I got the new issue of [The Art of Eating](http://www.artofeating.com/) this week, and a letter from David Downie voiced a complaint I’ve heard before:
> During my travels in America I have been treated to so many overloaded, over-spiced, over-complicated dishes at homes and in restaurants that I’ve simply stopped commenting on the phenomenon.
Downie, who lives in Paris, contributes regularly to AoE (he writes about unsalted Italian bread in this issue). Something tells me he wouldn’t have approved of tonight’s dinner.
Dinner consisted of the remainder of the homemade poblano sausage, formed into patties and served on toasted buns (Franz cornmeal kaiser buns, which are great, and wouldn’t Franz the Cornmeal Kaiser make a great Sesame Street character?). For sandwich toppings, we had sauteed mushrooms and homemade tomatillo-chipotle salsa.
Downie doesn’t provide any examples of what he’s talking about, so it sounds to me like he’s elevating a personal preference–or perhaps a matter of physiology–to a moral standard.
Naturally, I wouldn’t profess to like “overloaded” or “over-spiced” food, but I think Thai food is one of the world’s greatest cuisines. I doubt this is a controversial sentiment anymore, and certainly not in Seattle. What makes Thai food special is often described in shorthand as “hot, sour, salty, sweet,” but that’s only half of it. Thai food is the culinary equivalent of Extreme Programming: it’s what you get when you take all of those delicious qualities and turn them up to eleven.
Now, part of the reason I like Thai food is the same reason I like any food: I had a good experience with it, and it resonated with my personal palette of psychological quirks. But another part of the reason is purely physical: I’m a nontaster. That is, I’m physically incapable of tasting the chemical known as PROP. Seventy-five percent of the population finds this chemical unpalatably bitter. My fellow nontasters and I could chug it like Miller Lite. Nontasters, who have far fewer tastebuds than average, tend to have a high tolerance for spicy and bitter foods, as well as extremely sour foods like grapefruit.
I can’t say for sure that Downie is a PROP taster, but it seems likely. He goes on to say:
> Instead of tasting the subtle flavors and rejoicing in the nuances, the respect shown for the unmediated flavors of the ingredients, this distinguished writer found blandness.
The key points that I think Downie is missing are: the cooking of different countries can be great in different ways, and often a nation’s greatest strengths are also its greatest flaws. America’s penchant for big flavors gives us the Big Mountain Fudge Cake with one hand and barbecue with the other. To take this metaphor in a totally gross direction, we can’t just amputate the fudge cake hand. (Big Mountain Fudge Cake is a nasty-looking dessert served at a chain restaurant. I saw it on TV. I am not opposed to fudge cake in general.)
Also, of course, America offers among the world’s best and worst food, and if you come looking to pick a food fight, you’ll find plenty of material.
I went to Paris once. I could have come back complaining that the vegetables were all overcooked, the food was bland, and everything was larded up with too much butter and cream. That would have been silly. Right?
Huh. I think I may be a nontaster, too, since I absolutely adore extremly hot and sour foods. What’s PROP found in that I could test with?
Do you suppose one’s ability to taste changes as one ages? Most kids don’t like very hot or bitter foods, but that often changes as they grow. Could a PROP-taster become a nontaster in adulthood?
PROP is a thyroid medication, so you can’t just go out and get some. I tasted it in a biology teaching lab. But based on my eating experience, which is like yours, I wasn’t at all surprised to learn I couldn’t taste it.
Tasting ability definitely falls off as you age, but probably not enough to change your PROP-tasting category, since we’re talking an order of magnitude or more in taste bud density. Babies are probably averse to bitter foods for evolutionary reasons, since many poisons are bitter.
As for hot foods, there are two things at work: there’s our natural physiological response to them, and then there’s how we decide to interpret the stimulus. Hot foods cause pain, period, but pain doesn’t have to hurt, if you catch my drift.
Oh, I thought you had meant that PROP was something that naturally occurred in some foods and made them taste terribly bitter to some people and not to others. Sort of like how cilantro tastes soapy to some people and not to others. I understand now.
De Gustibus non disputandum est.
I think your observation that a cuisine’s “greatest strengths are also its greatest flaws” is very apt… Although to be fair, American cuisine has come full circle from primarily bland, salt-and-pepper-is-as-good-as-it-gets to over-the-top, unnecessarily and unappetizingly dramatic. It just shows that American cuisine is a bit immature in its pursuit of adventure.
For most countries, simplicity is usually where cuisine shines brightest… Japanese cuisine is about simple preparations that just wake up the basic flavors of what is being served, and Italian cuisine’s most impressive dishes are also generally its simplest.
At first glance, Thai and Indian cuisine appear to break those rules, but if you look more closely, you’ll see that the complex flavors generally accompany relatively unfussy, imprecise cooking techniques.
Japanese dishes other than nimono, and Italian dishes other than stews, often require more precise timing or careful seasoning for the ideal result… More complex flavor bases seem to coincide with slower, more gentler cooking techniques with more room for error.
If you splash a little too much soy sauce on a Japanese ohitashi or overcook pasta by a minute, the flavor can be completely ruined, but if you keep a Thai curry dish on the stove a little too long or leave your daal a little too long, or add a bit too much seasoning, it’s not going to be a disaster.
The essential weakness of American cuisine seems to me to be a problem of moderation: our food is too big, either too cooked or too raw, either underseasoned (I remember a rural girl worrying that onions and garlic were too spicy, even as she complained that a bland version of tomato sauce she asked her friend to make wasn’t as good as mine) or “bam!” overseasoned, with everything but the kitchen sink mixed in to a dish; when a tablespoon of wine would do, we would pour in half a bottle for dramatic effect. We either do instant food or make a single dish that requires four hours of attention.