Christopher Kimball - Milk Street

I recently dined at La Grenouille in New Yorkthe last of the old-world French restaurants. It provided a timely reminder that classic American cooking is based largely on the cuisines of northern Europe. Traditional French cooking, in particular, is poorly suited to the home kitchen. It depends on a marriage of top-notch ingredients and advanced culinary technique to coax flavors, often slowly, into perfect harmony. Poached sea bass with a mlange of tiny vegetables surrounded by a delicate nage is a case in point. One false step and triumph turns into an overcooked disaster. After 40 years of cooking, Ive learned to leave that approach to the professionals.

The rest of the world thinks differently about cooking. While so much of northern European cuisine relies on heat and time to build flavorlong simmers and roasts fueled by fireelsewhere, flavors are built by layering bold, simple ingredients. The Ottoman Empire had access to 88 spices. Northern Europe was happy with salt, pepper and a bit of caraway kneaded into rye bread. Herbs are limited to a spare sprig or two. Yet from Lima to Sichuan, they are used by the handful, to say nothing of Middle Eastern tabbouleh, for which herbs are the main ingredient. Chilies, fermented sauces, flavored oils and condiments, ginger, turmeric, scallions and lemon grass. They abound.

And so the world offers us the opportunity to simplify and improve our cooking. Hot oil flash-cooks Chinese greens topped with ginger and scallions. Water instead of stock produces cleaner flavors. Fish sauce, soy sauce, miso, rice vinegar and other pantry staples give the home cook a head start toward culinary success. Instead of apple pie spice and a few dried herbs, what about zaatar, dukkah, ras el hanout, togarashi, garam masala and baharat? And when it comes to pepper, there are myriad choices, from aleppo and urfa to Sichuan peppercorns and the spicy white pepper popular in Asian cooking.

For the most part, the cooking itself is quicker or, at the very least, easier. A whole chicken is simmered effortlessly in water for the classic Chinese dish, white-cooked chicken. Thai fried rice takes just minutes, as does an herb and pistachio couscous or spicy red lentil soup. Start with the right ingredients and the cooking almost takes care of itself. The beauty of this approach is that you get both bolder and simpler food.

Milk Street offers the proposition that America, and the rest of the world, is experiencing a watershed moment. Like music and fashion, cooking is becoming a mashup of ingredients and techniques. Its an opportunity to learn, rather than appropriate. Ethnic cooking is dead. We are all simply making dinner. A couple in Mexico City doesnt cook Mexican food. They cook. And they might well prepare a Ligurian pesto or a quick stir-fry instead of a mole negro from Oaxaca. Why should we aspire to authentically reproduce what is natural and necessary in another culture? Food is imbued with cultural intimacy, defined by the unique nature of local ingredients, and experienced by different societies in a thousand unique ways.

Attempting to reproduce that elsewhere ignores its import. Sharing a dish of thieboudienne (a rice and seafood platter) in Senegal is about being seated in a circle on a stone terrace, scooping portions with bare hands, and obeying rules of sharing food borne out of the overwhelming hospitality of the Senegalese. Make that recipe in an apartment on the Upper East Side of New York City and much is lost in translation. Yet, there are enduring kitchen values that travel easily from Saigon to Kiev to Jerusalem to Quito to London to New York.

We strive to learn, hoping to find bits and pieces of things we can bring home as the basis for a new repertoire. We might stick to the original, if it makes sensea classic such as Chinese stir-fried eggs with tomatoes, for exampleor we might borrow a flavor profile from Turkish cooking and marry it with a method from Morocco. A simple variation can be a quick pasta dish with Asian flavorssoy sauce, toasted sesame oil and scallionsinstead of pesto. This approach has history on its side. In late 19th century Japan, American dishes were adapted to Japanese tastes in a style of cooking referred to as yoshoku. The Japanese potato salad in this book is a good example. And dont forget that Spam, the ultimate American export, is a hugely popular ingredient in South Korea. Culinary mashup is nothing new.

If this is old news, what then does Milk Street have to offer? We put our culinary experience at your disposalwhether on location, where a practiced eye is necessary to spot the techniques and flavors that will travel best back to America, or here in our kitchen, where we apply years of hard-won recipe development experience to produce well-tested recipes. That process, from inspiration to reliable recipe, is arduous and filled with dead ends, but this is our vocation. Its what we love to do.

But reliability is insufficient. We travel for inspiration and understanding. In the suburbs of Tel Aviv, we line up at 7 a.m. with workers waiting for their breakfastwarm, whipped hummusthen eat with them, standing by the side of the road. In the townships of Cape Town, we not only taste peri peri chicken, we spend most of a Sunday waiting for a bucket of raw meat, delivering it to a cook who works 12 hours a day before wood-fired grills. Outside, you eat, standing, no utensils needed. It is a raucous celebration of cooked meat, singing and dancing, a form of culinary revival. These moments infuse our words and cooking.