Last night, I watched Chinese Cooking Demystified's most recent video where they trace the history of mapo tofu to the best of their abilities. It was a fascinating watch where they had a particular recipe incarnation that defied their old definition of proper mapo tofu. At the end of the video they note how it's transformed over the years noting that there's an obsession these days for an authentic way of preparing dishes often using this point as a reason to criticize a dish. They aren't against criticizing a dish, but call for specific ciriticisms such as flavor balance or shape which is important in Chinese cuisine.
So I went looking though some critiques looking for something about how cream makes it too heavy or hides the flavor of this ingredient or that. What I found was something more exciting. This academic did a quick historical gloss of carbonara and found that several iterations of early carbonara included cream and other taboo ingredients like butter. It wasn't standardized into its canonical form until the 1990s.
Growing up in a traditional household, my parents never worked from recipes, but regularly made delicious dishes beloved by their friends and family members alike. Technique, ingredients, and interests ruled the day. Knowing how to bring out the flavors of the ingredients you had on hand to match each other made delicious food. And the lanes for dishes were much wider because the ingredient lists weren't as rigid. Obviously, a biriyani without rice be confusing if you dared serve it. But do you need kokum or can you use lemon juice? Is a carbonara still a carbonara with cream, with bacon instead of guancole, vegetarian? I don't know. Maybe I care less about the words coming out of my mouth than the food going in it.
