Culinary Themes and Variations 
Traditional seasoning practices provide both a sense of 
familiarity and a source of variety 
by Elisabeth Rozin and Paul Rozin 
Every morning in a small village 
in the southern highlands of Mexico 
one can hear in every home the rhyth- 
mic sounds of the grinding stone. Be- 
tween these stones, or metates, are, 
without fail, chili peppers, and fre- 
quently tomatoes, being ground into 
the salsa (“sauce”) for the day. The 
salsa will appear at almost every meal; 
when it is absent, the chili peppers, 
often combined with tomato or lime, 
turn up as components of cooked solid 
foods and soups. A ubiquitous feature 
of Mexican cuisine, the chili pepper, 
along with the staples corn and beans, 
is an essential part of what makes 
Mexican food “Mexican.” 
This Mexican village is not unique, 
for the same processes take place in 
every other Mexican village although 
the ingredients may vary slightly from 
one village to another. So it is in other 
parts of the world as well. One can 
observe in the Brahman Tamil cuisine 
of southern India, for example, the 
same kind of daily seasoning prep- 
aration: the soaking of tamarind, the 
grinding of chili pepper, the frying 
of mustard seed, turmeric, and hing 
powder (asafetida). These and other 
flavorings, used daily on almost all 
cooked staple foods, create the iden- 
tity of this cuisine. 
Such flavoring practices are very 
widespread but seem to occur most 
frequently in tropical or semitropical 
areas or, what may be the same thing, 
in cultures that depend more heavily 
on plant foods than animal foods. Thus 
the most distinctive and easily de- 
scribed seasoning traditions occur in 
China, Southeast Asia, Africa, India, 
the Mediterranean, and South and 
Central America. Seasoning practices 
may range from the use of one spe- 
cific, pervasive flavoring ingredient 
(the use of coconut in the islands of 
Oceania) to much more complex and 
elaborate bonds or combinations of fla- 
voring ingredients (the spice mixtures 
of North African or Indian cuisine). 
Within cultures that characteristically 
season their foods, the use of com- 
binations of flavoring ingredients is 
the most common technique: the soy 
sauce and rice wine and ginger root 
bond of China; the soy sauce and ses- 
ame seed and chili bond of Korea; 
the “curry” spice mixtures of India; 
the tomato and garlic and olive oil 
bond of southern Italy. These distinc- 
tive and pervasive flavoring combi- 
nations, which we call “flavor prin- 
ciples,” seem to impart a clear and 
characteristic identity to the foods of 
any group. Cultures that reliably sea- 
son their cooked foods do not, for the 
most part, utilize these seasonings in 
sweets and beverages. 
The use of characteristic seasonings, 
whether singly or in combination, is 
not universal in human culinary prac- 
tice; in cuisines that have a high pro- 
portion of animal foods (meat or dairy 
products) in their diet and in many 
cuisines of temperate and polar re- 
gions there is typically no strong de- 
pendence on flavoring ingredients. 
This tendency results in culinary prod- 
ucts that are relatively less “marked” 
than the products of cuisines that sea- 
son heavily. Characteristic seasonings 
provide a gustatory “theme” that iden- 
tifies and unites the products of a 
cuisine so that, for example, having 
sampled at random several Mexican 
or Indian dishes, one would have a 
good chance of identifying new in- 
stances of dishes from these cuisines. 
This would probably not be the case 
in the relatively less marked cuisines 
of England or Germany. 
Most of the world’s people seem 
to belong to well-marked cuisine 
groups that create culinary products 
with distinctive and describable gus- 
tatory themes. The traditional season- 
ings are “loved” by the members of 
these groups. They find it difficult 
to imagine food prepared without 
them. Faced with a hypothetical ab- 
sence of chili, for instance, members 
of a Mexican village kept inventing 
ways of getting some — from neigh- 
bors, stores, or markets — rather than 
face the possibility of eating a meal 
without it. Chili is craved: food simply 
doesn’t taste good without it. 
This attachment to traditional fla- 
vorings seems to be as strong, if not 
stronger, than the attachment to tra- 
ditional staple foods. Human beings 
are remarkably conservative in their 
food habits and are typically reluctant 
to try new foods and to abandon old 
familiar ones. Although some new 
foods have been introduced and ac- 
cepted in both Mexico and China, for 
example, the ancient flavoring tradi- 
tions, many of them thousands of years 
old, persist unchanged to this day. Tra- 
ditional flavorings are high-priority 
culinary items and immigrant groups 
typically go to great lengths and ex- 
pense to procure them in foreign set- 
tings. After many generations in the 
mixed culture of Israel, the basic fla- 
vorings of the original home country 
(either Eastern European or Mediter- 
ranean or indigenous Israeli) still pre- 
dominate in the individual’s daily diet. 
The desire to re-create familiar 
tastes is illustrated nowhere more 
poignantly than in the behavior of 
Vietnamese refugees in an American 
resettlement camp that we visited in 
the fall of 1975. Vietnamese food is 
characteristically seasoned with nuoc 
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