thinking about recipes that taste different in every home, differing with each hand that makes it. how there can be so many different foods all sharing the same name, even within a single culture.

except not in a wow-cultural-variations-are-beautiful-way, but more along the lines of how they can inspire pure, distilled disappointment (or rage) in ways few other things in life can.

the dish stays the same, the ingredients stay the same, the cooking method stays the same - so you hear of [dish] and are briefly filled with hope and longing. bonus points if you're living away from home and you haven't had a chance to eat said dish for months or years. and!! here it is!! you've diligently avoided eating said dish at random restaurants over here because you just know (usually from prior experience) that they'll absolutely ruin it, so you're better off abstaining. or maybe it's the kind of dish that ISN'T available at restaurants, and your only hope is plotting and making friends with the right people that have family visiting in the vague hope that they're the kind to delight in plonking food into hands of "these students living all alone and so far from home :(" (nvm the fact that you saw said friend having the TIME of her life all this time because she's finally in a city with better food outlets than her hometown) (yes, I am aware that this is getting suspiciously specific at this point, shush)

so anyway, the food. it paid off! you put in the legwork and suffered through the appropriate number of awkward conversations with friends' parents who REALLY don't know you as well as they like to pretend they do, gave the right number of fake totally-not-awkward smiles, and now!! they're INSISTENT you join them for lunch because they brought [dish] from back home! and fuck, it's been literal MONTHS since you've had this last, AND they're from broadly the same culture as you so really, surely you can trust them to mean it when they call what they've brought [dish]. your eyes gleam and you agree, because oh man it's been so long and you just know it's going to be so good and the anTICIPATION is-

and then you take one bite and question your life's choices and experience a moment of unadulterated bafflement and abject loss because this was the first time you've had [dish] outside of your home and you didn't realise people used the same name for ATROCITIES like the kind you're attempting to eat now. it looks wrong, smells wrong, and tastes dreadfully wrong. this isn't [dish]. this isn't just a disappointment after all the build-up and hope you had. this is an insult. this is an embodiment of the sheer disrespect they have for the dish.

you realise then that ah, turns out disappointment actually DOES have a very distinct taste, and you just got acquainted with it. you wonder how they managed to ruin it so spectacularly. how!!! why???? literally WHAT lengths did they have to go to in order to manage to make [dish] taste so alien???

anyway, that feeling. few emotions I've experienced in life were as potent as that welling up of abject horror and sorrow as I tasted the first long awaited morsel of a beloved dish made in a different style (an objectively WRONG style /lh)