About Honest Cuisine
The Honest Cuisine
web site is an open food journal, meaning that we publish writing about food
from just about anyone. The only thing we demand of contributors is that
their writing be clear and that their subjects complement the ideals of
Honest Cuisine.
This site
is
also
100%
not
for
profit. We do
not make money from what appears here, nor do we pay any money for the writing
that appears here. The following is the full text of the inaugural article
that explains the idea of Honest Cuisine.
On Honest Cuisine
To truly celebrate food, we need to return to a focus on dining as sharing, cooking as craft and food itself as nourishment of both body and mind. We cannot honestly separate food from its functional potential. A dish offers us less if it fails to fill both the belly and the soul.
To create Honest Cuisine we need to take food back for ourselves from the cults of celebrity and artistic pretension. Discovering Honest Cuisine requires that we rely less on the people we discover food through and more on the people we share the our food with. Food created for enjoyment is monumentally more exciting than food created to impress.
Honest Cuisine is all about context: Quality ingredients mixed with thoughtful preparation and presentation enthusiastically shared with others in a special place at a special time. The expense, rarity or popularity of an ingredient has little bearing on the potential of any dish to satisfy us. Truffles and Foie Gras and Caviar (oh my!) are truly wonderful things and clearly play a part in Honest Cuisine (anyone claiming to be unfulfilled by a bowl of pasta tossed in butter with some fresh truffle shavings or a few drops of truffle oil is clearly being less than honest!). But Honest Cuisine celebrates equally that same shaved truffles on warm pasta served as part of a romantic dinner for two and the simply roasted chicken served with mashed potatoes, pan gravy and green beans on a cool fall evening at a table surrounded by family and friends. Honest Cuisine embraces both a scoop of vanilla ice cream on a waffle cone, sprinkled with jimmies, eaten in the back yard with your children and a bunch of neighborhood kids on a hot summer evening and fluffy islands of baked meringue floating on a pool of creme anglaise, topped with warm caramel sauce served at the end of a dinner at the fanciest French restaurant in town to celebrate your significant other's recent promotion. Honest Cuisine appreciates the charcuterie enjoyed by newlyweds at a bistro down a little alley in Brittany during their honeymoon in France, and the wieners slathered with spicy meat sauce and mustard served at the same counter they were ordered from in that downtown diner at two in the morning after a night of club hopping by the same couple on their first date.
When we take the time to prepare food for sharing and enjoying with others we create something special. We create Honest Cuisine.