Tall Food

I am relatively new to Gather and have done almost no publishing.  I have thoroughly enjoyed several months of reading everyone’s thoughts, and occasionally commenting on those thoughts.  But I was finally coerced into printing one silly piece.  So now I guess I’m up and running.

Every time I log on, I let the Gather web page go through its automatic highlight of its various sections.  Politics: always interesting but often scary.  Books: again interesting and often has good tips for my future book purchases.  Etc., etc.  My favorite is Food; quick, easy, immediately gratifying, much like my basic concept of food.

Turns out I’m a very good cook.  Certainly not a chef, since everyone differentiates those two statuses.  I learned at my mother’s elbow, as she learned at her grandmother’s elbow.  When I was a kid I called my mother Mama.  When I hit my teens, and forever thereafter, it was Polly, and she tolerated my irreverent use of her first name.  She calls herself a farm girl.  Although she says that with some disdain, I love all those stories of life on the farm, and all the wonderful German recipes (some are 200-300 years old) that I inherited.  None of my other sisters had much interest in cooking but from six years old, the two things that interested me to the level of obsession were drawing and cooking.  Drawing and art will be a whole other story.  I also learned from my fraternal grandmother.  Strong French, Cajun, Russian, and English influences.   And the two sides of the family could not have been more different in styles and flavors of food.  But they had some basic concepts in common.  Both sides were part of large clans, so the recipes I learned from maternal and fraternal cooks were developed to feed huge groups of peoples.  Also, both sides were actually quite poor but tried to live life to its fullest.  So the foods put on my childhood table were often the simplest of ingredients, prepared in phenomenal ways, feeding a dozen or more people for the price of three or four.

I often laugh when I watch the Food Channel, not in a cruel way but in a sort of “the joke’s on you, or me” way.  I see the TV chefs going overboard about washing their hands after handling chicken, and it brings back countless memories of my mother instructing me to examine, wash, and re-clean every piece of raw chicken under a running faucet.  “Why?” I would ask almost every time I was assigned the chicken cleaning duty.  “Because chicken is dirty.” would be her blunt answer.  And the few times I would persist with “It looks pretty clean to me,” I would either be subjected to one of her many lectures of life on the farm and how dirty everything really was, or excused from the kitchen all together.  I don’t mean to slam Polly’s kitchen habits.  On the contrary.  This is just one example of how Polly was decades ahead of her time in food preparation.

I could go on and on about my history with food, but who cares.  Let me get to that catchy title. 

So now that you know my history with learning to cook, you can understand my appreciation for simple, quality ingredients prepared with imagination and consideration for economy.  This is not to say that I do not enjoy haute cuisine.  Au contraire.  I love fancy-schmancy food.  Let me make that crystal clear.  It makes my palette sit up and take notice when I am introduced to a new sauce, an extraordinary cooking method, or a killer ingredient. 

But I have been noticing something.  I’ve been watching it develop for a few years now.  And I’m pretty sure I’m right in jumping to this conclusion.  When I go to fancy, exclusive, and expensive restaurants, the portions are small, the seasonings are international, and the food is very TALL.  That is to say, the items of food that make up a dish are prepared in a way that makes each item “individual”.  Then some colorful sauce is slathered over the surface of the serving plate and all items that make up that dish are arranged, usually one on top of the other, or at a carefully crafted architectural angle, so that the final presentation can be a concoction reaching 6-12 inches in height. 

OMG!!!

I don’t wish to flaunt my culinary ignorance but how does one politely and successfully fork into such a delicately balanced Tower of Pisa?

And now for the real point of my ramblings.  Is it just me or would you agree that menu items are more and more expensive, depending on how tall they are upon presentation?

Maybe I’m making much ado about nothing, but I don’t think so.  I know I’m right about this one.  The same foods can be served family style, that is to say, all ingredients that make up the primary meal served next to each other on one plate, and the price is appropriate to family style dining.  Or those same ingredients can be crafted into an edible tower, and you are almost paying for a trip to France.  Granted, the “tower” dish is hand crafted and probably stunningly beautiful, but am I the only one not fooled by this?

It occurs to me that the food industry is finally achieving what the fashion industry has long been expert at selling.  If you are short and wide, i.e., normal looking, then you are somehow lower class or just not as good.  If you are tall and skinny, then you are unquestionably superior, and should be rewarded as such.

You know, now that I’ve made my point, I realize that I don’t really have a point.  My opinions are certainly not going to change the culinary world, and I probably don’t want to.  I’m not going to influence restaurant pricing, so what’s my beef?  And I enjoy culinary eye candy in my restaurant dining just as much as everyone else, even if I have to pay double and triple for the long trip up.  I guess I just can’t resist the temptation of saying to any food fashionistas (I can’t even find that word in the dictionary) who may be reading, “I know who you are and I know what you’re doing.  And yes, I’m still paying through the nose, just like everyone else.”