving gushta” entails wrapping morsels of food in injera, the sourdough flatbread, and placing it into the mouths of your fellow diners, who in turn feed you to honor the connection between people.
This sharing of food at table has ancient origins.  Most cultures have traditionally held hospitality in extremely high value.  In fact, there is evidence that one of the most egregious sins of the people of Sodom was in refusing hospitality to guests and foreigners passing through their lands.  Jewish folklore from the Haggadah has accounts of Sodom being a place where hungry strangers were cruelly given gold, but no food or lodging.  When they starved to death, the gold was taken and the bodies desecrated.  Most Near Eastern cultures require protection of guests under one’s roof.  In the biblical story, Lot was visited by two angels in disguise, and when the mob attacked and insisted on “knowing” the guests, Lot offered his own virgin daughters instead, so great was his felt duty to protect his guests.

A Personal Culinary Journey
Of course, any analysis of cultural culinary discovery must spring from personal experience.  Surely, to attempt to understand the new, one must examine the familiar, and why it influences our lives so deeply.  Our personal experience, whether we grow up with abundance or penury, adventure or the comfort of safety, forms a layer of assumptions from which our food psychology springs.  Most people grow up assuming that the way their mother cooks is simply the way it must be done.  Going to a friend’s house and smelling the aromas of unfamiliar foods on the stove can be a challenging experience for a young child.  New smells, textures and tastes give our palates completely new sensations which we can either embrace or reject.  The degree to which a person can break through this early imprinting to be open to new tastes determines how he will take to the foods of different cultures.
My own food epiphany came early in my life, and through a childish curiosity which has stayed with me into adulthood.  I grew up in central New Mexico, which has a distinctive regional cuisine, a blend of ancient Pueblo foods, Spanish and Mexican dishes brought by the conquistadores, and of course, the ubiquitous American foods.  We always had a pot of red chile on hand, and special occasions saw dishes like posole, a pork and hominy stew served around Christmastime, and carne adovada, another pork dish marinated in a chile/vinegar sauce and slowly baked until the cubes of pork are tender with a light crust of chile on the outside.  The holidays also brought biscochitos, little cinnamon and sugar dusted cookies made with copious amounts of shortening, and dozens of tamales would steam on the stovetop while we kids filled paper bags with sand and candles to make luminarias to line the walkways.  We would come in from the cold to find a hot mug of atole, a drinkable blue corn meal mush cooked with milk and sweetened with honey.
These and other New Mexican dishes were as familiar to us as pizza, burgers and hot dogs, or a roasted turkey with gravy, corn bread stuffing, green beans and all the trimmings.  For many Americans, our New Mexican dishes would seem strange and even foreign, although several of these dishes really are the native foods of the very first Americans. Yet for me, the exotic usually meant “Chinese” food (a catch-all phrase for anything remotely Asian, whether authentically Chinese, or otherwise).
My epiphany came one afternoon at the age of eight when I joined my aunt Ruth and older cousin Beverly (already an eighteen-year old culinary adventurer) for a daylong project of making Chinese egg rolls.  I had never seen such an array of strange ingredients:  water chestnuts, bok choy, wood ear mushrooms, oyster sauce, and egg roll wrappers.  The smell of these ingredients, even raw and unprepared, invaded my nostrils like an army of imperial terra cotta warriors and transported me far away from the Rio Grande valley to an imagined fantastical China.
I learned how to chop, shred, julienne, and combine these strange flavors, watching Beverly stir fry them in a wok.  Once it had cooled, my job was to place the filling onto the oddly pliant and cool, yet silky-smooth, wrappers coated with cornstarch and roll them up into a neat cigar-shaped package ready to be frozen or fried.  As the afternoon went on, I imagined what it would be like to be in China, surrounded with these aromas and flavors, and what it must look like.  My childish image was pretty far removed from what I actually discovered twenty years later, but the pleasure of the exotic kept my imagination fueled and my hands moving all day.  After making about six or seven dozen egg rolls and freezing them in plastic bags, our hard work was rewarded when Aunt Ruth heated up a pot filled with oil and deep fried a few of our egg rolls to be immediately devoured.  I can still taste the too-hot outer wrapper (which I could not wait to bite into) and the crisp, vegetal interior flavored with garlic and oyster sauce, and I remember thinking how lucky Chinese kids were to get to eat like this every day.1
My taste buds had been activated, and I was off.  Over the next few years, I tried to experience as much foreign cuisine as possible, given the sparse choices available in Albuquerque in the late 1970’s.  One particularly memorable event occurred on a family trip to Santa Fe when I was about twelve years old.  I learned that Santa Fe had the only authentic Japanese restaurant in the area at the time.  I strong-armed my family with constant and overly plaintive pleas to go to this strange place and try the sushi I had heard about.  They acquiesced when they learned that the Japanese also serve cooked food, and that there was a teppanyaki table at the restaurant.  Benihana had just hit it big in the Southwest, so they figured that they could at least eat rice and chicken.
I was the only one who wanted to try the sushi, and yet even I was stricken with fear when I smelled and saw the odd parcels and small bites lined up on the sushi plates.  My brother laughed at me as the wooden tray was laid before me with an array of raw fish lying atop balls of rice, some of them wrapped in a strange green paper.  The waitress, a beautiful Japanese woman, noted my look of panic and the strange inquisitiveness of the rest of the family and spent time explaining what each piece was, and the way to enjoy it.  She called the octopus slice tako, which made me laugh and intrigued me, since we had eaten tacos all our lives.  I thought it strange that the Japanese would also have something called tako, which was so different from the familiar crunchy shell filled with meat and cheese.  I carefully placed the cold white octopus in my mouth and was shocked by its chewy texture.  It was not rubbery, as badly prepared octopus can be, but it had a texture that was so foreign to me.  The waitress suggested I dip it into the soy sauce flavored with wasabi, which nearly blew out my ears.  I must admit that my first venture into sushi was more an experience of asserting my culinary independence than of gustatory satisfaction.  It was simply the most foreign experience I had yet discovered, and I would need a few years and a more developed palate before returning down that path.
Yet something shifted after that experience, and I learned that things which were so odd to me were mundane for other people.  Granted, I would not have access to these people for many years to come, but the time the waitress spent explaining to me the customs and intricate eating rituals of the Japanese helped me to recognize that tasting foreign foods is a fast track to understanding.  Like the egg roll experience, the décor of the restaurant helped me to imagine myself in Japan, wearing their clothes and exploring the pagodas and wooden walkways.  It awakened in me a thirst for knowledge, and actually provided a base for further exploration.  Because I now had some familiarity of the food, I was able to integrate new knowledge about Japan and its traditions into a coherent whole, based in a visceral experience, not just in a theoretical or visual one.
These early experiences would form the basis for a desire to add to my knowledge about other cultures and cuisines.  I chose to learn French in high school, and through that study, became enamored with all things French.  In fact, I even started to become quite francocentric, at least as much as is possible for an American who had not yet traveled to France.  French was one of my majors in college, and in my junior year abroad, I finally had my first experience of living in another culture.
I learned that many of the assumptions at the base of my world view were not shared by others living halfway around the globe.  This was most clear in the European tradition of shopping for each day’s staples every morning, making a circuit of different specialty purveyors.  Growing up in the late 20th century United States, my only context included weekly trips to the supermarket, convenient yet devoid of the vitality and sense of community commonplace in European markets.  I was unaware that one could have fresh produce, fish, dairy, meat in different places, often brought to market by the farmers themselves, and of the highest quality.  This is happily becoming a strong value here in the United States.
Bringing New Tastes to the Table
While not everyone has the luxury or inclination to travel the world in search of deeper cultural and culinary understanding, today Americans are blessed with a multitude of world cuisines here at home which are becoming increasingly more authentic.  Gone are the days of ketchup in marinara sauce, or Chop Suey passing for authentic Chinese food.  We have fallen in love with couscous, eat chiles with abandon, and most of us are even brave enough to eat sushi.  We have shed our fear of the foreign in a way that entices us to taste of what we might once have considered exotic.  In the past twenty years, the proliferation of ethnic restaurants throughout America, even in places far from urban centers of immigration, has brought us many new tastes.  This is most assuredly a good thing, as Americans who might never have the means or desire to travel the world are being introduced to new worlds, and embracing them.
The native familiarity and comfort of what we have known as children gives way for some to the desire for the next hot trend, and for others the desire to explore what might not have been available to them before.  The upshot of this is that as Americans develop a palate for the taste of world cuisines, the people serving them can develop progressively more authentic versions of their native dishes, and are in turn increasingly beholden to avoid cutting corners.
In order to help people to get in touch with the deeper layers of world cuisine, I have developed a series of classes introducing people to the international cuisines that have most inspired my own cooking, and I have presented these classes throughout the country. Four of these classes are A Taste of Vietnam, A Taste of Umbria, A Taste of Persia and Small Plates Around the World.
Much has changed since my early forays into eating sushi and egg rolls.  True, in the past twenty years, it has become much easier to find food from other countries, and unusual tastes are no longer derided as weird.  However, when it comes to cooking ethnic foods at home, we have generally not ventured beyond the usual suspects: Red sauce-based Italian foods, Mexican night, and perhaps the occasional stir fry. As more ethnic haunts pop up just about everywhere in the U.S., we find ourselves eating sushi, pad thai, arepas, tagines, and gyros, but we are not always crafting these same dishes at home.
My desire is to delve deeper, moving beyond the typical and better known dishes of world cuisines, and focusing on micro-regional dishes from the cultures I love. Thinking of these cultures and cuisines like an onion, the typical – or more to the point – stereo-typical dishes are that first layer of onion.  When you begin to peel back the layers, you discover the nuances and varieties, special dishes that come from particular towns, brought over and adapted from others with a unique lineage.  Discovering these micro-regional specialties helps to tell the story in more detail than just broad strokes.
Rather than focusing on generic “Italian” food, I saw an opportunity to introduce people to the foods and ingredients of Umbria, the landlocked region of central Italy and neighbor to both Tuscany and Lazio. Most Americans know and love the food of Tuscany, and rightly so. Florentine cooking, the wines of Chianti and the lavender fields of Tuscany deserve their place in the hearts of anyone who has had the good fortune to travel there. But I have always been a fan of the underdog, and love to promote lesser know, yet fabulous, cuisines. This is why I am a champion of the cuisine of Umbria, the “Green Heart of Italy,” which is known for its truffles, wild boar, wood pigeon and lake eel, and is the production center of as much as 40% of all pasta made in Italy. With dishes like Wild Mushroom Bruschetta with Polenta, Tegamaccio (a fish stew from Lake Trasimeno in central Umbria) and Poached Pears in Sagrantino wine, this cuisine focuses on the simplicity and purity of its core ingredients.  Many of these dishes have evolved from the early cuisine of the Romans, as mentioned before.  My own visits to Lake Trasimeno, Perugia, and Assisi have etched the flavors into my sense memory, and I hope that tasting these dishes encourages people to discover Umbria for themselves.
Ancient Persia was a crossroad of history and culture; once the center of the known world, Persia influenced most other Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures.  Many of the principles of Persian cuisine were developed during the height of the Islamic golden age, while much European cooking was still rather primitive.  Using more subtle herbs and flavorings than many other Middle Eastern foods, Persian cuisine is based on ancient principles of “hot” and “cold” foods, and strives to balance body and soul through diet; saffron, sumac, fenugreek, pomegranates and rose water figure prominently.  The building block of Persian cuisine is rice, which is best expressed in polow and kateh.  The intricate ritual involved in making a satisfactory kateh gives us great insight into the culture.  Time is spent picking over and repeatedly washing the rice, which is gently steamed over very low heat with a towel over the pot to prevent steam from escaping.  The bottom forms a crisp caramelized crust, which is overturned onto a serving platter and enjoyed separately from the fluffy steamed top rice.  Kuku Sabzi, an herbed egg dish, combines eggs with a healthy mix of herbs, ground walnuts and saffron, and likely influenced the frittata seen in Italy and the tortilla española in Spain.  Khoresh, a method of braising almost any meat or vegetable, is much more than simply stewing.  The subtleties of Persian herbs and flavorings come through in these special dishes.  Sohan asal, a honeyed almond brittle made with saffron and rose water, is a simple and easy dish which is the touchstone for candied nut sweets of other cultures.
The food of Vietnam is influenced by its geography and history, by both native and European foods.  Learning how to handle rice paper, thin translucent sheets made from a pounded paste of glutinous rice, forms the base skill for making an assortment of Vietnamese summer rolls.  This staple of Vietnamese cuisine uses fresh vegetables, herbs, ground meats and shrimp, as well as nuoc cham nem dipping sauce, redolent with lime juice and fish sauce.
In the class Small Plates Around the World, we explore the concept of tapas from Spain, dim sum from Southern China, and mezes from Greece, all small plates and hand snacks found in diverse cultures.  I lead the class on an exploration of Albondigas, stuffed grape leaves, kataifi, bruschetta and potstickers.  As with other explorations, we see that many cultures have similar ways of enjoying snacks, whether wrapped, as sandwiches, small pies, or meatballs
    What strikes me most each time I teach one of these classes is how eager students are to learn about the tastes and techniques of different countries. In some cases, students sign up for every class, so eager are they to learn for themselves how to make food from around the world.  There is a culinary renaissance going on in the U.S.: We are eager to learn not just how to eat, but also how to make foods from many different places.
It seems that once people get a taste of new foods, the floodgates open, and they cannot be satisfied.  It helps that many specialty products are readily available in shops around the country, not to mention the ethnic restaurants which are ever more commonplace.  One might assume that the preference for comfort foods would drive people’s culinary choices, but the more people learn about world cuisines, the more they seek out these new tastes and incorporate them into their lives.  Though the sense memories of the foods of youth inform our desires, our food choices are equally driven by wanting to recapture a feeling, taste or smell from our travels in other countries or a special meal eaten in a favorite ethnic restaurant.
The current state of the world may appear to some as a battle of opposing cultural forces.  On the surface, this may have some basis in history, politics, and religious values that seem contradictory, but I believe that we have more in common than we tend to think.  We all sit down at table and share in the bounty of the harvest, and every culture values their culinary expressions, and how those expressions celebrate the path they have taken into the contemporary world.  It is important that each culture retain these values, and often food is the most palpable and sensory way in which they are preserved.
However, even cultures which have widely opposing values and historical conflicts can find in their enemy’s traditions some aspect which mirrors their own loves, values, traditions and desires.  Arabs and Jews alike share a rich and complicated history of living in the desert, deriving their sustenance from working the unforgiving land, and holding to the dietary laws of their scriptures.  Many of their traditions, while expressed in divergent ways, have similar origins.
There is hope for the future when young people sit down together and share a meal.  It is encouraging to see that many university dining halls are places where students from different countries and cultural backgrounds break bread together.  Larger universities have many students of foreign heritage who can share their experiences with American youths over a meal, and the dining halls themselves are starting to serve a greater variety of ethnic dishes.
Tables in kosher dining rooms in universities all over the country are platforms for culinary summits.  Many observant Muslim students eat in Kosher Hillel dining halls, since the food is prepared in accordance with Halal restrictions as well.  The ancient practice of meeting at table and breaking bread as a means of sealing contracts can now serve as a way for Arabs and Jews alike to become familiar with one another and build trust.  The taking of another’s food into one’s body is a symbol of accepting their offer, or signifying that you trust their word.
Seeing that young people are willing to share their time and tables gives us hope that new paths for understanding can spring up over the sharing of something simple like a meal.  This seems like such a small thing, but it has the power to change the hearts of individual people, and over time, it can change the world.

-Mark Tafoya

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