Nine cooks, nine versions of xacuti. When does a dish stop being itself?

Between lunch and dinner service, so this will be quick.

Xacuti is a Goan curry. My mother's had poppy seeds, roasted grated coconut, Kashmiri chillies and about fifteen spices toasted one by one. In my kitchen I have cooks from nine countries, and when I let each of them make the staff meal, I got nine xacutis. The Nepali cook's had more heat and no poppy seeds. The Filipino cook used coconut milk instead of roasted coconut. A guest from Margão once sent a plate back with the message: "This is not xacuti."

Was he right? I can think of two ways to answer.

Essence. Some ingredients or steps are what make it xacuti, and without them you have a different dish with the same name. Aristotle would ask what the thing is, and expect an answer.

Family resemblance. Wittgenstein says there's nothing common to all games, only overlapping similarities, like the features of a family. Maybe dishes are the same. Each xacuti shares something with the next, nothing with all.

The trouble is, the second answer seems right in theory and useless in a kitchen. The guest was not confused about a word. He knew something.

What did he know?