Foods where the allure seems to be being stylish or pseudo-sophisticated (Gob, paprika)

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by Lodestar

Don't miss my point, Geoff.


Perhaps by now you've read further and seen other comments about how food is marketed to the masses for snob appeal. And yes, it has a history that goes back in the States for a couple of hundred years. Nearly since the invention of the menu restaurant owners have known it's not the food per se but how it is described, presented and the atmosphere in which it is served which will bring in the money.


There are a lot of folks out there who will pay good money just to talk about eating the latest high appeal dishes who wouldn't give the food a second thought if it were served on a piece of chipped crockery in the local Ma and Pa's and called a blue plate special.


But, give the restaurant a face lift, make the same meat loaf (with a dollop of red wine mixed in) and mashed potatoes (with roasted garlic, call them "infused") and announce to the town that you are now serving the new comfort food and watch them flock to taste it.


That's what the naming of those dishes I listed was all about. The restaurateur supposedly named Caesar who was asked for a late night salad when there was little left in the kitchen was clever enough to use the ingredients he had at hand and present it as something special. And here, all these years later, it still has popularity although what we eat at MacD's bears little resemblance to the original. It still sounds more upscale than an order of lettuce and dressing.


Chicken Tetrazzini is chicken and spaghetti. It's probably not much different than what Italian immigrants were eating in the tenements at the time. But a chef in a hotel in San Francisco elevated it to glamor at the turn of the last century when he named it after a famous opera singer of the time.

I didn't miss your point. I merely disagreed with it. You listed standard 'Murican menu items that might have been exotic a century ago but are quite pedestrian in 2017. I can get seafood/shrimp/lobster Newburg at a dozen seafood joints within a few miles of my house. A Cardiologist is going to roll his eyes about the butter, cream, and egg yolk but that is anything but a pretentious sauce in 2017. It's just a name. Everybody recognizes Newburg just like they recognize Hollandaise, Bearnaise, Remoulade, Tartar, Bordelaise, Bologonaise, Salsa Verde, Bechamel, Mournay... I can also drive a few minutes and still find a couple places that will make a real Caesar salad at the table rather than dumping Sysco truck bottled dressing on romaine in the kitchen and tossing some store-bought croutons on top.

Now you've changed topics and you're talking about upscale versions of comfort foods. So what? In my experience, it's a lot more labor and higher food cost. If I perceive the value for the higher prices, I'll go back. If I don't, they've had their one shot at me.

[emm74]

I wonder why OP hasn't come back to clarify whether they meant exotic meat rather than meat that was left rare when cooked. Given that they combined it with mushrooms, it seems like they may have been confusing a personal taste for well done meat for some supposedly new-fangled trend to people liking their meat rare.

Personally, I like medium-rare (although erring more to the rare side) and don't care at all for mushrooms.

And this would be the epitome of overly stylish trendy food IMO.



http://www.popsugar.com/food/What-Ra...-Cake-40893810

[cat1116]

I don't care - if it looks good, smells good and tastes good to me, I'm eating it - trendy or not.

[Mikala43]

I guess the "what's old is new again" current trend of nose to tail use of an animal.

So to me the "new" pretentious" is tripe, sweat breads, etc.

I really don't consider any trends pretentious, they are just trends (like clothes, interior decorating colors, etc.). If I don't like it, no biggie.

[Mikala43]

Originally Posted by TabulaRasa

Sushi is a pretty pedestrian convenience food in its Asian countries of origin. It's kind of funny that it's elevated to non-street food status many places here.

There are very high end sushi restaurants in Japan.

[Mikala43]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

What food safety reasons?

Read the FDA regulations. Other than tuna, all raw fish at any sushi bar is flash frozen to kill the parasites. Every state in the country as the FDA regs as part of their local board of health food handling code.

Raw shellfish? Yep. That has food safety issues.

I eat it all the time, BUT we just had a Hep A outbreak here from raw scallops.

[Dirt Grinder]

Originally Posted by Mikala43

There are very high end sushi restaurants in Japan.

Oh yeah. There's nothing "pedestrian" about Jiro-san's offerings at Sukibayashi Jiro (3 Michelin stars).

[Pyewackette]

All those weird chemical things that pass for food these days. Things that turn into bubbles or gels. Weird combinations of ingredients such as turmeric-mango-parsley mayonnaise. Teensy portions of not very appetizing looking foods with weird sauces or gravies poured over them. Stuff sprinkled on these huge glaringly empty plates with the teensy portions that just looks like the ceiling shed dirt over the dish. Any kind of metal applied to the food - silver foil or gold or whatever.

All manner of pretentiousness when it comes to food. I just don't have the time for it and none of it tastes any good. Put parsley in the mayonnaise and you just make it taste like grass. No thanks. Peanut butter crackers would be an improvement over most of this nonsense.

[Mightyqueen801]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

I kind of roll my eyes at foods that were once poor people food that are now pretentious. I grew up in a place where kale was a very pedestrian Portuguese leaf vegetable. Kale soup has always been a working class staple. I grew up with it I've been making it forever. All of a sudden, kale is trendy. It used to be you could only find it in stores with a big Portuguese population. Now, it's in every organic food case.

Same goes for things like Greek yogurt and blueberries. I grew up eating Greek yogurt and blueberries 50 years ago. When did that become trendy?

The big shoulder shrug is quinoa. I grew up with bulgur in tabbouleh salad. It's not all that different. It's not like I'm a vegetarian or gluten-intolerant where I care about complete proteins or the whole gluten-free thing. Couscous, bulgur, quinoa... they're kind of interchangable fillers where you have to cook them with something that actually has some flavor.

I also smile at some things marked organic. Maple syrup. It's not like they're fertilizing sugar maple trees or dumping pesticides on those trees.

Look at "pasta". People who were grown and functioning before 1980 can remember when that word came into common usage. Before that, there was spaghetti or macaroni or noodles, which were eaten when the budget was low and you needed to stretch the meat by adding it to dried flour and water.

Suddenly it became "pasta", with all sorts of sauces from this or that obscure region of Italy, and dried flour and water in various shapes was served in restaurants for exorbitant prices. And still is.

[Gerania]

Originally Posted by bjh

Foods where the allure seems to be being stylish, cool or "in" or "sophisticated".

Here are a couple of foods I believe often carry this phenomenon:
Rare meat
Mushrooms

? Mom cooked steaks medium rare in the '60s. We ate mushrooms, too. One of mom's friends used to give us wild mushrooms every spring. Dad wouldn't eat them.