Ingredients That Travel Well

Most food does not travel. The tomato outside a small town in Sicily in August is one ingredient. The same tomato three days later in a London kitchen is a different ingredient, and pretending otherwise is the source of most disappointment in cooking.

But a small number of ingredients were built to travel. Soy sauce. Aged cheese. Cured pork. Vinegar. Salt. Olive oil that was bottled with a date on it. Dried mushrooms. Miso. These are the foods whose original purpose was preservation, which means their original purpose was movement. They were always going to leave the room they were made in. They were designed for the road.

It is worth noticing that the foods that travel well are usually the foods that ferment, dry, age, or cure. The pantry of a serious cook, anywhere in the world, ends up looking surprisingly similar, because the foods that survive a journey are a relatively short list, and every culture eventually finds them.

This is why two pantries — Japanese and Italian, Korean and Mexican — can read so differently at first glance and so similarly on closer inspection. They are not the same foods. But they are the same kind of food: foods that have been built to last, made by people who knew the meal would not be eaten right away.

The cook who understands which ingredients were built to travel is the cook who can move between kitchens without losing anything.