Ingredients

Appears in
top 1000Culinary Artistry
Culinary Artistry

By Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page

Published 1996

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  1. Chile seeds. Chiles are really adaptive; you can use them for coloration, heat, spiciness. You can consume them fresh or dried. With the peppers, you wouldn’t need as much salt in the food—and I hate bland food.
  2. Grape seeds. You’ve got to have wine. While you’d have to find a variety that would do well in that climate, I love pinot noir. You can make white or red from pinot noir pretty effectively. And at the second dosage, you could ferment it and have Champagne!
  3. Wheat. Obviously, you’d need wheat for breadmaking, and pasta. I think that’s a very important staple.
  4. Corn. I love corn—you have to love corn if you grow up in Illinois. Corn’s a good storage food; it grows really quickly, and it’s very high yield. And you can roast it, boil it, bake it—you can do a hundred different things to it.
  5. Tomatoes. They’re very adaptable—you can make a sauce out of them, you can eat them raw, you can dry them and put them into salads and sauces. They’ve got good, high acid.
  6. Potatoes. They’re a great staple. You can mash them, you can use potato starch for thickening, you can make gratins, or fry them—you can do tons of different things to them.
  7. Citrus—limes. For vitamin C. I like them all, but I’d probably take limes. I think they’re the most adaptive for being blended with other things. I like limes better than lemons, and I think they go better with the chiles. They add a characteristic that is beyond citrus itself. Oranges are not that concentrated, which is why I passed over them.
  8. Spinach. You could use it as a salad or as a vegetable, or for fillings in ravioli, or for soups. And I love spinach. It’s got lots of iron. And it grows very quickly.
  9. Garlic. I’ve got to have garlic. Besides that, it’s good for you. It’s a great flavor enhancer on anything that you use. It’s also very stable. And it protects you from vampires!
  10. Basil. It’s a good overall herb. I wouldn’t say that it’s my favorite—I like cilantro, I like thyme and rosemary, I love savory—I love them all. But you can turn basil into a sauce, whereas you can’t really with the other herbs.