I’ve noticed over the years that there are multiple disciplines/pastimes where the classic examples are relatively simple, but the modern practitioners seem to be more interested in ever more arcane and complicated renditions, usually centered on obscure ingredients, etc…
Take cuisine for example. Something like Pommes Dauphine is a simple recipe in concept- it’s a particular style of fried potatoes that puff up. That’s a classic, simple vegetable dish. Ratatouille is pretty simple as well.
But today, the new dishes have stuff like black garlic, preserved lemons, or urfa pepper. Or equally strange ingredients- black radishes, purple Okinawan sweet potatoes, calabash gourds, etc…
And in cocktails, the old drinks were things like 2 parts rye whiskey, 1 part italian vermouth, 2 dashes bitters, and maybe a dash of maraschino, curacao and/or absinthe. Now they’re chock-full of all sorts of weird-ass infusions and syrups that put even tiki drinks to shame.
Is there a term for this phenomenon where things get more obscure and complicated as time goes on, as opposed to the relatively simple forebears?
I guess so. I just get a bit startled and after a second, annoyed when I read some menu (cocktail or otherwise) that has very weird ingredients. It just seems like pointless complication to me.
The business school guy in me is guessing that it’s an attempt to differentiate themselves and their bar/restaurant from all the others, by serving dishes/drinks with obscure ingredients. You see the same thing with hamburgers, of all things. Nobody markets a 1/3 lb patty of USDA Choice meat cooked just right with fresh lettuce, tomatoes, onion and pickles on a fresh bun. It’s always got to be a artisanal baked brioche bun, patty of grass-fed free range beef (30% brisket, 30% chuck, 30% hanger steak or something), with heirloom tomatoes, hydroponic lettuce and organic onions, with house made ketchup, mustard and pickles (which are made from organic dill and cucumbers).
But most of the time, even to a lover of novelty and inveterate tryer-of-new things like myself, it’s a bit much. I mean, I’ve had a few high end hamburgers in my day, and while they were certainly excellent, they were still only hamburgers. And not even necessarily better than those from burger joints in the middle of nowhere that have been open for a half-century.
I’m just kind of skeptical of this innovation through obscure ingredients and have noticed that it seems to be a stage in the evolution of categories. I even wonder to some extent if wine varietals is an example vs. the old-style regionally named blends? Certainly naming the types of hops and the types of malt in beers falls under this phenomenon I think.
Hah! I’m just quoting the canonical recipe for a Manhattan from David Wondrich’s Imbibe!, which is an absolutely fantastic book if you’re interested in cocktails. It’s about half cocktail recipe book, and half history book- kind of like Robb Walsh’s cookbooks, if you’re familiar with them.
I really like this trend. It tells me what to avoid. Whoever the asshole was who first bred Citra hops has his own circle of Hell awaiting. IPA should not look like, smell like or taste like Coors with grapefruit juice added to it!
I think you’ve got some confirmation bias there. Yes, there are places that that over describe every item. But there’s plenty of chefs that focus on simplicity. But you aren’t paying attention when the burger just says “Lettuce, tomato, pickle, onion.”
I do agree with the naming of the hops in certain situations- if it’s a single-hop beer where it was brewed to showcase the hops, or if it’s some sort of very broad category where that might actually help you figure out what it actually might be like. An IPA dry hopped with Citra is a different beast than one dry hopped with Simcoe, and that’s good to know. But the mash bill? Not so sure about that, unless there’s something peculiar in there that might give it an unexpected flavor (10% teff or something like that)
Otherwise it’s not entirely sensible; listing a pilsner as being made with 90% pilsner malt and 10% carapils, and with a mixture of Crystal and Sterling hops doesn’t actually tell me anything that the style doesn’t already indicate.
Well, yeah. But if a place is doing the descriptor things with their Pineapple Guava gose, they’ll probably do it for their no-frills pils, just for a consistent look across the menu.
Gack… pineapple guava gose? I’m not a big sour beer fan to start with, but that sounds awful.
I do have to say that despite generally not being a huge fan of beers that are flavored, the following one from Vector in Dallas was surprisingly ok, even if their description is exactly what I’m talking about.
This nod to the classic Thai favorite, Tom Kha soup, features many of the same ingredients, lovingly layered into a double dry hopped hazy IPA. We started with a base of pale malt, malted oats, and a little rice to dry it out, then hopped it with Sabro and Motueka. Then we got cooking w/ Thai basil, lemongrass, Thai chiles, cilantro, and lime leaf. After primary fermentation was done, we conditioned it on desiccated coconut, galangal, fresh lime, and dry ‘shroomed it with both shiitake and oyster mushrooms, as well as further dry hopping with both Sabro and Motueka.
This isn’t really true in my experience. Take The Ideal Bartender by Tom Bullock published in 1917 there are a lot of recipes in there that take up a whole page, mostly for punches. Even something like a Ramos Gin Fizz is
Most of the fancy cocktails bars are trying to build old cocktails or slight variations on them like making an old fashioned spicy or smokey. They really aren’t more complex than they used to be.
It was…not nice. I like sour beers, but that one was just empty. There was no there there. But the brewery is one of “those.” To be expected since the place is just down the street from the Claremont Colleges.
The primary focus of the beers at Claremont Craft Ales is on quality and freshness, so no style is off-limits, but West Coast-style hoppy beers definitely dominate the portfolio. Even with these highly hopped beers, the goal has always been to produce well-rounded, drinkable beers that will appeal to both craft beer experts and novices alike. To this end, a lot of our IPAs contain an unusual twist to the typical West Coast hop-bomb … the addition of malted rye in our flagship Jacaranda , the smooth South American coffee added to Coffee Del , or the rich malt backbone of our red IPA, Station 101 .
I think this is just a continuation of what has been going on for all of human history. Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a hamburger or a cocktail. Someone had to be the first precious little innovator to think of putting all those ingredients together. And others built upon that, and still others built upon that. The phenomenon here is that you see anything that came along before you were born as the natural order of things, and anything recent as a perversion without a purpose. I don’t have a name for that, though.
You do live in an area that is particularly bad about that. One can’t even buy a regular soda in East Dallas: it’s all craft soft drinks from local breweries with edgy names and “all natural sweeteners” . You can’t buy a donut that isn’t Cosmic, a popsicle flavored after any fruit you’ve heard of, or bully stick that didn’t start life on a Free Range, Organic bull.
That’s not everywhere. Even around my house, you can get a burger (go over to Shady’s. They have burgers). That’s East Dallas, Old East Dallas, and Bishop Arts.
Yep. Shakespeare wrote about painting (gilding) the lily in King John. The idea of ruining something simple and perfect with excessive ornamentation isn’t new.
More to the point, the very best restaurants and very best bars I’ve been to have used fairly simple recipes meant to highlight the quality of the ingredients rather than trying to impress with a word count on the menu.
We actually live just west of the worst of it; we’re over by Skyview Elementary actually. But yeah, the whole East Dallas/Lakewood/Old Lake Highlands/bishop Arts/Uptown areas are rife with that stuff.
I mean, I’m not trying to be a curmudgeon, but I do kind of frown at the menus when their basic hamburger is described in such absurd ways. Which is funny; I’m all about weird chef-driven food and that sort of thing, but there comes a time when making a hamburger like that is kind of ridiculous. It’s a hamburger, not haute cuisine or anything like that. It’s definitely gilding the lily in a silly way.
I think one thing driving this is increased internationalization. The Op bemoans things like preserved lemon and clabash popping up, but those are extremely common, everyday ingredients in North Africa and Asia.
With a more global culture, these once-regional food items are now becoming more widely known. So it’s no surprise they’re now being taken up by cooks.
The irony to any food historian is that both the OP’s cuisine examples are just earlier examples of this exact same phenomenon, since neither potatoes nor tomatoes&courgettes are European in origin, and would once have been obscure, exotic ingredients in European cuisine.
From what I know of that cuisine, I think even for them, cinnamon and ginger (both ground and at least a year old, of course) magically appeared just before Thanksgiving and disappeared before New Year…and then, only for pumpkin pie and gingerbread cookies.
Funnily enough, I only encountered black pepper as an adult. We used exclusively white pepper in my childhood home (other than whatever was in premixed masalas) - and we were not exactly strangers to spices.
I don’t usually link videos, but this is a funny 3 minute satire of “before and after you find the subreddit for something”. It illustrates more the phenomenon the OP is describing.
I think globalism is probably encouraging this sort of tendency, but the underlying human nature issue is there regardless.
