What Happened to Real Food?

From an actual menu in a restaurant in Stockholm, August 2018:

Reindeer heart on white moss

Wild king crab on juniper sprigs

Really? What’s next, bee pollen on winter moss with salmon foam? What the hell is white moss anyway? I thought moss was green, maybe a brownish green, but white?

Before I start sounding like the old man with a moth-eaten bathrobe picking up his paper and yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, I want it on record that I’m not opposed to innovation. But what I am opposed to are chefs who try to be too clever by half. That’s the problem with the “Nordic food” craze these days. All that moss and bark and reindeer meat gathered from the forest. I thought that agriculture vs. foraging was a great advancement for humankind? Call me old fashioned.

The fascination with what I call “foam cuisine” results from the fact that many people who eat in restaurants these days don’t really cook. Cooking should be more than reading about the latest food trend or watching other people cook food, whether it’s on T.V.  or in a restaurant with an “open kitchen.”

Ok, there he goes again with the old man on the front lawn routine…

But for the every day, run-of-the-mill faire, you really don’t need fancy. You don’t need Giada on the Food Network; you don’t need anything that you can’t find at the Piggly Wiggly.  All you need are basic skills and common sense. Go old school. And that means that fusty old culinary school called French cuisine. French cuisine is the latest victim of “foam.” There’s something to be said for the old classics, as Edward Behr suggested in his book, “The Food & Wine of France:” 

I used to think that unaccustomed combinations of ingredients, as opposed to classic complements from the past, would at their best tell you something new about one or more of them. But we’re so used to the unexpected mixtures now that I hardly think carefully about them at all, beyond a simple reaction of whether or not I like what I like what I’m eating.

And so maybe we will come full circle. The old ways of doing things will become the new. We will go home again. I enjoy French cooking because it’s like jazz, another passion of mine. You learn the blues scales; you practice them—over and over. And then you do your own thing, and that thing ain’t the same each time you play. My bolognese is different every, single time. 

So, what should you do the next time you’re in New York, and your sophisticated cousin from “that side of the family” asks you out to the latest trendy foam restaurant? Well, if you have a lick of sense, you graciously accept. And, if as I suspect, you are still hungry a few hours later, and as I suspect you can’t find any good BBQ, you go back to your cousin’s shoe-box apartment, grab what you can from the larder, and make a real meal. Why? Because you know how to cook and not forage for dinner!