SC - Who you callin' an 'abomination'?

[Nicholas Sasso]

<<clipped the Guest vs. Cook post because it was long, but you can refer back
to that>>

I'm taking the middle ground in this one.  You have to take the guest's needs
into consideration at some point, because if you kill your guests, well... 
But, at the same time, there is something to Celia's stance that you have to
be free to cook as an artist, not as a photocopier.  

However, these statements aren't neccisarily contradictory.  Rather than thinking
of the needs of your guests as a restriction, think of them as a challenge.
 No less than an architect who is asked to remodel a house.  He doesn't get
to tear it down and rebuild it because he really wants to design a hotel.  He
doesn't even get to tear it down and design a new house.  But, that doesn't
mean that his creativity is cramped.  He'll have other opportunities to build
a new house or hotel.  But, that's not the project at hand.  Similarly, a cook
has to prepare a dish for a guest.  The guest has given him freedom to design
the meal within certain neccisary bounds.  But, that still allots him a lot
of opportunity - and offers him a challenge.  Projects with boundaries are a
lot more difficult than the ones with no boundaries, and are worthy of much
more acclaim.

If you're cooking a feast and you know that a guest has an allergy to onions,
it would be unethical and possibly criminal to put onions in a dish and serve
it to that person without warning.  It would be mean and possibly unethical
to put them in every dish under the banner of "well, I'll just warn him," because
then the person won't get to eat.  But, if onions were only in one of a dozen
dishes, and accidentally or otherwise got added to a second one, a warning should
suffice.  Then it would kinda suck, but it's pretty low on the unethical scale.
 You can't please every single person with every single dish, and you can't
fail to serve the best you can to the other 124 guests at the feast.  

Remember, you're cooking for a lot of guests, not one.  If you made a romantic
dinner for your spouse and decided at the last minute to put in an ingredient
to which he is allergic, that would be a different story.  "Sorry, honey, you
can't eat the pork chops.  I put pineapple in the sauce.  Here, have some more
mashed potatoes!"

The key there is *** Make sure you tell people ***  No less than if that architect
put a trap door under a rug and needs to tell the homeowner not to put heavy
furniture over it lest it break.  It doesn't compromise your artistic integrity
to have to tell people that there was a slight change in ingredients in a particular
dish.  Chances are, even if an ingredient is an allergen for one or two people,
everyone else will be very pleased.  At worst, you could be accused of being
mean, stubborn or thoughtless;  But not unethical, irresponsible or dangerous.
 But, even if it's something that you've never heard of an allergy for, it would
still be unethical to take a chance.  

As a Picky Eater, I don't bother annoying a feast cook with demands.  I review
the menu and decide if there is enough there that I would like to eat, and avoid
the other dishes.  Or I pick the mushrooms out.  But, I'd be pretty darned pissed
to learn that I ate a dish because the ingredients listed butter, but the cook
secretly substituted lard.  I know some people who eat kosher in their homes
and kosher-style outside take the same approach.  I would imagine that someone
with a sensitivity to a relatively seldom-used food would do the same.  If you
have a mild allergy to strawberries, why bother telling a cook you're allergic?
 How many dishes are they likely to be in?  It's not like allium sativum (onions,
garlic, shallots), which could be in most of the dishes if the cook has no reason
to exclude them.  So, you can't count on "nobody told me about an allergy, so
I don't have to tell people about a substituted ingredient."

- -Magdalena
who is bored this morning.