boeuf bourguignon

From Friday's luncheon:

unstirred

stirred

The luncheon was mostly a success, but my Korean coworker decided to shake some Parmesan cheese onto his bowl of beef Burgundy. I gave him the usual grimace that I always give him when he does weird, fucked-up things with Western food. He's put ketchup on bologna-and-cheese sandwiches before, then microwaved the sandwich (because he fucking microwaves everything). The boss and I joshed about the cheese thing maybe a little too much, and my coworker gave an awkward Korean laugh (instead of frowning or wincing, Koreans laugh in moments of awkwardness) and called himself a 푸드 테로리스트/pudeu-teroriseuteu, a "food terrorist." When he'd left the room, the boss was more sympathetic than I was, saying my coworker was merely experimenting, and without experimentation, how can one innovate? I privately thought that my boss was perhaps deliberately missing the point, but whatever—the deed was done. I told the boss that I wondered what it'd be like to take my coworker to France to let my French family see him putting cheese on food that shouldn't have it.*

The question of being a purist about something** always takes me in a metaphysical direction: from a Buddhist perspective, everything ends up being connected to everything else—everything implies or flows into everything else, so it's impossible to find anything one can call a foundation or an essence. There's nothing essential about French cuisine. It's not impossible to put cheese on beef Burgundy. But it's also true that beef Burgundy is a known quantity, and plenty of French folks will look askance at the foreigner who presumes to ruin the dish with fake Italian cheese (I did say he used Parmesan, not Parmigiano). There's creativity, and there's getting it wrong. If I point at a baby and call it an octopus, that's plain wrong, not an example of creativity. If I point at a monkey baby and call it a human baby, I might be closer than with the octopus thing, but I'd still be dead wrong.

From the Buddhist perspective, this is what it means to be a thing: real, but never fundamentally real. What is French cuisine if not the result of centuries of culinary interactions with roots and influences extending far beyond the boundaries of ancient Gaul? French cuisine—the coalescence of phenomena that we see today—therefore has no solid essence but is instead the product of interdependent interactions—causes and effects that are themselves causes for more effects, all ramifying and echoing and mixing and separating and colliding and flying past each other. But at the same time, can we not say that there is a such thing as distinctly French cuisine? This push-pull relationship between the static and the dynamic is the reality we live in, and as mere humans, we all have our tendencies and our preferences. When it comes to food, my tendency generally is to be conservative, but I innovate once in a while, too. My Korean coworker is often a nightmare when it comes to how he reckons with Western food (see above), but he's also made sincere efforts at doing certain foods the proper way: I've eaten his homemade scones and his early attempts at bagels (I really respect him for trying to make legit bagels; even I haven't done that yet), and they all came out tasting like the real thing. In fact, I like my coworker's bagels better than those Costco bagels, which are in turn a damn sight better than those ridiculous Paris Baguette bagels (which are an abomination).

Philosophical ruminations aside, the luncheon went about as well as it could. The boss liked his boeuf bourguignon and didn't add any goddamn cheese. My coworker lamely tried to justify his use of cheese by noting that the beef was on a bed of pasta. He really doesn't understand flavor profiles—the question of what goes with what in a given culinary culture, as well as what makes a given culinary culture distinct. He should go through the same culinary education I've gone through: a heavy dose of Food Network, including all the ridiculous shows like "Chopped" and "Iron Chef," followed by the assiduous following of certain chefs on YouTube. And along the way: practice, practice, practice. I should put him in touch with Charles*** since he likes baking so much.

__________

*To be fair, Italians note that, when Americans attempt Italian food, they think garlic needs to go in everything (like carbonara), but it doesn't. This is a stereotype.

**In this context, the something is food, but we could be talking about language or culture or anything else, really.

***Charles, dude, you need to switch your site to https for security's sake.