It felt like an exceptional effort. Snaking through the hills outside of the Spanish city of San Sebastián in the backseat of a cab, intensely hungover after a night of chasing pintxos in the Old Town, my friend Lara and I were determined.
Smooth two-bite potatoes coated in crackly kaolin clay and served warm on a bed of fine sand. Struck by its playfulness and unassuming beauty, it was just as I had expected, yet my anticipation did nothing to diminish the strength of the emotional response in that moment. To read about the origins of a dish, to pore over the ingredients and methods involved, and to see it on film or in photographs provides background.
It was for just this reason that Diego Salazar, a journalist based in Lima, Peru and Mexico City, nominated Aduriz’s trademark trompe l’oeil to be included in a new book dedicated to the restaurant creations that have made an indelible mark on culinary history: Signature Dishes That Matter , curated by Salazar, Susan Jung, Howie Kahn, Christine Muhlke, Pat Nourse, Andrea Petrini and Richard Vines.
As Mitchell Davis, chief strategy officer at the James Beard Foundation, writes in the book’s foreword, signature dishes “are the flavour of history.” As inclined as we may be to view new-to-us tastes or treatments as novel, there are global ties that tell a different story. Chicken Country Captain by Mashama Bailey of The Grey in Savannah, Ga. is one such dish. With roots in the Lowcountry of Georgia and South Carolina, Kahn nominated Bailey’s rendition of an 18th-century classic chicken stew. Salty-sweet and scented with curry powder, she highlights the key flavours of the original — currants, green pepper and turmeric — in a relish, which she spreads on a slice of toasted sourdough steeped in pan juices before topping with a partially deboned half-chicken.
Consider David Chang’s steamed pork bun , which put his restaurant empire Momofuku on the map. What became his signature dish was, as Chang writes in the Momofuku cookbook, “just our take on a pretty common Asian food formula: Steamed bread + tasty meat=good eating.
The rate and means of which information is shared has, of course, changed drastically over the time period covered in Signature Dishes That Matter. Ideas and inspiration flow increasingly freely; whether acknowledged by those who pick up the concept and run with it or not, attribution is essential to distinguishing culinary through lines and giving credit where it’s due.