On cooking

and connection.

I own a shit tonne of cookbooks. I used to get sucked into buying restaurant or chef-name cookbooks because I was young and naive once, but I never cooked from them. They mostly felt empty. They were more about creating abstract concepts and being artists over making something really fucking delicious.

Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that when I buy a cookbook, it’s about a particular type of cuisine, a region or a focus on a single practice. If I want to learn about Palestinean food, I will buy a book by a Palestinean. If I want to learn about improving my sourdough techniques, I will hunt down a book by a professional baker who has taken the time to share their hard-earned knowledge. I don’t own many books on Cantonese food because I find a lot of books in English on Cantonese food end up being a smash and grab of China as a whole, and I look at the recipes and can tell that they’re wrong. Luckily, there are a lot of older content creators who share their complex recipes on Youtube and I can understand Cantonese.

This is why I will defend chefs and writers like Fuchsia Dunlop and David Thompson because they have devoted their lives to learning the language and cuisine from the regions they’re obsessed with.