“She’s going to change the world, but she can’t change me…”

Let’s pretend for a minute that you are setting out to recreate “The Scream” by Munch, (humor me here), but you love daisies so much that you can’t resist throwing a few into the background. Is it still a replicate of The Scream? If you take the outer body of a Ford Mustang but put in a Nissan Sentra engine and a Jaguar interior, is it still a Ford Mustang just because it looks like one from the outside? Lastly, if you decide to rerecord “Stairway to Heaven” but feel compelled to put an accordion in the bridge and replace Jimmy Page’s famous solo with the one from Hotel California, is it still Stairway to Heaven?

I’m asking this because a disagreement over a recipe on a popular forum got me thinking about how we define dishes. It began harmlessly enough with excitement over the last of the summer tomatoes and using them in a Caprese salad. Someone commented on the thread that they like to marinate the tomatoes overnight with (among other things) aged balsamic vinegar and dried oregano because the marinating “really brings a ton of flavor to the table.” I disagreed with this person simply because this dish was born out of simplicity and harmony, and at no point when the people of Capri created this dish did they use any type of vinegar at all, or oregano for that matter. What he had created was most likely a very delicious salad, but it wasn’t a Caprese salad, which, by definition contains only fresh tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, extra virgin olive oil, and salt/pepper. The reason the Italians didn’t want to use vinegar in this simple dish is because it would overwhelm the delicate flavor of the cheese, thus it seems to me that if we want to maintain the integrity of a recipe, we should follow it. If we choose to alter it (which most of us wind up doing at some point if we love to experiment) we should call it something else. Am I alone in thinking this?

A hollandaise sauce is a hollandaise sauce. If you asked a chef how much garlic should go in a hollandaise sauce he/she would probably throw a cast iron skillet at you along with a few choice expletives. This isn’t to say that you can’t put it in your sauce—no kitchen police are going to come and slap cuffs on you (unless you like that sort of thing)—but it ain’t a hollandaise. With certain classic recipes there are expectations in what elements create that compound. In fact, when I created my own version of roasted peppers, which get sliced and roasted in an oven as opposed to charred whole over a fire, I always called them “my version of roasted peppers” so there was no confusion. When people ask me to make them for a party they always say, “Kate can you make your roasted peppers?” not “Katie, can you make roasted peppers?” It’s a small semantic difference, but hey, there’s a reason they call me a wench.

SIDE NOTE: Here’s a recipe for my roasted peppers which, above all, need lots of TLC if they are going to make you weak at the knees. I serve them over crostini, with a small slice of fresh mozzarella.