a prescription for a grand cuisine

A prescription for a grand cuisine: Take a vigorous people, give them an empire, let them get accustomed to the spoils, and then take it all away again ... bit by bit. Palates accustomed to good things will fight—hard, then harder still—to keep them, or to find replacements. Luxuries now rationed will become distilled. The ultimate cuisine may not be as luxurious as it was in its "glory," but it will be more inspired, more various, and more complexly realized. Roman cooking was lavish; Italian cooking is great.

john thorne and matt lewis thorne, "la cuisine creole," in serious pig.