Tradition 101: Seminar 1, Footnote 1(c)

'Tradition is the living faith of the dead, traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. And, I suppose I should add, it is traditionalism that gives tradition such a bad name. The reformers of every age, whether political or religious or literary, have protested against the tyranny of the dead, and in doing so have called for innovation and insight in place of tradition. ... (T)he dichotomy between tradition and insight breaks down under the weight of history itself. A 'leap of progress' is not a running broad jump, which begins at the line of where we are now; it is a running broad jump to where we have been to where we go next. ... For during much of our history, insight has often come through the recitation and rearrangement of materials from tradition. .... The growth of insight - in science, in the arts, in philosophy and theology - has not come through progressively sloughing off more and more of tradition, as though insight would be purest and deepest when it finally freed itself of the dead past. It simply has not worked that way in the history of tradition, and it does not work that way now. By including the dead in the circle of discourse, we enrich the quality of the conversation. Of course we do not  listen only to the dead, nor are we a tape recording of the tradition. That really would be the dead faith of the living, not the living faith of the dead.' Jaroslav Pelikan, 1984 The vindication of tradition.

Tradition 101: Seminar 1, Footnote 1(b)

"Once this false opposition (between tradition and modernity) is set aside and the problem of tradition ceases to be defined as a resistance to modernity, tradition becomes again a means of raising essential questions about the ways in which we pass on the life of cultures - questions that necessarily include issues of authority  as well as invention, practice as well as interpretation." Mark Salber Phillips, What is tradition when it is not 'invented'? A historiographical introduction.  In Questions of Tradition, edited by MS Phillips and G Schochet.

Eating tradition

It has been my view that going out to dinner has less to do with eating than with "doing tradition". Contextually speaking, if you are hungry you cook at home or get take out. If you fancy you can have a braai also.  Though this performace of eating tradition obtains in Stockholm, Hong Kong,  Paris, Moscow, New York, London and other parts of the overdeveloped world too, in Brits, Tripoli, Lusaka, Harare, Mbabane, and other economies of that size and attitude, eating out is a ritual. You go out to celebrate, if you can afford it.

True, there are those who can't cook, have disposable income, have restaurants within reasonable distance, blindly or deliberately try to strike a pose to indicate that they too belong in this class of seats, right here in Le Quartier Francais, Mathias, Dahlgren, El Bulli, or wherever, they also have use for restaurants. Even they do more than eat when they go out don't they. For one thing, they have to dress up. They usually have company. For I have seen it masterfully done, but I can't muster the art of eating out alone without appearing lost. 

While I have been talking of restaurant patrons, the same point applies to chefs: what they make is not so much food as giving you an experience whose significane is better illumined by the concept of tradition. Food taste so much better if you know its routes, perhaps roots too. You can imagine how interested I was to see something on the matter in the recent issue of Taste magazine (http://www.tastemag.co.za/TheMag.aspx) where Luke Dale-Roberts has these thoughts about the whys of frothing your food:

Take the mousse. The epitome of 1960s nouvelle cuisine, the mousse actually emerged on the culinary scene during the 18th century, when chefs to French royalty discovered the frothing power of eggs and proceeded to make foams out of everything they could get their hands on. They assigned these airy, cloud-like concoctions the name 'mousse' from the French for 'lather' or 'foam' and, by the mid-1700s, everybody who was anybody was taking their nourishment in foam form, though not yet sweets (perhaps delayed by the French Revolution, it would be another 100 or so years until dessert mousses began to proliferate).

Branded the height of kitsch in the post-sixties bistromania, mousses have been assigned the same status as polyster tracksuits and garden gnomes. But, in truth, a mousse is the ultimate expression of French tradition...and, in my view, there's nothing as timeless as tradition.

Today's chefs are, for the most part, master jugglers keeping aloft the balls of tradition and innovation, convention and trend, and choosing which works works when and where.