Home Cooking Manifesto
A spectre is haunting Northern Europe, North America and parts of Australia -- the spectre of Home Cooking for Invited Guests. The perversion of Home Cooking in itself, if practiced in the seclusion of the private kitchen, is a matter between consenting adults and should not make tongues curl unduly. But it becomes a haunting spectre when made scandalously public, by the highly improper act of Inviting People Home for Dinner.
Care for my Home Heart Surgery, anyone?
Cooking is an Art form, like painting, composing music or writing poetry. Creating good art requires a gift for it, but gifted people are few and far between. This applies to the Art of Cooking as well. It is widely known that proficiency in the Art of Gourmet Cooking is a statistically rare occurence. Why then are people so eager to empirically prove -- beyond any reasonable doubt -- this deplorable statistic, by inviting friends and strangers to dinner -- in millions of American and Northern European homes? Not many are proud of their Home Heart Surgery or Home-Painted Matisse. Still, every home-made collapsed soufflé, every burnt bouillabaisse from the family hearth, is supposed to elicit sighs of admiration from disgusted dinner-guests.
Corrupting public morals
Hence the perversion of Home Cooking is not only hazardous for the palates of the dinner-guests. It also corrupts public morals by imposing a deplorable honesty-gap on the guests. As a dinner-guest, you are expected to be an accomplished liar and never utter the obvious: decent meals can only be had in decent restaurants, prepared by people who actually understand the Art of Cooking.
Guests should be taken to decent restaurants
In the culinarily competent cultures of Southern Europe (France, Italy, etc.), home cooking is not imposed on strangers. The stranger is prudently taken out to a decent restaurant instead. Thus the family's alimentary skeletons -- like Aunt Anna's overcooked vegetables and Mother Maria's terrible terrines -- remain safe among other unsavoury secrets, in the kitchen closet.
The Manifesto:
Eaters of all countries -- unite! Combat the perversion of Home Cooking for Invited Guests!