Being garnished

One of the pleasures of dining out is being served a beautiful plate of food. One of the ways a chef makes a great presentation is to use some decorative garnishes to enhance the look of the plate. Garnish can be a very important part of a plate, sometimes even making or breaking the dish visually and gastronomically.

In culinary school, we are taught that there are rules to garnishing plates. For example:

1. The garnish should be edible.
2. It should reflect (or at least not compete with) the main elements of the dish.
3. It should enhance the dish visually or give the diner another small taste of something that compliments the dish.

So with these few rules it seems that garnishing a plate should be easy, and in times past this was generally accomplished by a sprig of curly parsley on the edge of the plate.  Okay, at least it is a try, and it follows the rules above.  It is edible and it generally 'brightens' flavors in a dish.  Then one day, an intrepid chef decided that it was time to try something new, to make the plate stand out from the crowd. So to that end, he brought out the flat-leaf parsley!  Not to be outdone another chef decided to pull out all the stops and make his dish stand out through eternity.  Rifling through his cooler, he found the garnish to end all garnish!  He would be remembered in the culinary world alongside Escoffier!  He place a huge, inedible stalk of rosemary on the plate!  Rosemary?  No one can eat rosemary!  It's like trying to gnaw on a friggin' pine tree!

Lasagna with Rosemary Garnish

So here we have a nice lasagna with a gigantic stalk of rosemary gently laid on top.  Let's critique this stellar garnish shall we? 
1. Is it edible?  Definitely not! 
2. Does it reflect the main ingredients of the dish?  Odds are there is no rosemary used in the dish, so no.
3.  Does it enhance the dish visually?  Yes it does, but not enough to make up for its shortcomings.

In fact, the use of a nice piece of parsley would have been a much better choice in this case.

Does the chef really expect someone to walk out of the restaurant with that rosemary in their mouth?  Hell, it's almost as bad as that mint leaf on the dessert, but that is a whole different blog...

The Tastes, Oh How They Change

01As time goes on, peoples tastes in all things change. Fashion, music, art, religion, and of course, food. For whatever reason, the things that people like, or crave change, sometimes drastically. Being a chef, I find the changes in the public's tastes in foods fascinating. How certain dishes rise and fall out of favor. So that brings me to a long-time favorite of past times...Perfection Salad.

Perfection Salad is a fabulous creation of Aspic (or gelatin) en-robing an eclectic mix of raw vegetables. Things like celery, carrots, olives, peppers, onions, just about anything else that may have been at hand in the kitchen. For an incredibly long time the salad was a popular side dish. As far back as 1905, there were published recipes for it.

So it begs to be asked, what changed in the publics tastes that let this gelified concoction fall from grace? I certainly don't know, but I think it could have to do with the fact that all of a sudden in America gelatin was only palatable if it is fruit flavored. I agree with the general assessment of today, there is nothing attractive in good ol' Perfection Salad

Even though I am always looking through old cookbooks, trying to find recipes that have passed to the wayside, I think this one is not ready to come back quite yet.