Goldilocks

Let me start by saying that I think this piece falls into the category of overthinking an issue. It happens.

So. I received an order the other day, with one overall instruction: “Please don’t make anything too spicy or too sweet.” OK, I can’t help myself. I have to unpack that directive.

For starters, the caution against making our soul food cooking too spicy is something I hear a lot here in Tel Aviv. Almost to the point where I don’t even think about it much any more (OK, that’s something of a lie, but no matter). But this Goldilocks charge got my attention: Not too spicy, not too sweet, just right. Like any chef puts on his/her apron and thinks today I’m going to cook things TOO sweet. Or TOO spicy. On the contrary, we look for that tricky umami balance. BALANCE. Secondly, to state the obvious, what is sweet (or spicy) to one person might not be to the next. I happen to think that southern iced tea, for example, is too sweet. I happen to think I’m right. There a lot of folks out there who disagree and like it that way. And,by the way, not all southern iced teas are done up sweet. Just saying. My long-winded point here is that we cooks are not mind readers, or, more precisely, palate readers. I have absolutely no idea what constitutes too sweet or too spicy for this guest.

But all this stuff is a sideshow to a few deeper issues I want to raise. I think most of us do have this vague sense of proper taste as a range between X and Y. And now I’m not just talking about an elusive and ill-defined range where something tastes neither too sweet nor too spicy, but a similar, amorphous range between good taste and bad, between social mores that are acceptable and those that are beyond the Pale, between what is OK and what is clearly not OK. How does this range come into being? Is it immutable or does it change with time? Who is in charge of governing its domain? How do disagreements get resolved?

As I said from the outset, sometimes we just overthink things. We don’t want our discussions to be overly complicated, or overly simplistic. We want them just right. Right?