Kiwisizzler

What is ‘fusion’ food?

Well, my understanding of fusion food is the combining of foods from different cultures to form a harmonious dish. This seems to be the case with Peter Gordon’s food style, as was explained at a recent demonstration at Cafe Spice Namaste, giving him an opportunity to further promote his latest cookbook, Vegetables: The New Food Heroes.

Peter Gordon

I won’t bore you with yet another regurgitation of the mass of articles written about this great chef, but if you are unfamiliar, or just plain interested, I suggest you check out his website. In particular, have a read of his perspective of fusion food. Hearing Peter speak about the subject opened my eyes to the idea that fusion food is all around us, we just don’t realise it very often.

Leek & Salted Black-Bean Tart

Peter points out that we are happy to label things as ‘fusion’ just because they have a new or exotic ingredient combined with a classic dish. If we think about it, we’ve had exotic ingredients around us for centuries but don’t consider the traditional dishes that use them to be fusion, such as spices and tea in England, polenta in Italy (after all, maize did come from America) and the ‘classic’ Thai food we’ve all come to know and love. Peanuts and chillies also came from America and coriander is a Mediterranean herb. He also reminds us that the kiwifruit (Chinese gooseberry) and tamarillo (tree tomato) are not traditional New Zealand fruits, as much as we as Kiwis would like them to be. In fact, it was for marketing reasons that they came to have their current names. Kiwifruit was changed briefly to ‘melonette’ in the 1950′s before changing to it’s current name. The ‘tama’ in tamarillo is Maori for ‘leadership’ and ‘arillo’ is Spanish for ‘yellow’ and it got it’s name to promote sales and its use in the 1960′s. This demonstrates we view things as being ‘traditional’ if we’ve grown up with them or can trace a brief history of them being in our locale. My favourite example is that of the traditional English ginger bread. Ginger is not an indigenous English ingredient but we consider ginger bread to be a classic English dish. The term ‘fusion’ doesn’t enter the equation. Even when we add dates, we still consider it English but when we add tamarind (from northern Africa, as is the date) we then class it as ‘fusion’.

Tomato & Cavelo Nero Stew

I have always been excited by Peter’s style of food. He is clearly a person who understands ingredients and uses them to their fullest potential. I remember being given a Peter Gordon book from my mother when I began studying cooking and I read about ideas like toasting rolled oats before cooking them for porridge and combining fruits and vegetables in salads. These methods opened my eyes to the possibilities of cooking and that things don’t need to be complicated to be excellent. It is all about treating the ingredients with the utmost care and knowing how to enhance the flavours, colours and textures within by treating food right and coming up with effective combinations. Peter’s journey reflects my own and many other chefs’; a voyage of discovery as we traverse a multitude of cultures and tradition in the search for perfection.