A Single Man’s Kitchen
By Jeremy Goodwin, Dec 15, 2006

Is that a melting pot I smell?

“Fusion” was a buzzword in the restaurant industry for over a decade but recently has started falling from favor. There is a trend toward the re-establishment of the purity of cuisines, whatever that might mean.

Try taking tomatoes out of Italian or potatoes out of German and British food and you might begin to understand how elusive the idea of culinary purity may be. To pick a point in history and state that that is the boundary between authentic and modified cuisines for a particular nationality is impossible at best and ludicrous when the claim is heard from the mouth of an international celebrity chef who should know better. Yet, watching the latest offerings from the kitchen- or restaurant-based “reality” shows, where the judges are successful restaurateurs, I cannot fail to notice their tendency to denigrate the adventurous and innovative intermingling of ingredients from disparate sources. 

Nowhere is the benefit of fusion more apparent than in the New World, where the influx of invaders and immigrants brought often not only their ideas about food but their own ingredients, and where they ran head on into some of the staples of the natives that subsequently changed the world. Imagine, if you would, Italian food without tomatoes, Chinese and Thai food without chili peppers, no corn tortillas. Even the ubiquitous French (originally, Belgian) fry would be missing, not to mention the ultimate in horrific concepts—a Europe without chocolate!

Conversely, it is impossible to escape the French, Spanish and even German influences that appear to have influenced the food from New Orleans to Panama. Panama is probably the most complex of the Central American cuisines to analyze. The importation of workers for the construction of the canal probably makes it the most cosmopolitan population in the New World. 

Sometimes the use of fusion is prompted by the local lack of an ingredient, or even just a last-minute discovery of a gap in the spice rack. The results can be either disastrous or fortunate in the extreme, and this week’s recipe is one example of innovation fitting the intent of the dish perfectly. 

Classic French cream sauces are strained so they are smooth and flavorful, with none of the pieces of vegetable or herbs left in, unless they are sprinkled on the surface at the last minute before serving. There is a logic behind part of this, because many fresh herbs give up their flavor when lightly warmed but lose it or infuse it entirely when cooked for any period over a couple of minutes.

My tendency is to leave everything in, and although the sauces may look a little more lumpy, my natural abhorrence of waste overcomes my need to meet classic standards, no matter who might be sitting down to eat and later criticize.

An ingredient on which I place inordinate reliance is lemon juice, the slightly sweet squeezings from a small yellow citrus fruit that seems to be very rare locally. I cannot use lime juice and sweeten it with sugar, for the tartness of lime always overwhelms the intent, especially in cream sauces, and if it is used with delicately flavored fish it changes the entire character of the food. If you do not believe me, try making a lemon margarita and passing it off as authentic.

This simple recipe for a cream sauce suits me for serving two people, but it has recently been observed that I have an appetite and that appetite is not necessarily as restrained as that of some of my gentle readers. However, as I have served this sauce with some of the most delicate fish in the world and then found people constantly returning to the kitchen for spurious reasons, my having found the pan wiped clean may suggest that appetites may adapt to circumstance.

Tomatillo Cream Sauce for Fish

Approximate time: three minutes preparation, ten minutes on the stove, with hands on for approximately five minutes. Can be held for up to an hour and reheated prior to serving.

1 pint heavy or whipping cream

1 large ripe tomatillo, diced

1 large shallot (or small onion) diced

2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

½ teaspoon dried thyme (optional)

1 tablespoon fresh parsley, minced, for garnish

Salt and pepper to taste



Heat the olive oil in a heavy skillet until almost smoking. Toss in the tomatillo and shallot and sauté for two or three minutes until the tomatillo has softened and the shallot is transparent. Add the cream and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until reduced by about one third or until the cream is a little thicker than the ideal gravy and coats the spoon and sides of the pan, about five minutes. Add the thyme, pepper and salt if necessary and stir for a further two minutes over a low heat. Add half the parsley in the last minute and sprinkle the rest over the results on the plate.

As always with cream- or fat-based sauces, it is important to serve onto prewarmed plates.

Jeremy Goodwin is an author, freelance food writer and owner of The Best Kept Secret. He may be contacted at Jeremy@dcnet2000.com