Balancing Act

As Julia Child advised multiple times on adding nutmeg to white sauce, add just a few specks but not so much that people can say, "Oh, nutmeg!" (Yes, I have watched quite a few videos of her old cooking shows and learned so much from her.) It seemed crazy but there does actually exist a zone where a quantity of an integral peripheral ingredient is just right, virtually undetectable by the palate, yet without which the quality of the dish would be impaired or incomplete. It's real. It's no twilight zone.

A long while back, before I watched any Julia Child videos, I tried following a recipe to make the South African stew Tomato Bredie. The recipe called for a dash of Worcestershire sauce. I was curious and tasted the stew before adding it, just so I could tell if it made any difference afterwards. And, boy, did it transform the dish! It as a very simple recipe, but it was the best, most elegant tasting of all the ones I tried. Other recipes called for tablespoonfuls of Worcestershire sauce, and while the results of such heavy-handed flavoring were tasty, the periphery upstaged a central ingredient, so much so that nomenclature for those ones would dictate a correction to Worcestershire Sauce Bredie. Also, I think, sometimes subtlety is an enormous factor in elegance.

There are many examples of dishes utilizing the delicate touch of something extra. Some of them are quite surprisingly contrasting too, such as salt in a dessert dish (e.g. custard pie, sponge cake), lemon/vinegar/tomato puree in a creamy dish (e.g. Hong Kong style Portuguese Chicken has 2 teaspoons of tomato paste in its primarily coconut cream base), or sugar in savory dish (e.g. brown sugar in meatloaf, rock sugar in dishes with five spice).

I guess, at the end of the day cooking a tasty dish requires balancing flavors. Lively, prominent contrasts can be a win too. Famous examples are Hawaiian ham, chicken with cranberry and camembert pizza, and sweet and sour pork, just to name a few. Perhaps, not everyone like the combination of pineapple and ham, but plenty of roast meat dishes pair sweetness and sourness of fruit or otherwise and the saltiness of meat. You can find lamb roasts recipes by the dozen that use apricot or balsamic vinegar. My husband cannot get his head around bacon and banana served together with maple syrup on French toast. I love it. Whoever came up with the idea probably well understood about balancing contrasting flavors and definitely daring in his/her pursuit in creating good food.

Let us all too boldly go where no one has gone before ... or least not often ... in creating exciting new flavors.