Fusion Food is a phrase that needs defining. It is the deliberate melding of ingredients, methods, and traditions of more than one culinary culture: a recombinant cuisine. Evidently, almost every culinary style has benefited from loans from other cultures. afghanistan takes from Arab, Persian, and Indian in equal measure; Japanese ramen noodles draw together influences from China, SE Asia, and Korea, and so on to infinity. It is not plain exoticism, exemplified by the French SociĂ©tĂ© dâacclimatation which held dinners that included animals from the Paris Zoo (giraffe neck in 1884) as well as produce from French colonies. And it is not globalization, though without that it might never have taken off. Finally, it should be distinguished from creole food which derives perhaps from a melding of peoples (see hawaii; tex-mex). Fusion first appeared in the 1960s and early 1970s, trailing behind a resurgent restaurant industry. In France, the practitioners of nouvelle cuisine began a healthy dialogue with Japanese styles and a greater interest in spices and flavour combinations (sweet and sour) than had been usual in classic haute cuisine; in California (Wolfgang Puck, Alice Waters, Jeremiah Tower) blended European traditions with local produce; in Australia, Cheong Liew, a Malaysian Chinese, showed how to reinterpret local foods with Asian methods and ingredients. Many and various have become the âschoolsâ of fusion: pan-Asian, Pacific rim, New World cuisine, French and Vietnamese, German and Japanese. Sometimes the voices resound as cacophony, at others the flavour notes are pure and harmonious.
