What does the post-Alison-Roman food landscape look like? A dish not unlike Roman’s #TheStew, but of course predating it, gets the following:
Khichdi is a comforting and mild South Asian stew typically made with lentils and rice. This version is made with long-grain rice and yellow moong dal (or split mung beans), softened tomatoes and onion, then flavored with a cumin, coriander and turmeric, but each family has their own recipe.
Amazing how each family, every last one, has its own recipe. But this is the spirit of a more collective, communal way of thinking about food. None of that Western individualism. And also: “comforting.” A favorite. Or: “nourishing.” (What food is not nourishing?)
Today, a culture is cited, and an original-language name used. This form of correctness took over where an earlier one (from which Alison Roman was a blip of a respite) left off: ingredient purity.
Yes, a decade ago, the idea was to know where your food came from, but in a different, blander, and subtly racist way. Don’t eat unknown ingredients, admonished the Pollans and Bittmans and Waterses. In theory, this was a much-needed turn away from an American cuisine that consisted mainly of high fructose corn syrup. In practice, it also meant looking at a jar of hot sauce at Hmart, not recognizing ingredients (or correctly assessing that some of them were artificial preservatives) and saying nope no thank you, and instead heading over to the ‘elevated’ aka white-chef-run restaurant riffing on whichever Asian cuisine, but with ‘traceable’ (aka photos of white farmers on walls) ingredients. Locavorism, which can be as simple as, strawberries do taste best when in season wherever you happen to live, functioned, at times, as xenophobia. This was also, aesthetically, the time of heritage-chic, of fetishizing Scandinavia (a region with lovely fjords but possibly not the most flavor-intense of the world’s cuisines).
This era peaked when David Tanis devoted columns to sourcing asparagus. Ideally foraged, but definitely local and seasonal, as he would prepare when cooking at Chez Panisse.
Hard as it may be to remember, that moment’s fussiness also claimed the mantle of political righteousness. If you chose supermarket over farmer’s market (as though these are interchangeable, particularly in cold climates in winter, with all due respect to the rustically-displayed turnip), if you didn’t think about how your ingredients were sourced, you were… I’m trying to remember what it even was. Bad for the environment, I think? Or was it that it made you fat? (A problematic concern now, but 2010ish was not afraid to bust that one out.) I recall that it was only occasionally about non-organic farming being bad for farm workers.
This new moment cares just as intensely where food comes from, but in a different way: it’s about cultural origins. The problem used to be that maybe you didn’t shell out for the organic lentils. (Or, occasionally, that you did not acknowledge your privilege, having a stove and a saucepan, and sanctimoniously note that a single mom with three jobs is certainly entitled to her Mickey D’s.) Today, the concern is that you’re making lentils (as Roman apparently still does) without self-flagellating first about having not descended from inventors of the lentil.
The new mood has pros and cons, political and otherwise. There is a greater emphasis on foods having a taste of some sort than had been the case. (Am remembering the British Bakeoff motif, wherein non-white contestants are referred to as being “good with their flavors.”) Everything now gets “chile,” an ingredient I had previously thought was spelled “chili,” an ingredient I had previously conflated with “hot sauce,” but that at any rate does improve foods. Oil-burnt rice, something I Columbused at Korean restaurants ages ago (without realizing you’re actually meant to eat it! I thought I was being weird by doing so!), the Times is now on top of. Everything also gets a glug of sesame oil, which is somewhat limiting if there’s a sesame allergy in your household, but the flavor can be recreated in some dishes (I figured out, after much experimentation) with a mix of peanut oil and peanut butter.
As a matter of flavor, it’s hard to argue with Samin Nosrat (that bridge from old to new: Chez Panisse formed but intensely now) that “salt, fat, acid, heat” improve matters. Home cooks had been frying foods and then pouring lemon juice on them for ages, but it’s nice to see such techniques encouraged more broadly. And politically, I suppose the handwringing culture-citing is preferable to crypto-xenophobic agricultural fetishism.
It is also interesting to learn where dishes come from, if not (in my view) the crime of the century for a food writer not to know or share this. And… some this moment was needed to correct for the previous one. But not the part where Alison Roman, decidedly not one of the figures of the where-your-food-comes-from earnestness of a decade ago, became its scapegoat.
while reading this I was reminded of the book The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane by Lisa See. It's about a generation of families who harvest tea and the traditions around picking & growing & selling tea, and the entire tea market & how the purest teas from certain regions are sold for exorbitant amounts of money... really good book if you like that sort of thing.