Creating Novelty

Long before, the advent of "nouvelle cuisine", the grandmas of virtually every cuisine in the world were technically adept at creating novelty out of nowhere.

Faced with the seasonality of ingredients, how do you create "interesting" food day after day after day, in a world where the airplane and refrigeration had yet to be invented, and the audience (as always) craved novelty?

The answer is shockingly simple - vary the proportion of spices.

You can serve the meat with more black pepper than ginger, and vice versa, and bingo! they taste different.

And since this scales exponentially in the number of ingredients (Ed: math geek alert!), this is a game that the grandmas were good at, and doggone it, they were not playing for mere stakes, they were playing to win!

Which brings us to the present. Multiple recipes for the same idea. Whenever the CC posts a classic spice recipe, there is a hangover that follows ("my family does it differently.")

Well, DUH!!!! Of course, they do. Which doesn't make it more "authentic". It just makes it as the baseline against which you compare.

The CC once made string beans with a classic North-Indian twist. Stir-fried with ajwain and cumin. The audience just pushed it away.

"This is not how I conceptualize string beans."

Total abject failure. Not one would eat it.

"Where's the coconut milk?", said one, his Asian roots showing.

Anyway, to get back to the subject before yet another post about the dubiousness of "authenticity" surfaces, back in the day, they made these spices in industrial-strength sizes. We are a little more circumspect, and need to tone it down a bit as explained by this post.

So when the next need to complain about "authenticity" arises, why not just lie down until it goes away?