this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Man, people miss out on so much good eating because of preconceptions and gatekeeping.
Berries go with almost anything. And yeah, technically strawberries aren't berries. But the point is that pretty much every berry is a blend of acidic tartness, sweetness, and complex flavors. There's no world in which berries make something bad.
Any fruit has the potential to go with any standard food. Meats, pastas, breads, even veggies. It's a matter of balancing the specific fruit with the other ingredients.
That's why pineapple on pizza works. Tangy, sweet, and with that hard to describe tropical fruitiness. It brings out the sweetness of a good tomato sauce while cutting through the fattiness of toppings and any oils.
Pork chops and applesauce baby, it's a classic for reason. Pork stuffed with apples; and other things, orange chicken or duck, blackberry glazed venison roast (seriously, you want to try it), apricot beef (or lamb), curried goat with prunes (or apricot, or peaches even), roasted brussels sprouts with apples and cranberries.
It's all about the balancing with other things.
The Polish strawberry pasta? It's balanced out with sour cream that mutes the sweetness some, and works as a bridge with the pasta.
I know I'm talking into a void here, what with this being a meme, but I'm always so amazed that people will dismiss a food combination without trying it, or sometimes without even trying to imagine the possibilities.
I blame Alton Brown.
Hear me out.
Alton Brown is undoubtedly a legendary figure and he did a lot of good for the modern state of culinary entertainment. His scientific, experimental approach was authoritative. He came up with what was scientifically the best way to do a thing, demonstrated why, and did it in a very entertaining way.
But with that, came scores of fans who saw "this is the best way to do a thing" and interpreted that as "this is the only way to do a thing, fuck you you're doing it wrong."
Alton wasn't doing what other TV chefs were doing. Emeril and Julia presented really good recipes, they'd add some flare and say hey, this is how we do it around here. Bourdain explored the world and showed off a lot of great ways to cook. He was reluctant to criticize and clearly just loved the food.
But Alton Brown, for all the good he did, opened up authority to fans who didn't know shit about fuck. He spoke with confidence about how his method was the right method.
Right about the time the Internet was coming in to it's own and arguing about nonsense online became a hobby a person could have.
Now, there's a culture of being right about cooking online. People who log in every day just to bitch about how somebody else cooked something.
Obviously it's not exclusively Alton's fault, and Alton is as open to new and interesting ways to cook things as Bourdain was, a fact you'll discover if he ever happens to visit your home town and read what he says about the food there on his Facebook page.
But there is a through line there, and it starts at Good Eats.
You know, I agree, especially about Alton not being the cause as much as it is the viewers looking for am excuse to feel holier-than-thou about something.
You're dead right that people took his work way too far and assumed that because he was breaking things down into the underlying food science and methodology that the exact preparations he used were default the best, period.
He wasn't prone to that himself, though he did go hard against myths.
He's a terrific food educator. One of the best in television history imo. But you're also dead right about the entertainment side screwing things up. His on screen persona, combined with the structure of good eats as a show made it too easy for food snobs to glom onto the wrong parts
I think you said it better than I did. Dude just wanted to educate and people just can't let something be good. It has to be correct.