One of the first bonds a person forms with the world begins, perhaps without their knowing it, at the table.
Before we learn to speak, we already know certain smells. The smell of food rising from the pot, the sound of hot oil, bread coming out of the oven, that indescribable scent spreading from our mother’s hands in the kitchen… And the first map of flavour we will carry all our lives is drawn in that very kitchen.
Wherever in the world we are born, the first reference of our palate is the land we were born into and the food culture of the family that raised us. Because food is not only the filling of a stomach; it is also memory, culture, belonging.
A child born in India grows used from infancy to the intensity of spices, to the mingling of different aromas. For a child raised in Greece, the fish the sea offers, olive oil and the plain flavours of Mediterranean cooking become a natural part of life. A child born in Türkiye is born into a culinary culture thousands of years old.
On this land, ancient recipes carried from the Hittites to the Seljuks, from the Ottomans to our own day, meet the countless flavours offered to us by meat, grain, vegetables, spices and the soil itself.
The most personal reference
Yet even inside all this great culinary culture, a person’s most particular reference is usually something far closer to home: the food their mother cooked.
Because the food we eat in childhood shapes not only our palate but our feelings. The smell of a soup a mother made can carry us back to our childhood even years later. A pot of stew, a plate of rice, a stuffed vine leaf or a kebab can turn into a memory whose flavour we never find anywhere else.
Perhaps this is why, however much we grow and however many of the world’s kitchens we come to know, we measure every flavour against something without noticing: “At our house it was made like this.”
The memory of the palate
We eat a new dish. It may be very good. It may be very expensive. It may have come from the hands of the most famous chef in the world. But the first measure in our mind is still that reference of flavour formed in our childhood. Because the palate remembers not only tastes, but stories.
There is an important distinction here, though. A palate that develops is not a palate that closes its doors to new flavours. Quite the opposite: a good palate learns to discover new tastes while keeping its past.
For me, a true culinary culture begins precisely here. To understand the new without forgetting the old. To modernise a dish without losing its soul. To change a recipe while respecting the land that gave birth to it.
Because the worth of a dish is not decided by its ingredients alone. Behind that dish there is a landscape, a family, a tradition, and a memory handed down from one generation to the next.
Our first restaurant
Perhaps this is why, wherever in the world we go, we end up turning back to look for our own kitchen. Just as the land a person is born into shapes their fate, the dishes they met in childhood shape the fate of their palate.
And the first teacher of that fate is usually not a cook but our mother. Our mother’s kitchen is our first restaurant. Our mother is our first master. Her table is our first menu. And the opening lines of the palate memory we will spend a lifetime refining are written by the dishes that come from her hands.
Perhaps this is why, with certain dishes, what a person looks for is not the recipe but their mother’s hand. Because some flavours are not made from a recipe; some flavours are remembered.
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