The Joys and Evils of High-End Cooking.
Or "Why the 1% is Getting Fatter".
On Thursday, I visited the local magazine where I interned last year, and while I couldn't stay long because half the staff was absent, my former supervisor did give me a copy of a cookbook that my fellow interns and I helped two of the editors put together. The cookbook contains a ton of recipes from high-end chefs around the St. Louis area, and a few from Kansas City and Springfield. I have spent the last day poring over it and I realized several things:
1. High-end food = taking basic recipes and jamming lots of extra ingredients and steps into the cooking process to make it fancier/richer/another "er" superlative.
2. A lack of preservatives does not automatically make a food healthy.
3. Rich people and their chefs are obsessed with butter and Heavy Cream.
All of this fascinates me most likely because I've been gluten-free/casein-free (no wheat, no dairy) for four years because of severe food allergies and sensitivities and so I now view mainstream recipes from an outsider/non-foodie perspective, often asking myself, "Does it really need that much butter?" or "Why do you need butter and/or flour in a soup recipe?"
I have lots of questions about butter. But I have even more questions and musings about Heavy Cream.
In Upper-Class Foodie-Land, Heavy Cream is Serious Business. Very Serious. It's in the expected stuff like creme brulee and bread pudding, but Heavy Cream also rears its head in the recipe for cantaloupe soup. Yes, cantaloupe soup.
Here's the recipe list for this soup:
5 slices prosciutto the fatty lovechild of ham and bacon
2 medium-sized cantaloupes, seeded, peeled, and cubed
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 cup 40-percent Heavy Cream
1 lime, juiced
Pinch salt no prepositions were harmed in this recipe list
Few twists of fresh-cracked pepper except here
1/2 cup golden raisins, steeped in Amaretto and here
1/2 cup crumbled Gorgonzola cheese
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
Maybe I'm just too unfamiliar with fruit-based soups, but this looks like the chef used an ingredients-randomizer set on "pretentious." Would one go to Starbucks to steep their golden raisins in Amaretto, or is that too pedestrian?
But back to Heavy Cream. No recipe ever asks for light or medium cream, just Heavy Cream. And why, in this recipe, should it only be 40% Heavy Cream? What's in the other 60%? Light cream? Essence of puppies? This is the sort of thing cookbooks should explain to non-foodies. Instead, we get long explanations about Langoustines, which are tiny European lobsters that only 1%-ers can get ahold of, and they apparently need Heavy Cream even more than cantaloupe soup does---an entire cup of it. I can only guess that Heavy Cream adds to the texture of these things, but it's just so...heavy. To the point that someone who has stopped ingesting it, like myself, has to wonder, "Why use it at all?" It's just so much extra junk to carry around inside that it seems messy and superfluous, no matter how "fancy" it makes the dish.
And on the topic of fancy dishes, this cookbook also has a recipe for braised rabbit. Yes, rabbit. As in those fluffy little things that jump around your backyard in springtime. Oh, wait, it's "Tuscan Braised Rabbit", which makes it okay. A chef probably adds words like "Tuscan" to a recipe like braised rabbit to give it a semblance of class and to allow upscale diners to eat it without the Deliverance banjo going off in their heads. There's also a recipe for goat meat, but...rabbits. That's the kind of dinner you'd serve during a Fatal Attraction roleplay session.
So that was my only venture into High-End Foodie-Land, and I doubt I'll return, due to my dietary restrictions. High-end cooking is an overly elaborate process that I will never wrap my head around, but I can't begrudge rich people their enjoyment of it. It's just really intriguing to be able to guess what Mitt Romney's having for dinner. I bet he loves rabbit.
On Thursday, I visited the local magazine where I interned last year, and while I couldn't stay long because half the staff was absent, my former supervisor did give me a copy of a cookbook that my fellow interns and I helped two of the editors put together. The cookbook contains a ton of recipes from high-end chefs around the St. Louis area, and a few from Kansas City and Springfield. I have spent the last day poring over it and I realized several things:
1. High-end food = taking basic recipes and jamming lots of extra ingredients and steps into the cooking process to make it fancier/richer/another "er" superlative.
2. A lack of preservatives does not automatically make a food healthy.
3. Rich people and their chefs are obsessed with butter and Heavy Cream.
All of this fascinates me most likely because I've been gluten-free/casein-free (no wheat, no dairy) for four years because of severe food allergies and sensitivities and so I now view mainstream recipes from an outsider/non-foodie perspective, often asking myself, "Does it really need that much butter?" or "Why do you need butter and/or flour in a soup recipe?"
I have lots of questions about butter. But I have even more questions and musings about Heavy Cream.
In Upper-Class Foodie-Land, Heavy Cream is Serious Business. Very Serious. It's in the expected stuff like creme brulee and bread pudding, but Heavy Cream also rears its head in the recipe for cantaloupe soup. Yes, cantaloupe soup.
Here's the recipe list for this soup:
5 slices prosciutto the fatty lovechild of ham and bacon
2 medium-sized cantaloupes, seeded, peeled, and cubed
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 cup 40-percent Heavy Cream
1 lime, juiced
Pinch salt no prepositions were harmed in this recipe list
Few twists of fresh-cracked pepper except here
1/2 cup golden raisins, steeped in Amaretto and here
1/2 cup crumbled Gorgonzola cheese
1/4 cup parsley, chopped
Maybe I'm just too unfamiliar with fruit-based soups, but this looks like the chef used an ingredients-randomizer set on "pretentious." Would one go to Starbucks to steep their golden raisins in Amaretto, or is that too pedestrian?
But back to Heavy Cream. No recipe ever asks for light or medium cream, just Heavy Cream. And why, in this recipe, should it only be 40% Heavy Cream? What's in the other 60%? Light cream? Essence of puppies? This is the sort of thing cookbooks should explain to non-foodies. Instead, we get long explanations about Langoustines, which are tiny European lobsters that only 1%-ers can get ahold of, and they apparently need Heavy Cream even more than cantaloupe soup does---an entire cup of it. I can only guess that Heavy Cream adds to the texture of these things, but it's just so...heavy. To the point that someone who has stopped ingesting it, like myself, has to wonder, "Why use it at all?" It's just so much extra junk to carry around inside that it seems messy and superfluous, no matter how "fancy" it makes the dish.
And on the topic of fancy dishes, this cookbook also has a recipe for braised rabbit. Yes, rabbit. As in those fluffy little things that jump around your backyard in springtime. Oh, wait, it's "Tuscan Braised Rabbit", which makes it okay. A chef probably adds words like "Tuscan" to a recipe like braised rabbit to give it a semblance of class and to allow upscale diners to eat it without the Deliverance banjo going off in their heads. There's also a recipe for goat meat, but...rabbits. That's the kind of dinner you'd serve during a Fatal Attraction roleplay session.
So that was my only venture into High-End Foodie-Land, and I doubt I'll return, due to my dietary restrictions. High-end cooking is an overly elaborate process that I will never wrap my head around, but I can't begrudge rich people their enjoyment of it. It's just really intriguing to be able to guess what Mitt Romney's having for dinner. I bet he loves rabbit.