When Does a Dish Stop Being a Dish?

"How much can a recipe be tweaked until it no longer is what it was originally meant to be?"

I saw a “recipe” the other day for a healthy “cake” that consisted of protein powder folded into a large portion of whipped egg whites, baked, and “frosted” with a thin layer of protein pudding. This recipe, of course, ended up in my Instagram feed as I was doom scrolling in hopes of finding some sort of inspired but healthy option for dinner and the person posting the reel emphatically swore that this “cake” would satiate all cravings while also providing 33 grams of protein!

I truly could never. How is that cake??

Nothing about this protein foam cloud of a recipe screamed “cake” to me except that it is a round base topped with a “frosting.” There’s a reason I keep using quotation marks to describe it. And while I am a fan of innovation, it had me a wondering, when does a dish stop being a dish? When is a food stretched so far past it’s structural make-up that it is no longer itself? How much can a recipe be tweaked until it no longer is what it was originally meant to be?

Cake, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary is:

“a sweet food made with a mixture of flour, eggs, fat, and sugar.”

The aforementioned dessert (?!) above contains exactly one of those ingredients. But that isn’t to say that the recipes that don’t adhere to that (arguably vague) definition aren’t… cake. Flourless chocolate cake is absolutely cake. Vegan cakes (which are always made without eggs) are absolutely cake. I’ve seen cakes made from alternative flours (almond! oat! buckwheat!) and alternative sweetness sources (bananas! honey! maple!) and alternative egg options (flax eggs! applesauce! just omitting them all together) and even cakes without typical fat like butter or oil that instead utilize ingredients like silken tofu instead.

Photo by Daria Strategy on Unsplash

So when does it stop being a cake? When it’s missing both flour and eggs? When it’s missing three of the four? When it has none of them above? I think often of the “watermelon cake” that made the internet rounds a couple of years ago, popular among the fitness set and parents who didn’t want to feed their kids sugar just yet. A giant fresh watermelon is cut into rounds, resembling cake layers, which are then stacked and frosted with sweetened Greek yogurt and decorated with other fresh fruit. It has no flour, no eggs, no fat, and no sugar (minus that which naturally occurs in fruit?) — is that still a cake?

I say yes, simply because it adheres to the spirit of cake — something that is often made in celebration. That egg white/protein powder catastrophe from above? A hard no from me, only because I don’t see how cramming low calorie/high protein foam down the gullet matches the spirit of cake? But again, all of this is totally arbitrary — does the spirit or intention of a food actually matter?

And this doesn’t even began to explore the question of appropriation and food. I still vividly remember, nearly a decade later, the very visceral annoyance that coursed through my body as svelte white lady after white lady kept publishing their recipes for the “kitchari” (which they would pronounce as KEEEEE-CHAAR-REE, like nails on a chalk board to my ears), that they swore saved their gut health, detoxed them of their sins, and changed their lives.

One recipe in particular, published in T Magazine, featured brown rice, sweet potatoes, and yellow mung beans along with kale and onion (the latter of which is actually a big no no according to Ayurvedic principles). The recipe calls for the rice and yellow mung beans to be cooked separately and then combined later. I never understood how they could label this as khichdi/kitchari, the beloved South Asian staple where at its baseline definition (at least to me!) is rice and lentils that are cooked together — everything else is somewhat flexible. I am willing to agree that khichdi can involve swapping rice out for another grain, but it must be cooked together with the lentils, not separately. What she made is essentially brown rice with a soupy, vegetable-y daal — which is delicious, just not khichdi.

This brings me to a conversation I had with a friend recently who told me that for her, a tiramisu must have espresso. You can swap out the lady fingers for another spongey baked good, and you can have the booze or not, but you cannot skip the coffee.

I am not sure I agree, when this matcha “tiramisu'“ exists, swapping the espresso for a matcha soak and the chocolate powder for matcha powder. That to me is innovation. It’s a gentle pushing of the form. It still looks and eats like a tiramisu, but there is a major shift in the flavor profile.

But to my friend? She was firm that is a trifle.

I am not sure who is right. Or if it even matters?

The only thing I am sure of is that I will not be making that egg white/protein powder monstrosity, no matter how much someone tries to push it as cake.