California! Because I'm a California girl. And because that would mean lots of fine dining, clear flavors, healthy techniques, lots of produce, and since California Cuisine includes French, Latin and Asian influences, there would be a great variety of ingredients and breadth of flavors. Yummy, healthy and never boring? I'm trying to think of what I'd miss, but most of it could be cheffified and have something sort of like it on my plate. Maybe not a real, sloppy, gyros pita, but very possibly an elegantly deconstructed one with all the flavors. Yep. I could manage with my comfort foods run through the rubric of California Cuisine.

That would be an easy decision for me to make. I'd select Middle Eastern (or what used to be called Near Eastern) for my lifetime cuisine.

Lamb and chicken as dominant protein sources, lots of vegetables I like, fruit and nuts used both in sweet and savory dishes, milk and honey, and cinnamon, cumin, peppers, mint, and marjoram spicing things up. There is a good balance among the different food groups too.

That is an ancient part of the world with a rich culinary history and so many regional variations that I can't imagine getting tired of it.

I'd start out by asking my chef to prepare Armenian on Mondays, Syrian on Tuesdays, Albanian on Wednesdays, Turkish on Thursdays, etc. and sit back and wait for my meals to be delivered.

Heck, that's easy, I'd choose American. I've often said that we are such a melting pot, we get to choose the best of all cuisines and make them ours. So, my smoked Lake Michigan salmon sushi is American cooking, so are Indian tacos and New York Bagels and Chicago Dogs and Memphis BBQ and southern soul food and California fish tacos and New England chowder and Maine lobster and....well, you get my point.

Yeah, I suppose it's cheating, but I choose "American"!

Annie

Remember, your master chef is a purist, a classicist, he doesn't do world cuisine, he is an unrepentant traditionalist. He ain't no Alice Waters.

"California cuisine"? Vat ist zat? Some b*st*rd melange developed by hippies in the last 50 years? Nein! No French, Latin, Asian or oder "outside influences"! You vant American cuisine, you haff to eat "Mittle Amerika cooking". Like zis Betty Crocker.

If Mediterranean is behind door #2 that's what I will take. If it is not a choice, then I'll share Middle Eastern with ruthanna. But if there is not enough to share I'll take Italian. Ohhhhh....don't make me choose!

Seriously . . . "American cuisine" is hard to define, since ethnically speaking "Americans" are hard to define. Americans are an amazing polyglot of influences, and America is probably the only country in the work where the average kid is as likely to grow up on carnitas and mole as on ca hap hanh and keo me xung.

But I'm trying to talk about the traditional, standard, classical, majority, old-school middle-class cooking in each country in question. So, for American cuisine, I'm really thinking more of Betty Crocker - and I mean Betty Crocker circa 1950, not Betty Crocker after she burned her bra and moved to coastal California, got all hippie'd and yippie'd out, and starting living on couscous, ahi, tapas and pad thai.

Here is what Betty Crocker cooked in 1950 , by the way (the link should let your browse the menu of the 1950 edition).

http://www.amazon.com/Crockers-Picture-Cookbook-Crocker-Editors/dp/0028627717#reader_0028627717

Here is a link that might be useful: Browse 1950 Edition

OK, never mind. If I have to eat only one cuisine, I ain't gettin' on the boat because there's no possible way I can choose.

As for purists, is that a single area? Northern Italian food I like, the seafood, the sausages, the cheeses, those are all good. Middle Italy with the bolognese and white pasta? Nope, don't like it. If we choose Chinese, must it be Mandarin or Szchewan? Or can it be all parts of China?

I could tell you what I would never pick: Greek, Central Italian, Mexican (sorry, I just don't like corn tortillas or very much heat), Indian and probably not Norwegian.

I guess I'd better just stay off the boat, there's no way I'd ever be able to choose a single cuisine without being completely sick of it in a month or less.

Annie

Nonsense! There is a very particular point of view with true California cuisine! You want me to change it to Mom's Home Cooking? Fine! Though Alice Waters is the mother of my native cuisine!

My mother's standard dishes, besides the California simplicity I was referring to, include everything from piroshki to arroz con pollo, Italian "gravy" style spaghetti sauce (and pasta) to borekes, mulligan stew to chateau briand, enchiladas to blintzes, hummus to guacamole, lots of amazing salads, fresh fruit every day, a few sweets, breads, jam, etc., and make your own sandwich lunches.

That's real, American cookery. Russian influences, Middle Eastern influences. Jewish influences, Californio Mexican influences from her rural upbringing among real Californios, Irish, Italian and Southern influences from her mother's first American friends, Japanese influences from our Japanese dear friends, etc.

Limiting "American" to bad American is denying American altogether. At that point, we have to go to pemmican and fry bread.

My familial culinary heritage is Russo-Middle Eastern. I can't imagine wanting to eat Russian food in the desert, so I'll choose the Middle Eastern under protest, but you said "REGIONAL" and I still think California is a region.

Hands down it would be Italian but I'm not picking a region!

I think Italian cuisine is one of the most diversified in the world and it suits my palate very well.

Everything from pasta to rustic breads and meats, cheeses, fish, seafood ..... oh and did I say pasta! Antipasto platters, smoked meats and sausages....and of course those big bold wines of Tuscany!

When does my ship sail !?!

Teresa, there's plenty of M.E. cuisine to go around. I'll just scoot over a bit.

While America may be a melting pot of different cuisines, so are many other countries, whose diversity may not have been as a result of immigration but rather military invasions or occupations, marriages of royalty to spouses from other countries for political alliances or territorial acquisition, or trade for commodities. How many centuries must we go back to find a country's "pure" cuisine?

Hmm, I guess I was thinking the master chef knows all the traditional dishes of an entire country or broad region of countries with a similar food heritage, rather than being solely a provincial cook.

It is easier for me, too, to rule out some cuisines, than to pick my "forever cuisine". I wouldn't pick Mexican cuisine either. I believe I can also rule out British cuisine. Apologies to Britannia.

I am going to go with thai. But fortunately, the ship I was traveling on was transporting vast barrels of wine that illogically all survived intact.

I have given this a little thought. I'd choose French, with a nod to Julia. There is enough complexity and diversity in French cuisine to keep me happy for a very long time. And all that lovely wine, too.

Please make sure my chef knows every recipe in that old Betty Crocker cookbook! That was one of my first cookbooks back when I moved into my first apartment.

Sure I've branched out and love many other types of food.
But if I had to choose only one...

Nancy

John - if I just HAD to choose, I'd take classic French cuisine. All that butter and cream.......oh my!

I guess I was thinking the master chef knows all the traditional dishes of an entire country or broad region of countries with a similar food heritage, rather than being solely a provincial cook.

You think a 3-star French chef (in Frace) can't turn out a respectable hamburger? He might refuse, but that's snobbery not lack of skills... All of the traditional dishes of a country or region is basically an encyclopedia of food. It's like what was said in your other thread about Japanese home cooking not resembling what we see in most Japanese restaurants. There's a lot more to life than that.

I think I'm having a really hard time wrapping my head around the question given your parameters because you have unlimited ingredients. Perhaps a better question would be to name a single restaurant whose menu one could survive on (with the addition of a 10 item breakfast menu in keeping with the rest for those that don't serve breakfast). That would get really old really quickly, and is maybe what you were aiming for.

I think my answer would still be Middle Eastern because of the variety of salads and spices. And the comfort food thing. Okay, I think doing it that way might have gotten me closer to what you were trying to ask.

Just don't put me on a real desert island. I've seen what they eat on Survivor, and I'm allergic to fish and coconut. I can eat fish that's right out of the water, but if I eat it too many times within a short span then I react to that too.

Italian, hands down. All regions (for variety, you know).
With unlimited ingredients and a creative chef, together, we could make it taste like almost anything!

And there'll be wine, right?

If not, I'm not goin'.
I'll kiss up to get "unexiled" or whatever it takes.

Deanna

Definitely Mediterranean, preferably from the Balearic Islands, and including the local wines, fresh fish and shrimp, tomatoes right off the vine to the table, salads, sopas de Mallorca, garlic & parsley, pork and local pastries.
Oh and sitting by the sea under a palm tree to dine.

SharonCb

John, if you are using the fictional character of Betty Crocker to represent American cooking, you might find the article linked below of interest.

Since 1996, Betty herself has been a melange.

Here is a link that might be useful: Betty Crocker through the years

Man, oh man - what a fantasy. To be "stuck" on a desert island for the rest of my life with a master chef to cook for me.

Where do I sign up???

I choose Japanese cuisine. Clean, healthy, tasty and built for longevity. I wouldn't be hiding behind bulky winter clothes. Who needs butter and chocolate when you've got sea, sun and sand. I'd want to live forever LOL!

seagrass

BTW, in my restaurant hypothesis above I didn't choose my beloved California because the menu on any one day is too limited for a lifetime. If I could have daily changing menus as I imagined in my first answer, then I'd take it!

French....by all means French!! And if push comes to shove I will ask for my hand minced very lean steak tartare to be sauteed in a little butter, sil vous plais. I will even substitute Armaniac for Scotch and drink Bordeaux.
I would pig out on Pommes frites and all that fresh fish from the surrounding sea cooked in marvellous ways I can't even imagine!
Linda C

Give me the Austro-Hungarian Empire! from Liptauer Cheese and great wines to Paprikash or porkolt with nockerl and an array of Vienesse pastries and dessert with the wonderful beers and wines of the area..... Yep - that is my briar patch!

Alexa

Oooooh, LindaC, I wanna be deserted with you! Anyone who's never had classic French food should investigate!

Italian. In a heartbeat, all the way. I could live off of someone cooking straight out of Marcella Hazan's Essentials of Italian Cooking.

I would choose Japanese food, too.

That would be my kind of chef, one that won't cook fusion. As for which cuisine I would choose, I keep going back and forth between French, Italian and Greek/Mediterranean. Still deciding.

Ann

I ping-pong between French and Chinese for my "desert island" choice.

Both are fabulously rich cooking traditions. From elaborate dishes with the finest ingredients, thanks to centuries (for China, millennia) of wealthy kings and emperors, to luscious tastes coaxed from offal and waste, courtesy of poor but inventive peasants. Extremes of climate and geography have produced both hearty winter fare as well as cooling summer dishes, landlocked food as well as coastal bounty. Influences and ingredients absorbed from all the neighboring regions.

Each has something that the other lacks. France has the noble grape, succulent chocolate, and the wonder of dairy. Rice-based liquor, almond sweets, and soy milk are feeble substitutes, for my palate. But China has heat and bite; blazing peppers and fiery spices are scarce in French cooking.

Good French cooking is easier to replicate at home, where we don't usually have afterburner-style wok cookers - but presumably my master chef would have no equipment handicap.

I grew up on Chinese food, so France has more unexplored vistas for me.

All in all, when it is gun-to-the-head time to choose, I'd probably head for French Island.

Japanese is my next runner-up. The thought of all that fresh fish that I'll never be able to eat raw - that alone nearly tips me over to Japanese cusine.

When I asked my family, SWMBO chose Italian. Girl-spawn unhesitatingly selected Chinese. Boy-spawn said "fruit smoothies". I guess the family will have to be broken up.

Fruit smoothies are a cuisine of their own? (grin) Well, he and Ashley could live happily on that island, I guess...

Annie

Hmmm...
Italian with Chase and fearlessem, or French with Pat_T and LindaC. I can't choose!

But the problem would be that DS and DH would be over with Seagrass and Carol eating Japanese food (if they could eat sushi as much as they wanted!)

I am torn between Chinese and Indian. Which isn't really fair, because both countries are huge, ancient, and are made up of many ethnic/cultural groups that have unique culinary traditions, ingredients & techniques.

Perhaps that's why I would choose one of the two. Both make ample use of a wide variety of vegetables, which is an absolute must for me. Both are complex, well developed cuisines with an emphasis on fresh, good quality ingredients but also make ample use of dried and preserved foods.

I'll follow your rules, John. You were very clear that it is intended to be a tough choice, with no weaseling, and it is tough.

Mexican cuisine is far more refined and varied than is usually known. It has ancient roots. It is underestimated and underappreciated because the restaurant versions are so limited. Even in Mexico the best is not to be found in most restaurants. The chef you describe would serve outstanding Mexican food on a daily basis and I would be more than happy with it.

Middle Eastern, Chinese or Japanese would be quite OK with me. I would have no problem subsisting on a diet of any of those if prepared by the master chef.

I have to choose one however and that would have to be Italian. Not the Italian food typically found in restaurants in the U.S. although I like that. Like Mexican restaurants, they serve only a caricature of the cuisine, namely everything with red sauce and cheese. The master chef would serve up an incredible range of dishes. Vegetables would be prepared in countless ways, not to mention seafood, which I love. The wines would not be imported, they would be Italian wines, which are equal in quality to any French wines but have more character. French was not my choice of cuisine because, although it is good, it derives from the Italian and loses in the translation. My chef would not be wasting his time carving potatoes into batons. He would be cooking boldly, not timidly and fussily. Nuance would be there when it is important but not as an affectation. His pantry would be stocked with the best possible staples, Parmigiano-Reggiano, Prosciutto di Parma, various Pecorinos, Aceto Balsamico di Modena, white truffles and fine olive oil from Lucca. Coffee would be concocted to suit different moods and time of day, cappuccino to start the day, expresso for an afternoon pick-me-up. I would have an occasional gelato or one of the many baked sweet treats.

I could live on that cuisine.

Jim

I'm gonna say Tex Mex just for the heck of it because it actually is more diverse than most might think. It's more than tacos and enchiladas, especially considering that the chef is master enough to cook anything that falls within that particular category. My second choice would be middle eastern because in fact, that is what I grew up on with very few outside influences. The vegetable dishes of middle eastern cooking alone are something I could probably live on indefinitely.

You're right that a large part of the world eats the same local type dishes every day. We are plenty spoiled here. But after having been exposed to so many different types of cuisine, it would be pretty hard to suddenly get cut off.