Aesthetics of the Tongue: In Defense of Vintage Spices and the "Food-for-Thought" Movement
Some time ago I acquired a can each of paprika and cayenne pepper from the 1960s which had remained unopened. These were selling at a junk shop for about two dollars apiece. Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure, as the saying goes. Now my original intent was to keep them for sentimental value as relics of a lost era. But, like mischievous genies in bottles, the raspy voices of the ancient paprika and cayenne, like the sound of dried leaves blowing across a sidewalk, began calling to me to release them.
It was 2002, I was cohabiting with a sociopathic harpy, and thinking outside of the box was a privilege that I had to fight for at every turn, especially in the kitchen. So you might imagine the response I received when I first proposed the idea of cooking as an aesthetic phenomenon, or more precisely, the creation of food designed not to induce pleasures to the taste buds, but to provoke thought. Of course, no thought-provoking food movement (excuse the expression) would have much of a future without a venture into the past.
So as some of you might remember, I would invite friends over for dinner, and the conversation would often progress in the following manner:
Friend: "So what is it that you are making for dinner tonight, ____?"
Me: "Tonight we are having a high-density, broth-recessive, mixed-ingredient soup, featuring a 1968 cilantro augmented by an assortment of period spices."
Friend: "I seeeeeeeeeee..."
Anyway. I readily admit that a 30+-year-old spice will not compete in intensity or freshness with a newly-minted (heh heh) version. But freshness is not always the goal, nor, in the larger scheme, is a pleasurable dining experience the end all, be all of culinary endeavor. Hence, my endorsement of "Food for Thought," a movement to liberate cooking from its role of satisfying the primal urges of the base and the pretentious graspings of the bourgeois.
A vintage spice does not become rotten. True, it becomes less of what it was, but that is not all - it also becomes something slightly different, flavor-wise. There is a certain "narrowness" to the flavor of a new spice, and a certain understated "roundness" to the character of the vintage variety.
I will never advocate the complete usurping of the role of contemporary spices by vintage products. However, as a supplement, as a break from the mundane, and perhaps, most importantly, as a conversation piece, they are equaled by few.
It was 2002, I was cohabiting with a sociopathic harpy, and thinking outside of the box was a privilege that I had to fight for at every turn, especially in the kitchen. So you might imagine the response I received when I first proposed the idea of cooking as an aesthetic phenomenon, or more precisely, the creation of food designed not to induce pleasures to the taste buds, but to provoke thought. Of course, no thought-provoking food movement (excuse the expression) would have much of a future without a venture into the past.
So as some of you might remember, I would invite friends over for dinner, and the conversation would often progress in the following manner:
Friend: "So what is it that you are making for dinner tonight, ____?"
Me: "Tonight we are having a high-density, broth-recessive, mixed-ingredient soup, featuring a 1968 cilantro augmented by an assortment of period spices."
Friend: "I seeeeeeeeeee..."
Anyway. I readily admit that a 30+-year-old spice will not compete in intensity or freshness with a newly-minted (heh heh) version. But freshness is not always the goal, nor, in the larger scheme, is a pleasurable dining experience the end all, be all of culinary endeavor. Hence, my endorsement of "Food for Thought," a movement to liberate cooking from its role of satisfying the primal urges of the base and the pretentious graspings of the bourgeois.
A vintage spice does not become rotten. True, it becomes less of what it was, but that is not all - it also becomes something slightly different, flavor-wise. There is a certain "narrowness" to the flavor of a new spice, and a certain understated "roundness" to the character of the vintage variety.
I will never advocate the complete usurping of the role of contemporary spices by vintage products. However, as a supplement, as a break from the mundane, and perhaps, most importantly, as a conversation piece, they are equaled by few.