There’s only 7 notes ¹

When playing music, one quickly realises that there are only so many chord progression’s, and so many ways of arranging notes. You start to see that, even across continents and cultures, everyone seems to converge on the same 5 notes, to form most any song. Whilst things can sound vastly different based on instrumentation, cadence, and context, the way our ear perceives harmonics largely stays similar.

Cooking seems to be the same. Across cultures, we have developed cuisines in parallel, but have arrived at the same conclusions regarding methods of building flavour and turning raw ingredients into dishes that we look forward to eating.

As a general rule of thumb, it seems that each sauce based dish is built up the same way.

Heat up some fat —> Bloom some aromatics —> Braise some protein (optional) —> Add water base —> Let it cook.

From bolognese, north Indian curry bases to Mexican stews. You see the same general idea across all these cuisines.

So like any reasonable Jazz musician, once you can play the 7 chords, you can start to play any standard.

Playing the standards

Once you learn a couple standards, you are essentially good to go to join any sort of small scale² jazz band. What then separates the average person who can play a couple 7ths and 9ths to the Bill Evans of the world is the intricacy of the ideas that they are able to express.

The commonality with Jazz and food however, is that 7ths and 9ths are really all you need. (Unless you are trying to cook at a Michelin Level I suppose, even then it’s debatable.). A lot of the ‘sound’ of a tune comes from it’s feel. The instrumentation, the tempo. Similarly a lot of the best dishes come from the simplest things. Good ingredients, basic cooking methods, executed well.

Once you figure out the standards, you can add whatever voicings you want on them and with the absurdly high error tolerance for both crafts, things will work out just fine. Maybe even very well.

Once you work out how to make a good tomato based sauce, the only difference that there seems to be from culture to culture is the spices/aromatics that fall into it. You’ll get heavier spices in middle eastern cuisine, milder aromas and copious amounts of olive oil in European food, and much frutier and light elements in south east asian cooking. However, the general skills are all the same. It’s all about stepping back and seeing dishes as a ‘lead sheet’. As long as you got the changes down, the tune will sound good pretty much all the time.

Rules for cooking

Over my time of experimenting myself in the kitchen and watching unhealthy amounts of food related content on the internet³ I’ve come to follow some general rules in the kitchen, my own gospel if you will:

1. You need more salt.
2. You need more fat.⁴
3. Onions before garlic always.
4. You now probably need Acid.
5. Never cook with headphones on. You want to listen to your food.
6. Use chopsticks. Regardless of your cuisine.
7. I can’t say for certain what Asafoetida adds to your food, but chuck it in anyways.
8. You probably need a tad more salt.

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Footnotes

1. Okay technically there are 12 notes, but each major scale only has 7 which are diatonic. ↩

2. I guess there’s a pun here. ↩

3. Shout out to Adam Ragusea. He has been an enormous influence on the way that I like to cook now, and his no-nonsense style of videos, showing a ‘low-production’ real cooking environment, with real corner cutting that you would do in a home kitchen really strike a chord. ↩

4. If you want it to taste better. Unless you want to be healthier. Then you need ‘healthier’ fat. ↩