The Bastard Cookbook by Antto Melasniemi and Rirkrit Tiravanija is a collection of extraordinary recipes from a Thai and Finnish partnership that demonstrates how purity in cuisine, and also purity in nationality, is fiction and fantasy.
Forget 'fusion': these recipes are deliberate mash-ups of recipes and ingredients that didn't grow up together. Through the cooking of diverse ingredients, a wider humanist point is established about people, demonstrating that it is of course possible to become firm friends with unlikely others from elsewhere without either losing their identity and also that people (or ingredients) improve each other when they work together.
This is a book of resistance to nationalism and xenophobia that starts in the kitchen and around the hearth.
Working with instinct and flavour rather than purity or rules, Melasniemi and Tiravanija create startlingly great recipes. The “authentic” food experience is debunked; bastards cook whatever they want; and everyone is a bastard.
They often begin by describing a 'classic' dish, before embarking on their own wild remix of it, but you soon realise that all of these so-called 'classics' and 'originals' are bastards in the first place; Italians have only had tomatoes since the 16th Century.
With over 50 preposterous recipes, this collaborative exploration into the realms of both food and cosmopolitanism proposes that the key to fully appreciating the idiosyncrasies of an unfamiliar culture is through artfully mixing them up together.