I get that the OP was really railing against perceived pretension and complication, I do grok the impulse to rail against some of the fussiness in modern cuisine and mixology, that’s why I said “one thing driving it”, I’m sure common-or-garden hipsterism is also at play. And I say this as someone very devoted to molecular gastronomy and exotic-to-some ingredients.
I was just amused at some of the examples they chose, on both sides of their argument.
That’s fair. It is funny. And I don’t think it’s bad to indulge the human tendency toward being really interested in things. Really, that’s a wonderful trait, and it’s a horror that “geeking out” is pejorative. Hipsters are just geeks with an aesthetic.
But it’s also OK to not geek out over everything, and for people to not geek out over the things you do. Geekiness tends to run to snobbishness, and the occasional reminder is appropriate.
One of the things I noted, during my travels, is the proliferation of coffee joints, doin’ their artisinal thing. To me it seems like Starbucks kicked society in the nuts when it started it’s whole ‘artisinal’ thing. You can’t order just a ‘medium cup of coffee’ anymore. For example,
[cue scene]
Tripler walks into Alice’s Restaurant: “Hi, can I have a large cup of coffee to go?”
[fade scene]
Pretty straightforward, right? Here’s what it is now:
[cue scene]
Tripler walks into an airport 'Coffee Kiosk’: “Hi, I’d like a largo-sized 95% post-consumer cup of fine-ground Sumatra blend, at 15 degrees above ambient, brewed with chlorine-free filters, using reverse-osmosis water (balanced with electrolytes for taste), served with room, but without sweeteners, nor homogenized or pasteurized dairy organic creamer.”
[fade scene]
Criminy, aeronautical engineering specifications are less complicated than ordering a cup ‘o’ joe.
Tripler
I’m a large cup ‘o’ joe kind of guy.
The Decline of Civilization?
After an extended period of fussy, intentional complication and obsessive searching for the next new, odd something-or-other in an otherwise mundane activity, there’s often a backlash that drives people to the simple ways of the past. I’m looking forward to that.
We find the trend shows up in so-called gastro-pubs. When I want a steak, I care most about which cut it is and how it is to be cooked - I don’t want to know the name of the farm where the bullock grew up or its pedigree.
Introducing ever-greater complexity is a plague in horticulture as well.
You want to vegetatively propagate a plant through cuttings? You can stick them in water or moist soil and get good results. Or, you can use hormone-stimulant gels, algae-infused water, a homemade apparatus that holds the cutting just above water admixed with chamomile tea, special propagation chambers etc.
People swear by certain methods, but there’s a distinct lack of controlled trials evaluating any one of them as superior.
You pretty much nailed it. I happen to have all those weird ingredients I mentioned upthread in my pantry. And they were not the easiest things to find either.
But another example might be tiki drinks. They have an image of being exotic and complicated, but under the hood, there’s nothing particularly exotic or hard to get in the classic ones. Passion fruit puree or maybe allspice liqueur is about it, and those are not hard to find or make.
But new books have stuff like “avocado oil-washed tequila”, “Szechuan oil-infused bourbon”, and other esoteric and strange ingredients that you can’t buy, and that aren’t common in other drinks. Or ones that are more common, but not really used. For example lots of tiki drinks use honey syrup. None but ones in the book I’m referring to use “spiced honey syrup”. Why wouldn’t regular honey and some spices added have sufficed? It’s almost like the author deliberately made it more complicated and esoteric.
I would wonder if this may be to push some product or other.
As usual,
Not completely true. I own a number of vintage (actually antique!) cocktail recipe books, and especially in the 1920s there were a lot of quite baroque cocktails.
I’ve heard that cocktails developed beyond their simpler roots in the 1920s because Prohibition booze was often awful and needed lots of other flavors to hide the taste.
I heard on a TV show years ago that the US was the number one country for consuming black pepper. Interesting that it was so seldom used by a cuisine so spice-centric.
And non-geekiness can be hella judgmental.
I get the joke, but I order a medium coffee at Starbucks all the time and don’t have any problems. Sometimes I’ll ask for the blonde roast, which I like better than their default coffee, but that’s it. The baristas like it because it’s less work for them.
One of my go to recipes is red sauce with pasta. But I don’t do it today like I did it while in college. That was repulsive.
Okay… ya gotta tell us…
I’m not talking about the number of ingredients, I’m talking about the ingredients and how obscure they are, or how single-use they may be, and/or how you may have to make them yourself out of hard to source ingredients.
I mean, I don’t really care if a cocktail has a dozen ingredients, if they’re all things I can get at the grocery store or the liquor stores near my house (which are well stocked, I might add). But when it involves things I have to get at the grocery store. things from the liquor store, and then go through an involved procedure to get a single ingredient (avocado-oil washed tequila) for a cocktail that I haven’t heard of before, and that has no mention in the dozen other cocktail books I have, I am a little bit irked by it. And I’m not going to buy that damned book either.
I mean, I’m just not going to that level of effort for my wife and I to have a drink on a Friday night when I can squeeze some limes and grapefruits, get white rum, maraschino liqueur and sugar, and have perfectly delicious La Floridita daiquiris without all that trouble.
And @Jackmannii nails it outside of food/drink related stuff. You see the same thing with what they call “wet shaving”. These guys will scheme up a procedure that would make the DoD purchasing people blush, for shaving. Wash with this product, pre-shave prep your face with this other, use this specific soap or cream with this specific yak hair brush, shave with a specific esoteric 1940s razor with a particular high tungsten steel razor blade made in Moldova from old Nazi anti-tank shells, and then follow up with a rub from an alum block mined in the Hindu Kush, and top it all off with an artisanal aftershave from Arkansas distilled from illegal moonshine and mountain pinecones.
O.k. you’re talking more about the process than the ingredients but some of those old recipes had some pretty obscure ingredients, too! I’ll have to dig them up to list some of them.
In the commercial world I think a lot of it is justification of a price. A burger is a burger but you can charge more for a burger where the bun, meat, and salad are all given exotic individual first names.
Another field for this is games and sports.
All around the world, people play some sort of game where they hit something (be it a ball or a severed head) towards some sort of target, and for all I know have done for millennia. But now we have all sorts of codes for cricket, baseball, golf, buzkashi, or what have you.
Or likewise various forms of football or handball.
For an over-arching name for this, how about “over-sophistication”?
Those who engage in it would probably prefer “keeping it interesting.”
And to be fair, there’s a part of human nature involved in creating elaboration and liking it. For example, there may be more people world-wide who’ve played checkers than people who’ve played chess, but chess engenders more passion and interest than does checkers.
(I’m not claiming that chess is merely ‘more elaborate checkers.’ But a comparison seems justified in that both games begin with similar set-ups, and there’s a general similarity in the play, i.e., moving toward the other side of the board.)