From avocado toast to pommes puree: signature dishes that rocked the culinary world

Full disclosure: I contributed to Signature Dishes That Matter (2019). It’s hard to miss my name because it’s the first one under “curated by” but that’s only because we are listed alphabetically.

The brief to me and the other contri­butors was to write about signature dishes from around the world that were influential to both chefs and the public. If they wanted to, the publishers, Phaidon, could have printed a book that was at least twice as thick (it’s already 448 pages).

In the foreword, New York-based journalist Mitchell Davis, chief strategy officer for the James Beard Foundation, a non-profit culinary arts organisation, writes about how far foodies will go in order to taste a signature dish. “Two hours standing in line at a Los Angeles parking lot. Five hours driving mountainous Swiss roads in a tiny Fiat Punto. A last-minute overnight flight to Paris. These are just some of the lengths I have gone to to sample a signature dish.

“The idea that any combination of ingredients – whether served on elegant china or in a paper bag – could be worth such effort, no matter who’s cooking, may be foreign to some. But signature dishes afford more than just a taste of something new. They are the flavour of history. What is striking as you flip through the beautifully illustrated pages of this book is that a menu of signature dishes is so much more than a meal. It’s an encyclopaedia of cuisine; a window into our collective culinary unconsciousness.”

Davis acknowledges that some of the chefs the sign­ature dishes are attributed to are not necessarily the creators. “Obviously, not all signature dishes are entirely original. Sometimes a confluence of cultural attention or a new context takes something out of the ordinary and puts it into the spotlight.