Skirting Convention

Nice article on cooking and Ismail Merchant. The style of Merchant's cooking is described thusly:

The food was sly, giving convention a knowing glance before tilting it ever so slightly.

On the  role of gender and specially sexuality in cooking, the author quotes John Birdsall

Birdsall wrote of his own impulses as a young line cook working in a casually homophobic San Francisco kitchen. He weathered prejudice routinely in these spaces, resulting in a fury that he soothed into spirited artistic output. He was “fueled by sublimated rage, the outsider with something to prove, taking the ingredients I was handed and making sure they transcended their limits.”

This brought to mind the experience I had of eating the exact same recipe cooked by a mother and two of her adult kids at different points in time. It was easy to see the source of the recipe being the same. The mother had taught them both alike and yet they interpreted it very differently. The son's version was aggressive and a bit too bold a departure from the original. His sister had a creative but very gentle take on what she had learned from their mother.