Two bowls of soup sit before you on a table. They are empirically identical. Both have the same ingredients handled in the same manner: pork roast was rubbed with salt and hot chili, seared on all sides and then braised for hours in coconut milk, puréed  mango and dark beer. The meat was then shredded and returned to simmer in the reduced braising liquid before the mixture was added to a coconut milk broth scented with curry, ginger and lemongrass. Both soups are very tasty.

But the soup on the right comes with a story.

The chef who invented it was inspired to do so by a major experience of his youth. He and his father were on a fishing trip in the Gulf of Mexico when they ran aground just off a small desert island. The boat took on water, then capsized. They swam ashore. They were stranded for six days and were near starvation on the fourth day when they cornered a small wild island boar and killed it with long sharpened sticks. They built a fire on the beach using the Zippo that had fortunately remained in the father’s pocket when they went in the water and still worked after being set out on a flat rock in the sun to dry for several hours. As their kill roasted, they found fallen coconuts nearby, cracked them in half with sharp rocks and filled the bowls with salty ocean water. Then they crouched beside the smoking beast, each holding a coconut half. They pulled off chunks, dipping them in the briny mixture of saltwater and coconut milk, which both cooled and seasoned the hot meat. Then after the meat was gone, they drank from their coconut shells the remaining liquid, now a veritable soup, flavored with the fat and flesh and char of the wild boar.

It was the best meal the boy would ever eat and, he realized decades later, probably the reason he became a chef. In the years that followed, he toyed with the idea of re-creating this life-giving island soup. It wouldn’t be an exact replica—more of an homage. It would capture the coconutty-oceany-porky essence of the original, and other ingredients—like mango, ginger and lemongrass—would reflect the soup’s island origins. The first try wasn’t half bad, but he tinkered with it over the years: less chili, less ginger, more ginger, garlic, no garlic, fish sauce, no fish sauce, shrimp stock and so on. He has finished tinkering now. He likes the soup in its current form, and that is what’s in the bowl on the right. The soup on the left, as mentioned, is strikingly similar, but the similarities are purely coincidental – the soup on the left has no story.

Which soup would you rather try?