David Chang himself throws me for a Strange Loop. On the one hand he is a genius and I'm so intrigued by his take on food, but then he'll talk about how he loves gas station hotdogs or orange chicken from Panda Express. I love that he can be pretentious in his unpretentiousness.
If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend the PBS series The Mind of a Chef. The first season is all about David Chang, narated by Anthony Bourdain. It's on Netflix and at least the Ramen episode is on Daily Motion.
I've always held that if you don't enjoy something across a wide range of the spectrum on which it exists, you can't really call yourself an enthusiast.
If you say you're a sushi connoisseur, but you only like top-shelf sushi prepared by world renowned chefs, then you don't really like sushi. You just like nice things. If you say you're a wine aficionado, but you will only drink wine that you've read is good, you don't really like wine.
Does a steak enthusiast need to enjoy a thin cut of pure gristle, cooked until it’s blackened on both sides? Or a haut cuisine “deconstructed steak” which can be eaten in one bite?
Does a coffee aficionado need to enjoy a cup from the local 24-hour diner which was made by over-extracting cheap stale beans and then leaving the pot to sit on a hot pad for hours? Or a cup of instant coffee mixed with non-dairy creamer and two tablespoons of sugar?
Would a code connoisseur need to have an aesthetic appreciation for a corporate 500 kloc Java project that does nothing useful?
* * *
Someone who is deeply satisfied to eat anything called “sushi” is just a very hungry person, and someone who has an insatiable thirst for every type of wine is an alcoholic.
Or in other words, there’s a big gray area here. There is a very wide range of quality in most things, from «entirely unpalatable and probably poisonous» to «divine once-in-a-lifetime experience», as well as a wide range in particular tastes and preferences. Different people have different standards, and that’s okay.
One group of people can like student art films with no action and long philosophical monologue voiceovers by entirely unlikeable characters. Another group of people can like superhero movies with a predictable plot, flat characterization, and lots of explosions. Both groups can plausibly say they like “movies”.
I think the number of replies to this is because the basic point is almost correct but not conveyed quite correctly.
If the post said "...if you CAN enjoy something across...spectrum..." it would be more accurate. You don't HAVE to enjoy something across a wide spectrum, you just have to be open to the possibility and have given it a try. If you aren't open then exclusion from 'connoisseur' etc is probably granted.
that is a fantastic gauge and one i live by. for example film critics: if you do not appreciate most films that you watch, then you are in the wrong field.
I have a $3k espresso machine but I also love gas station coffee -- there's something about it sitting on a bunn burner for probably 6 hours that adds something to the flavor, or maybe I just associate that flavor with super-early-morning travel, getting up to pick up a friend at 4am, having the blearyness stripped back by the caffeine.
Nice things -- like fancy coffee makers -- are nice, but so are other things.
I dont see a dichotomy in that at all. Nostalgia has great pull. His household didn't have great cooks. Eating hot dogs and other fast food isn't about the taste per se, but rather the whole they represent. So, yeah, he can sincerely enjoy a hot dog, just like the nine year old David enjoyed a hot dog with his family. As an adult, who is a renowned chef, he can also summon other more culinary aspects and gastronomy to enjoy more sophisticated aspects of eating.
A lot of commoner food (like ketchup and soy sauce) would be revolutionary if they were discovered today. Ketchup is the perfect blend of umami (tomato), salt and vinegar. Soy sauce goes well with most anything. Many of the fancy sauces you pay bank are not as good as soy sauce or ketchup. They become common because they are sooo good but also a little boring once you get used to it.
Combining orange and chicken is simple but powerful because they are favorite foods for many people and they have completely different flavor profiles (of course orange chicken could be executed better than Panda Express!).
Sometimes the only real problem with "commoner food" is that, being commercialized, they lose variety, which can lead to that boredom you speak of.
Take ketchup. From what I understand, a century ago, making homemade ketchup was a lot more common, and there was quite a bit more variety in the spices used. (This old cookbook -- http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/books/settleme... -- has three recipes for "catsup" on page 439-440 alone.) One of my great grand-aunts regularly made ketchup in Indiana, and it was very different from commercial ketchup. A fair bit runnier (no xantham gum), a fair bit "sweeter" (it used regular sugar instead of corn syrup / HFCS which may have contributed to this), and nice notes of garlic.
Commercial store bought ketchup, meanwhile, unfortunately seems stuck either being Heinz ketchup, or imitating Heinz ketchup.
This is slightly off-topic to the main, but related to things with David Chang in...
The HBO series 'Treme', set in a neighbourhood of New Orleans post-Katrina, prominently features David Chang playing a fictionalised version of himself. One of the main characters spends the second season working under him in New York. Quite odd.
Orange chicken at Panda contains wheat, soy, egg, and dairy products. [0] These are all things that are commonly used in fast food to thicken up the taste. Wheat, soy and dairy also have a small element of physical addiction from opioids - it's not just that people like the taste of these things.
Much like us software engineers - don't we like to dabble with embedded, memory limited systems, up to heavily distributed who knows where on earth machines. Or from real-time, to long heavy batch jobs.
Or at least I like reading about the whole spectrum, not only part of it.
He's also an enormous asshole. He refuses to make anything vegetarian, even though everything is prepared to order. E.g. the spicy noodles at the noodle bar just have some crumbled sausage sprinkled on top, but if you ask for the dish without the sausage he will kick you out of the restaurant.
I'm not even a vegetarian, but there's no reason to go out of your way to be a dick towards people who are actually making a considerable personal sacrifice for the benefit of others.
¨Considerable personal sacrifice for the benefit of others?¨
It´s his restaurant. You knew it coming in. He´s not an asshole, he cares about how his food tastes. If you´re not willing to accomodate his wishes, maybe make another considerable personal sacrifice and not go into his restaurant to be served in the way you want. Last I checked, his restaurants are always full. Why would he want your business?
I like David Chang but this is textbook hipster affectation. What distinguishes hipsterdom is the penchant for both high and low brow tastes. Drinking PBR and whatever microwbrew is popular in the locale that week. Nothing new or unique about this.
Ha, he actually used the word "isomorphism" correctly, in contrast to recent JavaScript terminology :)
I don't really think he used the concept of "strange loop" correctly, because there is no self-reference involved in his examples. It's more of a "paradox" (something that's undersalted and oversalted at the same time)
I just searched for the JavaScript isomorphism conundrum and did a facepalm. JavaScript seems to be a breeding ground for getting all kinds of things wrong. Just the other day on HN [1] - a JavaScript developer had misused the term "predicate," someone provided a correction, and then a whole host of responses emerged to defend the botched definition in a variety of manipulative ways(appeals to emotion, shame, "it's just like your opinion man," etc.).
Following your link, I do not see a single defense of the botched definition. The contention seems to be entirely over whether it is bad form to point out an incorrect definition without providing the correct one.
>a whole host of responses emerged to defend the botched definition in a variety of manipulative ways(appeals to emotion, shame, "it's just like your opinion man," etc.).
Did you link to the correct comment? Because I see absolutely none of what you described.
It seems that disparaging JavaScript is sort of an HN Godwin's law. As an HN discussion grows longer, the probability of disparaging JavaScript approaches 1. Is it really necessary here?
Is the use of "isomorphic" in "isomorphic javascript" that far off? You're mapping [program, output] pairs from one environment (client) to another (server), ideally creating the same structure. Isn't that an isomorphism? Sure to be mathematically rigorous you'd have to jump through lots of hoops, but the context is closer to Hofstadter's use than abstract algebra.
I'd argue that usage is more "technically" correct than David Chang, who's referring to the _entities_ as the isomorphisms rather than the relationships between them. (Though I understand his usage and find no problem with it in the given context.)
Perhaps the knowledgable people here (that unfortunately so far have preferred to be flippant and condescending instead of educating) could provide an explanation of showing us why "Isomorphic JavaScript" is a misnomer?
But the Liar's Paradox leads to the essence of Godel Incompleteness (Hofstadter starts off with that paradox in GEB as well, to build up a repertoire of modes of thought in the reader). I think the oversalted and undersalted paradox should be seen in the same light, because the point about dishes does seem beautifully isomorphic to godel sentences. The interesting dishes are their own dish, but also a different dish, depending on the system (the taster) in which they are interpreted.
The essence of the Liar's paradox ("this sentence is false") is that the sentence refers to itself -- it's a "strange loop". Godel's incompleteness proof shares this property of self-reference.
There is no self-reference in the paradox of something having 2 properties at once (e.g. undersalted and oversalted).
It is a paradox, but it's not a Liar's paradox or a strange loop. In other words, not all paradoxes are the Liar's paradox.
Well, "isomorphic" JavaScript is not technically incorrect. They just didn't want to use the word "same".
It's the same code on the server side and client side.
So the client and server are isomorphic, because an object is trivially isomorphic to itself.
It's a fine idea to run the same code on the client and server. No problem there. The word choice may be confusing because you expect there to be some deeper concept you are missing.
I think it was more like cognitive dissonance, but with taste. Gustatory dissonance? I don't know that I get it with food as such but I can certainly relate the sensation to wine tasting.
> I got really into experimenting with fermentation
I really like fermented food. Love kefir (fermented milk product), kvass (a Russian fermented bread drink). Pickles, sauerkraut...
He mentions fermented chickpeas. If you get organic foods with less preservatives in them, say some fresh salsa or chickpea salads, it will ferment pretty quickly even in the fridge and you can sort of taste it. I rather like it, and have left some things around long enough for them to ferment a bit.
Btw, if you buy pickles and they have anything else in the ingredients besides spices, water, salt and cucumbers, you are probably getting just boiled cucumbers with vinegar, so the sourness doesn't come from fermentation but from the vinegar. That is a very different taste than a properly fermented pickle. So next time look at the label and see what you are getting. One brand I have been getting lately is Bubbies (http://bubbies.com/kosher_dills) found it in a smaller local store, but there are probably others.
Start making your own kimchi and there is no going back. Stuff goes with everything: in paninis, on oatmeal with a poached egg and sesame seeds, on a baked potato...
Thanks for the tip on the pickles. Hadn't heard this before.
Indeed. It's not hard. My family started making kimchi, by just adapting a mainstream sauerkraut recipe. You have to get the amount of salt right, hence the reason for starting with an "official" recipe. Too much salt will cause "yellow kraut" which is a disaster. We used nappa or Chinese cabbage, and then began to experiment with our own amounts of red pepper and other stuff. A half-gallon batch is not to hard to manage.
On the same subject, you can make your own "refrigerator" pickles, that are fermented in a non sealed container. It's a matter of personal preference when they're ready to eat, and they continue to work, so you can experience a variety of flavors over the space of a couple weeks.
I'm not sure that all pickled food "should" be fermented to attain sourness. It's perfectly normal to pickle many foods in vinegar, is it not? Fermentation changes the flavour in a particular way and you don't always want that (though vinegar also changes it, and in more ways than just souring).
But I'm not a native speaker so maybe I'm confused about the definition of the word "pickling". Does it always imply fermentation? When you do it with vinegar is it just called "preserving" maybe?
Britt's Pickles (pike place, Seattle) is wholesaling now but I don't know what their distribution area looks like. They also sell pickling kits if you want to try your own.
His description of saltiness reminded me of something I like to do:
I enjoy braised vegetables cooked so that there are varying levels of doneness throughout. It's as if all the best flavors in each manage to come through and you get this whole spectrum of what it means to be that vegetable.
> I enjoy braised vegetables cooked so that there are varying levels of doneness throughout.
Yes! A common technique among more advanced cooks is to add the same spice multiple times through the cooking process. Spices (and other ingredients) change in flavor in response to heat, so you end up getting several different flavors even though they come from the same original ingredient.
My favorite example of an ingredient that works like this is onions. A fresh onion is super crunchy and so pungent it literally makes your eyes water. Simmer it for hours and you've got French onion soup—something so soft and sweet it's practically a dessert.
That's all the onion changing in response to heat. When you use an onion, you aren't selecting an ingredient. You get to select any precise point on that continuum between sharp and soft that you want, just based on when you put it in.
Even with the same recipe, I'll vary it up each time I make it based on how I'm feeling. Sometimes I want my farmer's omelette to have some crunch and tang so I cook the onions less. Other times I want it smooth and savory so I cook them more.
(And, of course, once you take into account cooking temperature—slow and low versus hot and fast, and how finely you chop them—thickness effects how different the inside and outsides of each piece cook are—you realize even a single ingredient gives you a multi-dimensional space to explore).
I'm absolutely in love with your description of experiencing "the whole spectrum of what it means to be that vegetable." If you ever have a chance, I would highly recommend going to a farm to table restaurant (or just doing this at home if you access to high quality produce) where they bring you all of the ingredients they will be using that night for your meal raw to be tasted before the meal as a reference point of sorts. It's an absolute delight to anchor the experience of a meal that way and I wish more places would adopt the practice in some form or another.
True not just for doneness but other attributes as well. Having ingredients chopped not too uniformly, charring only some of the surface, throwing in the same ingredient later in the cooking process, etc. are other ways of getting the same ingredient on the plate in different ways.
Sure, but he totally missed the idea of the book. Something tasting salty and not salty is not an instance of self-reference and neither were any of his other examples.
I don't think he missed the idea at all. He's not saying that his food is an example of a strange loop or self-reference. He's saying that the reaction to a dish can be similar to the reaction of coming across a strange loop. He says that "When you hit a strange loop like this, it shifts your point of view: Suddenly you aren’t just thinking about what’s happening inside the picture; you’re thinking about the system it represents and your response to it". That's the idea that he wanted to express in his food. He then provides the example of Spicy Pork Sausage & Rice cakes and other dishes that expressed that idea for him. All those dishes were no longer just about the dish, but about the reaction and response to the dish.
If you are in NYC, I highly recommend momofuku noodle bar and momofuku ssam bar. I've never been to Ko, but I've heard great things. I'd recommend taking a pass on ma peche.
Ko is allright, definitely check it out (my write up [0]). I've done 5/6 of the 3 Michelin stars in NYC and 5/10 2-star ones, and if you only want to pick one, Ko is allright but I would recommend Atera instead of Ko from the 2-star tier. For the really great stuff in 3-star tier, definitely Chef's Table Brooklyn Fare.
That said, ssam bar and noodle bar are both good, but don't forget Fuku, the chicken sandwiches are very juicy!
Ko is fantastic — we did the tasting menu with the full drink pairing. The courses aren't big individually, but there's 17 of them and they add up quickly.
> Suddenly you aren’t just thinking about what’s happening inside the picture; you’re thinking about the system it represents and your response to it.
This is what true art is about.
His use of "unfamiliarity" as a tool to evoke a shift in your point of view is actually a classic artistic device called "Defamiliarization"[1]. That is:
The artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar.
Or as Viktor Shklovsky put it first:
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
On step further it can be described with the "Wundt" or "Hedonic curve"[2] that basically says, the most interesting experiences are those that are similar-yet-different to those that have been experienced previously.
After our marriage, my wife's mother shared her precious cookbook with her and asked her to copy/translate it. My wife did so and she used that as the basis of her cooking since.
There was one important component of the recipes that my mother in law had neglected to add since it was second nature to her.
"Add salt to taste."
I was always confounded whenever I tasted the food that my wife made from one of those recipes and when I tasted the exact same food when my mother in law made it.
It was only a while later that we found out what the cause of the inconsistency was.
This was one of the biggest level-ups in my own personal cooking, realizing that salting (and to a much lesser extent peppering) to taste makes or breaks the dish. Most home cooks I know will skip that step out of ignorance or health concerns, not realizing that it will make the dish taste awful.
Why do you enjoy simple restaurant dishes (including salads) much more than your home-cooked equivalents? Salt.
I bought some truffle salt a couple years ago and now half the time I'm using flavored salts of one variety or another.
When I dry rosemary I put all the broken bits and stems in a jar with some salt and leave it for a while, then I separate them before use. I'm curious what would happen if I just put a bunch of fresh sprigs in a jar to dry them, but I would have to start gifting it to people because damn that's a lot of salt.
Last summer, my daughter was working as a prep/line cook in a sort of odd highbrow/lowbrow place. She is extremely sensitive to chili peppers - so much so that it's effectively an allergy for her. So for some dishes where chilis and "taco seasoning" (made in house) were "to taste", she'd have others taste-test for her. At one point, the head chef asked why she did that. She told him it was because "to taste", for her, would mean no chili peppers or taco seasoning in the dish!
That is an implicit step in the vast majority of recipes, so it's not surprising she missed it. Outside of some baking, you can rarely measure salt anyway, but you should always be considering it.
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If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend the PBS series The Mind of a Chef. The first season is all about David Chang, narated by Anthony Bourdain. It's on Netflix and at least the Ramen episode is on Daily Motion.
If you say you're a sushi connoisseur, but you only like top-shelf sushi prepared by world renowned chefs, then you don't really like sushi. You just like nice things. If you say you're a wine aficionado, but you will only drink wine that you've read is good, you don't really like wine.
Does a coffee aficionado need to enjoy a cup from the local 24-hour diner which was made by over-extracting cheap stale beans and then leaving the pot to sit on a hot pad for hours? Or a cup of instant coffee mixed with non-dairy creamer and two tablespoons of sugar?
Would a code connoisseur need to have an aesthetic appreciation for a corporate 500 kloc Java project that does nothing useful?
* * *
Someone who is deeply satisfied to eat anything called “sushi” is just a very hungry person, and someone who has an insatiable thirst for every type of wine is an alcoholic.
Or in other words, there’s a big gray area here. There is a very wide range of quality in most things, from «entirely unpalatable and probably poisonous» to «divine once-in-a-lifetime experience», as well as a wide range in particular tastes and preferences. Different people have different standards, and that’s okay.
One group of people can like student art films with no action and long philosophical monologue voiceovers by entirely unlikeable characters. Another group of people can like superhero movies with a predictable plot, flat characterization, and lots of explosions. Both groups can plausibly say they like “movies”.
If the post said "...if you CAN enjoy something across...spectrum..." it would be more accurate. You don't HAVE to enjoy something across a wide spectrum, you just have to be open to the possibility and have given it a try. If you aren't open then exclusion from 'connoisseur' etc is probably granted.
Nice things -- like fancy coffee makers -- are nice, but so are other things.
Combining orange and chicken is simple but powerful because they are favorite foods for many people and they have completely different flavor profiles (of course orange chicken could be executed better than Panda Express!).
Take ketchup. From what I understand, a century ago, making homemade ketchup was a lot more common, and there was quite a bit more variety in the spices used. (This old cookbook -- http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/books/settleme... -- has three recipes for "catsup" on page 439-440 alone.) One of my great grand-aunts regularly made ketchup in Indiana, and it was very different from commercial ketchup. A fair bit runnier (no xantham gum), a fair bit "sweeter" (it used regular sugar instead of corn syrup / HFCS which may have contributed to this), and nice notes of garlic.
Commercial store bought ketchup, meanwhile, unfortunately seems stuck either being Heinz ketchup, or imitating Heinz ketchup.
The HBO series 'Treme', set in a neighbourhood of New Orleans post-Katrina, prominently features David Chang playing a fictionalised version of himself. One of the main characters spends the second season working under him in New York. Quite odd.
It's relevant because it's from Mind of Chef season 1 with David Chang.
[0] https://s3.amazonaws.com/PandaExpressWebsite/files/pdf/Nutri...
Deleted Comment
Or at least I like reading about the whole spectrum, not only part of it.
I'm not even a vegetarian, but there's no reason to go out of your way to be a dick towards people who are actually making a considerable personal sacrifice for the benefit of others.
It´s his restaurant. You knew it coming in. He´s not an asshole, he cares about how his food tastes. If you´re not willing to accomodate his wishes, maybe make another considerable personal sacrifice and not go into his restaurant to be served in the way you want. Last I checked, his restaurants are always full. Why would he want your business?
Dead Comment
I don't really think he used the concept of "strange loop" correctly, because there is no self-reference involved in his examples. It's more of a "paradox" (something that's undersalted and oversalted at the same time)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12107737
Did you link to the correct comment? Because I see absolutely none of what you described.
Deleted Comment
I'd argue that usage is more "technically" correct than David Chang, who's referring to the _entities_ as the isomorphisms rather than the relationships between them. (Though I understand his usage and find no problem with it in the given context.)
"The term isomorphism literally means sameness (iso) of form (morphism)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isomorphism_(Gestalt_psycholog...
Perhaps the knowledgable people here (that unfortunately so far have preferred to be flippant and condescending instead of educating) could provide an explanation of showing us why "Isomorphic JavaScript" is a misnomer?
There is no self-reference in the paradox of something having 2 properties at once (e.g. undersalted and oversalted).
It is a paradox, but it's not a Liar's paradox or a strange loop. In other words, not all paradoxes are the Liar's paradox.
It's the same code on the server side and client side.
So the client and server are isomorphic, because an object is trivially isomorphic to itself.
It's a fine idea to run the same code on the client and server. No problem there. The word choice may be confusing because you expect there to be some deeper concept you are missing.
Hence the "strange loop".
I really like fermented food. Love kefir (fermented milk product), kvass (a Russian fermented bread drink). Pickles, sauerkraut...
He mentions fermented chickpeas. If you get organic foods with less preservatives in them, say some fresh salsa or chickpea salads, it will ferment pretty quickly even in the fridge and you can sort of taste it. I rather like it, and have left some things around long enough for them to ferment a bit.
Btw, if you buy pickles and they have anything else in the ingredients besides spices, water, salt and cucumbers, you are probably getting just boiled cucumbers with vinegar, so the sourness doesn't come from fermentation but from the vinegar. That is a very different taste than a properly fermented pickle. So next time look at the label and see what you are getting. One brand I have been getting lately is Bubbies (http://bubbies.com/kosher_dills) found it in a smaller local store, but there are probably others.
Thanks for the tip on the pickles. Hadn't heard this before.
On the same subject, you can make your own "refrigerator" pickles, that are fermented in a non sealed container. It's a matter of personal preference when they're ready to eat, and they continue to work, so you can experience a variety of flavors over the space of a couple weeks.
But I'm not a native speaker so maybe I'm confused about the definition of the word "pickling". Does it always imply fermentation? When you do it with vinegar is it just called "preserving" maybe?
Britt's Pickles (pike place, Seattle) is wholesaling now but I don't know what their distribution area looks like. They also sell pickling kits if you want to try your own.
I enjoy braised vegetables cooked so that there are varying levels of doneness throughout. It's as if all the best flavors in each manage to come through and you get this whole spectrum of what it means to be that vegetable.
Yes! A common technique among more advanced cooks is to add the same spice multiple times through the cooking process. Spices (and other ingredients) change in flavor in response to heat, so you end up getting several different flavors even though they come from the same original ingredient.
My favorite example of an ingredient that works like this is onions. A fresh onion is super crunchy and so pungent it literally makes your eyes water. Simmer it for hours and you've got French onion soup—something so soft and sweet it's practically a dessert.
That's all the onion changing in response to heat. When you use an onion, you aren't selecting an ingredient. You get to select any precise point on that continuum between sharp and soft that you want, just based on when you put it in.
Even with the same recipe, I'll vary it up each time I make it based on how I'm feeling. Sometimes I want my farmer's omelette to have some crunch and tang so I cook the onions less. Other times I want it smooth and savory so I cook them more.
(And, of course, once you take into account cooking temperature—slow and low versus hot and fast, and how finely you chop them—thickness effects how different the inside and outsides of each piece cook are—you realize even a single ingredient gives you a multi-dimensional space to explore).
for most people, the most dramatic example of this is a medium rare (or less) steak. black and blue is the extreme.
Interesting, any tips on spices that works particularly well with?
I can totally relate to the desire to have the onions be a bit more or less crunch in an omelette depending on your mood.
Yes! I do that stuff too. Making me hungry just thinking about it.
That said, ssam bar and noodle bar are both good, but don't forget Fuku, the chicken sandwiches are very juicy!
[0]: https://rafal.io/posts/momofuku-ko-new-york.html
This is what true art is about.
His use of "unfamiliarity" as a tool to evoke a shift in your point of view is actually a classic artistic device called "Defamiliarization"[1]. That is: The artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way in order to enhance perception of the familiar.
Or as Viktor Shklovsky put it first: The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.
On step further it can be described with the "Wundt" or "Hedonic curve"[2] that basically says, the most interesting experiences are those that are similar-yet-different to those that have been experienced previously.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamiliarization [2]: http://natcomp.liacs.nl/images/wundt.jpg
After our marriage, my wife's mother shared her precious cookbook with her and asked her to copy/translate it. My wife did so and she used that as the basis of her cooking since.
There was one important component of the recipes that my mother in law had neglected to add since it was second nature to her.
"Add salt to taste."
I was always confounded whenever I tasted the food that my wife made from one of those recipes and when I tasted the exact same food when my mother in law made it.
It was only a while later that we found out what the cause of the inconsistency was.
Why do you enjoy simple restaurant dishes (including salads) much more than your home-cooked equivalents? Salt.
When I dry rosemary I put all the broken bits and stems in a jar with some salt and leave it for a while, then I separate them before use. I'm curious what would happen if I just put a bunch of fresh sprigs in a jar to dry them, but I would have to start gifting it to people because damn that's a lot of salt.