A recipe we found browsing online offered an unexpected aftertaste. The recipe is for "Cumin-Roasted Salmon with Cilantro Sauce." But a great fan of the recipe (whose remarks 25 other readers found helpful) substituted out almost everything! (Culantro apparently is an herb somewhat similar in taste to cilantro
but much tougher and perhaps ten times as pungent - no wonder the sauce
exploded in the mouth.)
This put me in mind of how I used to use such friendly amendments to recipes as an illustration of lived religion. What's intriguing isn't just that someone bowdlerized a recipe (and was praised for it), but that this virtuoso thinks they've actually cooked it in the first place. And that the obvious next step isn't to try to give the original ingredients a try, but to further improve the ersatz version forced by circumstance!
This put me in mind of how I used to use such friendly amendments to recipes as an illustration of lived religion. What's intriguing isn't just that someone bowdlerized a recipe (and was praised for it), but that this virtuoso thinks they've actually cooked it in the first place. And that the obvious next step isn't to try to give the original ingredients a try, but to further improve the ersatz version forced by circumstance!
