The Artisan - Recipe Upload - 8/17/2006

Still beating?

Thanks.

B/

They usually reserve it for carpaccio when it still throbs. (Can you say throbs in a family NG like this?)

Pastorio

Andrew Price wrote:

13 years for this guy, and he makes a joke: " Il carpaccio: deriva dal nome del pittore, Carpaccio per l'appunto, che nel 1963 tenne una mostra al Palazzo Ducale (Venezia). Tale piatto venne infatti servito per quell'evento. (Non è il pittore che prende il nome dalla carne, Wink ). "

"Normal evolution of language" has no direct currency and is unpredictable. Languages evolve and transmute words willy-nilly (which, at one point used to be "will he, nill he" and went through "normal evolution"). They also corrupt, curtail, enlarge and add stuff to existing meanings. English is absolutely best at this, pillaging other languages and making new words faster than the old ones can die.

I maintain that expanding the meaning of carpaccio this way is exactly typical of chefs trying to sound cool and neat-o and cutting edge, by using words that carry a social cachet rather than actually describing the dish. It's more like a "normal" dumbing down of language to misuse it this way, subtracting meaning rather than enlarging it.

I saw a menu that described passionfruit run through a processor as a"confit" and a little later as a "coulis" - both technical terms shattered into fragments of meaningless. Apparently "puree" wasn't sexy enough despite the fact that it was correct. It's pure pretension and inflation. People "swellifying" their language. I saw "roulade" used to describe a piece of fish surrounded by rice and wrapped in seaweed - "roulade of wild-caught tuna and California rice." There is only wild-caught tuna. I saw "Popiette" to name a stack of slices of chicken breast with cheese between - makes no sense at all. My absolute favorite was a "muffin of hand-chopped chicken with assorted root vegetables" that included peppers, tomatoes, cauliflower and grapes among some roots - carrots, onions and yuca. The "muffin" was essentially a slice of meatloaf.

Because ignoramuses do it is no reason for me or anyone else to dignify it by according it any respect. There are restaurants I've been in whose menus are opaque. So much trendy jargon and pompous self-aggrandizement as to make it necessary to plague the server to get even the smallest notion of what the hell the kitchen is doing. My sense is that most of this is to show the customer how much smarter the chef is than they are.

Not interested. I understand romancing the menu a bit, but maybe do it with adjectives and leave the nouns alone.

Here's romance marking the end of summer from the beginning of an article I wrote...

It's time for the dizzying flower perfumes of summer to give way to the crisp, gold scents of autumn. And for small fruit-sweet tastes to give way to full stews and herby roasts. There's no other time to smell the grasping earthiness of a pumpkin patch, of an apple press at work, of late season tomatoes stewing for a Sunday dinner with the first steamy kitchen windows of this new season. It's fall and it's time to cook differently and eat with a seriousness that summer just can't match. Oh, sure, there are the technical seasons, measured with laser scientific precision more precise than the dance of angels on pinheads. We're not talking calendars here; we're talking the color of the afternoon sunlight, that mysterious blueness that tells the pear trees to don their autumnal finery and, finally, to rest. We're talking of the first hints of some yet unborn far-off snowfall somehow to be smelled at the edge of a sniff of some clear October morning. For the months just past, we gave heat away, seeking a cooling breath. Now we look to find that last ray of warming sun, pulling it to us as we know it will be yet half a year before we can again relax and sun ourselves in some feline pleasure. We start the search for warmth in the kitchen with hearty soups, stews and that whole family of one-pot meals. Good chunky hunks of meat and vegetables in a broth so rich you wonder why it's been so long since you had some, Summer forgotten.

Not one "carpaccio" in the bunch...

Pastorio

Interesting. I, too, grew up with Miracle Whip. Indeed, I was a not-so-young adult before I realized that it isn't mayonnaise (which is what my family called it) -- simply never thought about the possibility that there was actually something else. 'Course we lived in the sticks, one of the myriad hollows in the northern panhandle of WEST-by-gawd-Virginia.

I'm surprised that you find it sweet. To this day, I still prefer it to mayonnaise because, to my palate, it has a tang that's lacking in mayonnaise (which I find bland). To me, Miracle Whip has almost a tartness that I like. I'm speaking of store-bought and/or restaurant mayonnaise, here. Don't know that I've ever tried home-made.

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