STEWS FROM SCRAPS

One aspect of modern, restaurant-driven food trends that I wish would disappear is how every year or two, a deeply traditional home-cooked dish—or even an entire cuisine that was developed by those in need, like that of Appalachia—gets reinvented, which typically means it becomes very, very expensive. It’s fine when high-end restaurants want to celebrate a style of cooking. It’s also important to preserve cultural traditions. But when it comes to the problem of food waste, it’s more important to have a general understanding of how those dishes evolved than to be too strict about following a modern recipe. The most lasting classic dishes [such as cassoulet, gumbo and cholent] were designed to use ingredients that were available in abundance or to reuse the odds and ends from cooking other dishes.