Part of a Facebook Conversation

making Parmigiano Reggiano

Language and cooking – home cooking that is – are vehicles for consciousness, the thing that makes us human. Cooking, like language, is most expressive of our identity when it is associated with a place, when it is grounded in a past and, because it is alive and evolves, when it can expect a future. When cooking is invented or, as the media likes to call it in Ferran’s instance and in that of other chefs, reinvented, it comes from nowhere and has nowhere to go, it exists only in that moment, it is no more than an amusement, at best just an amuse bouche. I love language and dialects and the flavors that are linked to them; I enjoy accents that speak to me of territory, of history, of class; in my family and that of my husband Victor we have used Italian, Romagnolo, Turkish, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, French, Spanish. I have no need for Esperanto or for Ferranto.