I've spent the last five days or so on a tropical beach holiday in Queensland. It's been all toes in the sand and wake boards and picnic lunches and castles and seashells and generally getting one last taste of summer before I settle into what is meant to be a rather wet Sydney winter. The trip was deliciously devoid of electronic connectivity, which is why this week's post is both a tad late and brief. All that relaxing, you see, didn't leave much time for writing. I did have plenty of time to lie about near the surf collecting miniature seashells with my two boys. As my regular readers will know, food is never far from my mind and the repeating patterns on our collection of shells got me thinking.
Holidays and Cinnamon Shells
On Old Ovens and Picnic Lunches and Bears
I feel as though, if I am to be completely honest, I've been a bit blasphemous. I've done an injustice to one of the great culinary institutions of the human race. Last week, instead of lifting up, idealizing, instead of crafting a pedestal upon which I might rest my tribute to the foundation of one of the fundamental principles of the Western diet – bread baking - I blathered on about the expectations, both assumed and otherwise, heaped upon professional chefs. I should have been, rather, talking about the amazing chain of human expertise, about common knowledge of complex chemistry, about everyday mastery, generation after generation, stretching back to nearly the beginnings of definable civilization. I should have told you, when I talked about sourdough bread, of how every one of your ancestors, if they originated in Europe, Northern Africa, the Near East, or Middle East, have been making bread in this exact manner for their families, for nearly 5000 years.
I should have, but I didn't, and I'm not going to do so this week, either.
Start Me Up
I am a Professional Chef. It is a job title which arouses, in the uninitiated, certain romanticized visions of artful cookery. People imagine, when they think of the chef's trade, a Jamie Oliver-esque montage of ultra-speedy chopping, half second sautéing, and little pots of bubbling sauces, all culminating in a close up of placing the final garnish on an immaculate, finished dish. This is not exactly accurate. All of those things happen, certainly, but with a lot of long, hot, hard work in between. Chef's, would you believe, fall victim to the romance as well. I once asked a group of my chef friends what they imagined professional cookery to be before they embarked on their careers. One friend envisioned “stepping out of the cool room with a tray of eggs, brushing the hair from my eyes, and gently patting the flour off my apron.” My own vision was much less clear. I sort of imagined whisking things in very large bowls.
Which, I suppose, I get to do from time to time; chefs work with some comically over-sized equipment.
Ugly, But...
I have to be careful here... I'm about to spend an entire post complaining about the Western World's unhealthy obsession with beautiful food, all the while maintaining a blog where I glorify the same. Let's see how fine a line I can walk.
There are several facets to this particular obsession with perfect foods which we all share. At it's most basic, the urge to eat only the most beautiful foods is completely primal. We want the brightest fruit and vegetables, the darkest roast meats, the most perfectly shaped eggs. These things indicate they are good for us and will taste the same. Anything sub-par, any imperfection, gives us pause. An attractive strawberry, for example, looks and smells so because it it at the height of ripeness, and more or less pest free. Still green? Mouldy? Wormy? No longer arousing. It's part of our survival instinct.
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