Alongside the emergence of a new breed of chefs from diverse social and culinary backgrounds in Istanbul during the last two decades, new culinary interpretations and appropriations are appearing with regard to what is signified by authenticity in culinary products and practices. Here localism unfolds as the main trend and theme. This tendency is further strengthened by the formation of a new political economy of taste in Istanbul, which is defined by a double movement. On the one hand, there is a nascent transition in culinary work from craftsmanship to a more specialized professionalism, a process that invokes significant economic and social tensions. On the other, a new eating public is emerging, a more cosmopolitan foodie group, with more ambition, desire, and motivation to try culinary products that are out of the ordinary.

This essay traces the changing place of artifice as an ideal in food preparation through seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cookbooks and medical treatises published in France. Initially one of the guiding aesthetic principles of elite culinary production, artifice propagated a series of technical processes that redefined skill among cooks. However, by the late eighteenth century, an ideology of the natural gained ground in aesthetic philosophy, which rendered those same highly prized skills of disguise as increasingly suspect. Of course, it proved difficult to identify what qualified as ““natural cuisine. ”” During the eighteenth century, two oppositional definitions of natural cuisine developed, with very different implications for the organization of culinary labor. On the one hand, natural cuisine could indicate simple preparations, dispensing with the need for a master cook. On the other hand, natural cuisine could require a rigorous study of nature's laws. By positing a universal foundation for taste in natural law, natural cuisine envisioned the cook's liberation from diners' whims and so theorized a relationship in which the cook dictated standards of taste to consumers, rather than vice versa. We might trace today's celebrity chefs' authority over ““good taste”” back to the latter definition promoting a more natural cuisine.