Just how exotic are exotic cuisines today. You surely don’t need to
travel half-way around the globe to savor them.
They are so alarmingly near that it does take quite a bit of the zing
off the exotica-factor !
World-food has just shrunk, well who shrunk my food !
Exotic cuisines derive from their rarity, awesome facts and the mammoth
stretch it needs for you to reach to them.
Say for example the cuisine/s of the Malagasy speaking tribes of
Madagascar may sound exotic for us but for them it is daily bread and butter.
You can easily count a hundred cuisines in a modern metropolis and is growing
by the day. Ethnic cuisines are getting delocalized. They are also getting a
contemporary-makeover.
I am a great believer in simplicity and the cuisine which is surfacing
is truly ‘simply-exotic’
Tasting menus present an entire new dimension to world cuisines and
literally shrink them on your plate and latter on your palette.
Exclusivity is still a defining factor. A diner takes notice of the
source of his food. The food supply chain is an ever changing more complex grid,
you can source products from a plethora of destinations some even abstract but
surely proportionate to your passion to hunt them down to your kitchen pots.
At this point I sometimes do wonder the credibility and appropriateness
in cooking application/s of exotic ingredients in the hands of novice chefs. Well
just because we don’t need to break much sweat to get them the novelty factor and
awesomeness gets seriously undermined.
I remember cooking a prized black cod or a now-humble bunch of green
asparagus with ginger-fingers owing to the value as well as the perceived value
of the ingredients when they were rarer.
Well coming back to the shrinking cuisine/s, I feel exotic cuisine needs to be redefined.
Well traveled and well exposed diners get an extravagant amount of
variety to lay their fork on and new-age diners are an insatiable lot.
So till then.. on my piece on exotic cuisine redefined !
By : Devraj Halder
