Are food tastes evolving or cyclical?
By Jennie Yabroff, Newsweek
A writer declares in the New York Times that Americans eat far too many animal products; he advises that if we do as the French do and limit our intake of meat, we will be healthier and spend less money on food. Michael Pollan, in this month’s food issue of the Times magazine? No, a reader with the initials A.B.C., writing to the paper—in 1856. Instead of bacon and eggs, A.B.C. suggests Americans begin their mornings with café au lait, defined as a “decoction” of coffee with boiled milk—still a popular breakfast choice, as the lines at any Starbucks will attest.
Food writing is almost always infused with nostalgia. But when it comes to food trends, we have a recurring case of cultural amnesia. The Food Network, molecular gastronomy, vegans, locavores, heritage chickens, the obesity tax: it’s easy to assume that our current obsession with food is unprecedented. Surely our palates are more sophisticated, our recipes more complex, and our ideas about health and nutrition more enlightened than ever. In fact, most of our current obsessions are as old as Spanish cream. Never tasted it? It was all the rage in 1878, and, after reinterpretations as Bavarian cream, pot de crème, and crème brûlée, was featured on the Food Network’s Everyday Italian in its current faddish, egg-free incarnation, panna cotta, last May.
The Essential New York Times Cookbook, a nearly 1,000-page, bright-red doorstop (ideal for pressing terrines, says the book’s editor, Amanda Hesser), proves that when it comes to what we eat, there’s no such thing as invention, merely reinterpretation. In compiling the book, the first compendium of Times recipes since Craig Claiborne’s 1961 version, Hesser solicited suggestions from readers, ransacked the Times’s archives, and tested recipes spanning 150 years, throwing out any she wouldn’t make again. She found that not only have our tastes changed less than we think they have, but food has always been a key indicator of who we think we are—and who we aspire to be.
Since the time of Escoffier, who was the first to ‘codify’ recipes so we could enjoy the enjoyable once again, absent ‘trial & error’, food has lost its’ reverent quality as we cede control to “shelf life” and processed foods that use enhanced corn syrup in everything to “democratize” our choices.
Food has played a large part in historical periods, as well.
England is known for its’ plain fare (“boiling/blanching everything”) due to the fear of the unknown (they are after all an island) in the time of the Black Plague, where all spices one might want to use came from the “Orient”. As no one knew anything about “organisms”, they simply stopped using anything they didn’t know the exact source of. . .
Similarly,when Genghis Khan marauded China, the wily Chinese poisoned the water supply upon retreat, but Genghis was pretty shrewd himself, and quickly learned to boil the water.
But, as the English learned much later about boiling, boiled water doesn’t taste very good, so the Mongolians started working with indigenous plants wherever they happened to be, and – Voila !! – Tea was invented . . .
The Catholic Church came about due to their original location in the Po Valley in Italy, renowned for its’ fertile soil, so it was easy for them to associate their divineness in terms of the bounty in the region, compared, say, with the Middle East, Egypt or the far-away places of mystery in the Orient.
But as Chinese food is considered technically alongside French now as one of the world’s great culinary standards, how would we ever live without any of them (?) Pizza, anyone (?)