2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:20
We find it hard to believe that all great chefs have the same intuitions, the same strokes of genius, the same gastronomic enlightenment: we know that cooking steals, self-feeds and copycats.
Once there is the crumble: open heaven, if you do not have the crumble you are a nobody, the crumble must be there, the crambol must be able to pronounce it well in the room, otherwise the customer does not know that we have the crumble and the crumble must be there.
After the starry season of the crumble (maybe two seasons goes, if the crumble is lucky), it's time to find new guidelines that allow anyone to understand that the chef is not groping in the dark, the chef is on the spot.
Then, then, it happens that some name in the Olympus of stellar gastronomy comes up with the idea (now a few seasons ago) to insert the vegetables in the dessert.
In reality, the question does not find me skeptical at the outset: these years of "non-sweet" sweets have accustomed us to decidedly more indigestible jolts than a little parsnip in the dessert. And then there is always aubergine and chocolate, the combination that would make peace even the most skeptical.
It happens, we said.
And, once the "fashion" is launched, the menus of the great restaurants are filled with vegetable sweets, undermining the fruit from its natural and reassuring place at the end of the dinner.
Then we have the rosemary and ricotta mousse, the fruit and vegetable salad with cucumber sorbet, the chocolate cremino with black olives and caper sorbet, "L'orto": a sequence of vegetables, cereals and legumes on the border between sweet and salty, the fruit and vegetable soup that visually recreates the canned fruit salad.
But the truly à la page starry one gets tired quickly, is soon seized by new inspiration and, often, abandons the trend as it had begun, leaving it in the chopper jaws of the average restaurateur, the most skilled of copiers.
The average restaurateur, we said, the one who, to give himself a tone, slips a zucchini into the salted caramel millefeuille without thinking twice. And, without a shot being fired, it ruins everything that can be ruined.
In fact, at that very moment, the vegetable dessert becomes a cloying stretch that would make anyone lose patience.
Here, in a heartbeat, the reactionaries that you would have called "boring" until yesterday are back, they who only want tiramisu, and in the more traditional version of the term. Of artichokes, beets, tubers and cauliflowers, after the second dish, we don't want to hear about them anymore.
Idiosyncrasy is triggered as a form of self-defense from resounding ciofeche dishes that would like to offer us as a new (new?) Frontier of improbable cuisine. Measurement is the real problem.
Until someone casually throws a basil ice cream into the pile, nothing happens. But then you enter the restaurant that has always made the definitive tiramisu and you are presented with an innovative dessert that "stinks" of cucumber. For more on a slate plate.
The whole thing, of course, lies in the measure of the chefs (stellar, average or mediocre) who, like elderly teen-agers in the throes of an obligatory outfit delirium, in front of the return of the uncovered navel, remake the wardrobe with micro-bodices that are a little out of time.