Do you want chefs from all over, or chefs from all over with great cuisines?

I'm not sure what a great cuisine is, exactly. I guess that it's got to
have a wide variety of main and minor ingredients, and cooking techniques,
and tasty dishes from formal banquets to hearty rustic food. On that basis,
we can start with France and China, and don't ask me to rank order them.
Well, maybe put the French a little ahead for the variety of breads and
desserts.

After that we go to the second tier. Here, I think we have to look at
places that have the widest variety of fresh ingredients and have developed
a cuisine that makes the most of nature's bounty. Let's say Japan, Italy,
and California . California cuisine doesn't travel that well, except to
areas with a Mediterranean climate and a similarly wide variety of fresh
ingredients. So, if the boarding school is in Switzerland, there's no point
in bringing in Alice Waters (except maybe in the summer). The same is
probably true of Japanese cuisine, especially if a variety of fresh seafood
is not readily available.

At this point, pretty much all the techniques have been covered. For the
remaining cuisines, I would look for interesting local ingredients. I would
look for a Tropical climate chef who used a wide variety of chiles and other
spices in the highly seasoned dishes of India, Latin America, and the
Caribbean (Mexican and Indian food are surprisingly similar, especially if
you think of tortillas as chapattis).

Finally, for my magnificent 7, I think I would look for Mr or Mrs Meat - a
chef who specialized in grilled, roasted, and slow-cooked BBQ meat,
including Argentine beef (and Brazilian churrasco), African game, Aussie/New
Zealand lamb and goat, and pig from just about anywhere.




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Louis Cohen
Living la vida loca at N37° 43' 7.9" W122° 8' 42.8"


"Scott T. Jensen" > wrote in message
...
> Hypothetical situation: Your kitchen services a boarding school with
> children from around the world. The headmaster has told you to hire seven
> chefs and each specialize in one of the seven major cuisines of the world.
> Each chef runs the kitchen once a week and uses the rest of the week to
> prepare for next time. The idea is to give the vast majority of the
> students from all the different parts of the world a weekly taste of home
as
> well as expose them to other cuisines. Having said all that...
>
> What would be considered the seven cuisines these chefs would cover?
>
> My guess is:
> European (from Iceland to Russia to Italy)
> African
> Middle Eastern
> South Asia (India region)
> East Asia (from China to Japan to Singapore)
> Pacific (including Australia and New Zealand)
> American
>
> Scott Jensen
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