as brazilian i reserve the right to add cream cheese to anything and everything

Also, let’s be honest, 90% of changes home cooks do to any classic recipe just makes it worse, with the other 10% being merely interesting and not better.

In my experience it’s almost the other way around, the “classical” stuff tends to taste boring, especially Italian food.

Also, let’s be honest, 90% of changes home cooks do to any classic recipe just makes it worse, with the other 10% being merely interesting and not better.

That’s because most people can’t cook and so gormlessly following a set pattern that’s vaguely good enough is the only way they can make ok food. One has to remember that local recipes do not come about because they are perfect, but because they represent a set of ingredients that are readily available where they developed, prepared with tools that are readily available where they developed, with an amount of labor that’s considered acceptable for those circumstances. That means that in a different material context the recipe should shift to accommodate what’s available there and the amount of labor the cooks can expend on it, with the goal of making something good regardless of what one has available. And that’s before you get into prestige recipes that were just about conspicuous consumption of luxury goods and the waste of large amounts of highly skilled labor, which are always mid at best and don’t have a place anywhere (like aspics before instant gelatin).

All that people should learn from non-baking recipes is methodology and general combinations of things, which should then be applied to whatever one actually has or can easily acquire, and general dish names should just be a shorthand to explain what something is rather than something rigid and prescriptive.

Me: Having flashes of black and white footage of warcrime trials in my head because I found a pea in my midwest classic “tuna casserole”