Cooking Up Culinary and Cultural Understanding

Few foods express the individuality of the chef as much as chili.  Everyone’s chili is unique, and everyone thinks theirs is the best.  Ever wonder what chili would taste like with M&M’s in it?  Throw some in there then and make your own crazy M&M chili.  Remember that time someone found a thumb in their chili at Wendy’s?  No? Really?  Okay….Supposedly they planted it there anyway, but it just goes to show you that you can literally put anything in chili and still call it chili.  The great part of this is the awesome flavors that people come up with for their chili experiments.      

Cooking chili in Beijing has proven itself more difficult than you might initially think.  For one, chili ingredients tend to be very expensive.  It cost me nearly $50 yesterday for a basket of chili ingredients that would only cost me around $7-$15 in the United States.  Chili is no cheap dinner alternative here.  You really have to be dedicated to making it, or you’ll just end up bankrupt and hungry.  Also, obtaining some of the necessary ingredients requires visiting one of the city’s “western” grocery stores.  “Western” in this case basically just means they have a canned food section.  However, it still means that you have to get on the bus and take yourself to the Sanlitun district.  

      

When asked by my girlfriend what food I wanted her to cook the most, I replied chili.  No question.  Most foods are easy to get in Beijing, and the capital is certainly not short of great options for burgers.  After establishing my craving for chili, we had an interesting discussion about the “freewheeling” nature of cooking chili.  I found her hunched over her ipad looking up recipes online.  She made some comments about the large number of western spices that she was going to need to buy.  I told her not to worry and just to use whatever spices were available. 

“Would it still be chili then?” she asked. 

“Of course, you can put whatever you want in chili,” I told her.

This initially perplexed her.  To be fair, what other kind of food has listed recipes that you can totally ignore and still accomplish your culinary goal?  I am hoping she comes up with some kind of east-meets-west chili.  Either way, I am getting a free meal out of this, so no complaining here.  I am just excited to see what she’ll come up with for me.    

You sort of have to understand the general Chinese mindset about food.  No nationality on earth care more about food than the Chinese.  They just don't care about food in the American sense.  In the United States, people mainly want to know whether the food tastes good.  As KFC has proven, it doesn't matter if you substitute chicken patties for buns, as long as people think it tastes good.  In China people tend to focus on other factors, like how "correct" are the preparation and presentation.  Basically, does this food look like its supposed to look.  You'll notice many Chinese citizens visiting the United States obsess over whether American Chinese food is "authentic" or not, without caring whether it tastes good.  This sort of answers the question of why fortune cookies and crab ragoons haven't caught on in China, and probably never will either.    

Keeping this in mind, it's no wonder my girlfriend was surprised that she could just throw out the chili recipes she found, and just create her own culinary masterpiece.  It just goes to show you that differences can be culinary as well as cultural.