Dishes as Performances, Authenticity, Normativity, and Improvisation in the Kitchen

The relationship between 1. recipes, 2. Ingredients, and 3. dishes may be understood in analogy to the relationship between elements in the performing arts: for example, in music, 1. musical works (and / or scores), 2. ‘musical ingredients" (notes, scales, intervals, arpeggios, pauses etc.) and 3. performances. The recipe’s inventor would be like a ‘composer’ and the cook would be the ‘performer’. So, being analogous to performing arts, cooking practices are paradigmatic normative practices. Performances of a musical work do not repeat the work without modifying it, but adapt the score or the script, using it as an 'ingredient' of the performance. Analogously, In cooking recipes are applied to specific situations and, in this way, appropriated and transformed (more or less intentionally, and to a greater or lesser degree). For and while producing the dish, recipes are used and abused, thereby becoming themselves de facto ingredients of the final product: the dish. Both in musical performances and dishes, the application of norms requires ‘creative’ adaptation to the concrete specific situation and the final product emerges out of practical interactions that involve transformations of their own normative bases. Hence, as I will argue, both in culinary practices and performing arts like music, the improvisational case is paramount for understanding how their normativity, as paradigmatic of the normativity of human practices in general, works.