These are excerpts from the author’s book “Deep,” which contains eight of his small books published in the form of Wisdom Literature covering different aspects of life: Facing troublemakers, dealing with pain, personal financial issues, gastronomy, reading, criticizing, inspiring, and feeling always good to go.

Series 4: Cuisine – Feeling Good.

Series 4: Cuisine – Feeling Food

Cross-cultural Cooking

• When you intend to merge different cuisines’ flavors and before mixing two or several ingredients from each cuisine together, you must first be sure of the taste you are looking for and the senses you want to be tickled.

• There is no dish in any culture that is not marketable outside of that culture, even internationally. Just be keen on what makes the local dish international by reducing the severity of the ingredients or processes that lead to the very sharp or very specific taste in that area, and keep the ingredients that can be acceptable to all. There is no objection to adding what can make the dish more widespread and acceptable without completely obliterating its local identity.

• It is difficult to say that there is absolute singularity in food. No cuisine escaped being influenced by neighboring or distant cuisines. It should be noted that this is not a demerit but rather a feature that enriches every cuisine and dish anywhere in the world.

• The secrets of any global cuisine fame do not just lie in secret recipes; they hide behind the complex styles of a rich culture and a substantial civilization.

• Without the smart, broad, and intense promotion of your cuisine, people will not flock to it, no matter how rich in delicious food it could be. It is good to remember that a single dish with global success is enough to ensure that your cuisine becomes popular and ubiquitous.

• Sometimes a country enters world cuisine through a single ingredient, not necessarily a complete dish.

• Do not argue with people of a different cuisine and insist on convincing them of your point of view when you offer them a dish from their food culture that you have made some changes to. Instead try to understand what they didn’t like in order to take advantage of that and make an improvement on the twist next time.

• Whether you are introducing a dish from your local cuisine to the world or introducing from any cuisine in the world a dish to your local people, avoid literal copying and stay away from overmodification. Your ingenuity to maintain the identity of the dish lies in the simple twist that you must perform with precision and intelligence to pass the dish to people’s hearts in the new cuisine.

• You can learn a lot of cooking programs and even home cooks on various media. But wandering around and mixing with the owners of the original culture give you the necessary sense of creativity when you transfer any of their dishes to your own culture.

• Regardless of the modifications and slight twists that can be made to dishes in the cuisines of other cultures, the presentation and serving approaches are magical introductions to the hearts of connoisseurs of the new culture.

• It is not a crime if someone does not like food from another cuisine’s culture or even if they only prefer the food of their own culture. But a professional chef has to accommodate any dish from any culture and know how to cook it with love, even if it is not one of his or her favorite dishes.

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