Mesa do Chef

"One of the things I’m always looking at as I travel around the world is 'where the cooks come from'.  And if there’s a regular feature, a common thread wherever you go in this world, it’s that the best cooks and often the best chefs come from the poorest or most challenging regions.

And it is without doubt that the greatest, most beloved and iconic dishes in the pantheon of gastronomy — in any of the world’s mother cuisines — French, Italian or Chinese — originated with poor, hard-pressed, hard working farmers and laborers with no time, little money and no refrigeration.

Pot au Feu, Coq au Vin, Sup Tulang, Cassoulet, pasta, polenta, confit — all of them began with the urgent need to make something good and reasonably sustaining out of very little.

So many of the French classics began with the need to throw a bunch of stuff into a single pot over the coals, leave it simmering unattended all day while the family worked the fields, hopefully to return to something tasty and filling that would get them through the next day.

French cooking, we tend to forget now, was rarely (for the majority of Frenchmen) about the best or the priciest or even the freshest ingredients. It was about taking what little you had or could afford and turning it into something delicious without interfering with the grim necessities of work and survival. 

The people I’m talking about here didn’t have money—or time to cook.  And yet, along with similarly pressed Italians, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Indians and other hungry innovators around the world, they created many of the enduring great dishes of history.

So the notion that hard working, hard pressed families with little time and slim budgets have to eat crappy, processed food – or that unspeakably, proudly unhealthy “novelty dishes” that come from nowhere but the fevered imaginations of marketing departments – are, or should be, the lot of the working poor is nonsense."

ANTHONY BOURDAIN, Chef, escritor e apresentador de televisão, 28 Ago. 2011