HIGH IN THE SKY, SURFING THE WEB, AT THE MUSEUM, ON THE ISLANDS, IN AND OUT OF THE KITCHEN: MORE FOOD AND ITS MYTHOLOGY
We all know and marvel at the stories of endlessly hand-whipped merengues served to Louis XIV, or sauces once started by a great-grandmother still simmering away and added to each day. We know it, we appreciate it, and we don’t live in that world. Where we live, we learn what to eat from a television screen, do it on the fly, or in-flight, or meal-on-lap. Social and technological changes over the past hundred-fifty years have dramatically changed what and how we eat. These are five true stories about some of the food we eat today, and how it came about. Together, they don’t disclose a bigger picture. Instead, they are mere puzzle pieces in this great big work of human imagination we call food.
TAKE ME AWAY: TROPICAL TV COOKING
Ten years before Julia Child began teaching US television audiences to master the art of French cooking, on the other side of the Atlantic, untrained cook and failed actor Clemens Wilmenrod introduced TV cooking to German audiences. In 1953, Europe was still very much in the grip of scarcity and reconstruction, so Wilmenrod’s outlandish creations spoke to his audience’s desire for excitement. While he is credited with introducing ingredients such as garlic and olive oil to the German palate, he is mostly known for lending some fantasy to the boring, bland ingredients that were more readily available, such as canned vegetables, soups and sauces. His most well-known creation achieved cult status in Germany and is still a party favourite to this day, although mostly served with a side of irony: ‘Toast Hawaii’, introduced in 1955. It consists of toasted white bread, topped with a slice of boiled ham, a ring of canned pineapple and a slice of cheese, which is broiled and then decorated with a candied cherry. It’s one of a few visually striking dishes in a canon of campy classics introduced to Germany during those years, which indicate a sehnsucht for warmer, more amicable places. Another honourable mention should be awarded to spaghetti ice cream: vanilla ice cream pressed through a potato ricer, topped with strawberry sauce and little flecks of white chocolate. Speaking of strawberries: One of Wilmenrod’s proudest creations, which almost borders on avant-garde, is what he called a ‘filled strawberry’. To make it, the green crown of the berry is twisted off, after which a single blanched almond is pressed deep into the strawberry’s flesh. Hidden away, the crunchy nut comes as a surprise to the unexpecting mouth. “If the cherry has a pit which we throw away, as does the plum, why wouldn’t we, for once, give back the strawberry a pit of its own”, Wilmenrod asked. It’s hard to argue with that logic.
DINNER IN TEN: THE RHYTHM OF MODERN LIFE
Imagine someone telling you you could make a five-course meal in ten minutes. Insane. Now imagine that same person saying it could be French food — a cuisine known for its endless and difficult preparations. Who even is this idiot? Then add to it that the year is 1930 and you have to do it all without the help of microwaves and stick blenders. Absolutely bonkers. Edouard de Pomiane knew people would call him crazy when he released his classic cookbook ‘French Cooking in Ten Minutes’ in 1930, writing in the preface: “I won’t go on trying to explain or defend myself; I will simply show you how many wonderful dishes you can prepare in ten minutes.” He subtitled his book ‘Adapting to the Rhythm of Modern Life’, meaning that even then, in what seems to us a much simpler time, people felt pressed for time in feeding themselves. De Pomaine came to be one of France’s most famous chefs in a rather roundabout way. The child of Polish immigrants, he was a doctor of medicine and researcher at the famous Pasteur Institute in Paris. While studying the chemical composition of our stomach’s fermenting juices, he became interested in the other side of the equation. i.e food. He published twenty-two books on the topic, but ‘Ten Minutes’ takes the most scientific approach. If you set up your kitchen like a laboratory, everything is possible. When using his tricks, a meal of mussels with saffron, buttered spinach, tomato salad, an omelet flambé and fruit for dessert is a mere ten minutes away. Impressive.
FLY THE OCEAN IN A SILVER PLANE: CAVIAR MINUS ONE OLIVE
A remarkable thing about humanity is that in the span of a couple of hundred years, we have taken steps expanding our habitat which evolution alone would have taken millions. We now spend time deep underwater like the best of fish, or fly across the ocean with the ease of an albatross. What we don’t have, however, is energy-saving superpowers, and we’re a hungry bunch, so we have needed to figure out not only how to breathe ten kilometres up in the air, but also how to eat there. The first aeroplane meal was served on a flight from London to Paris on October 11, 1919: a pre-packaged lunch kit sold for 3 shillings. Not much later, full-blown kitchens were built into planes, and steaks were fried up à la minute. The fact that flying was a luxury for the select few soon reflected in the on-flight menus: caviar, truffles and lobsters were served on fine porcelain and stiff white tablecloths. But nothing gold can stay. With the democratisation of aviation, beginning in the nineteen-seventies, the more familiar plastic-clad, overcooked, barely identifiable meal began to take hold. Flying, by then, had become such a huge industry that the removal of a single olive from first-class salads saved American Airlines 40.000 dollars in 1987. Cutting costs is important, but good food can also make consumers choose one airline over another — so, today, the meals are sometimes selected by master chefs, and always follow certain trends that mimic life on earth. Right now, charcuterie is all the rage, and if you’re lucky, your board might even include an olive.
FROM SOUP TO SEXY: POP! FOOD!
When Oscar Wilde wrote that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life”, he turned the age-old idea of mimesis — art as a representation of life — upside down. The world view of Pop in turn brought nuance to Wilde’s assertion: The art takes on everyday life and charges it with aesthetic value, only to funnel it right back into the life it came from. This is exactly what happened when Andy Warhol hung up thirty-two painted soup cans in a gallery in 1962. From then on out, the pressed-for-time consumer buying a can of Campbell’s condensed soup wasn’t just grabbing a quick meal, but also a piece of pop. Along with that particular brand of soup comes, to this day, the distinction of knowledge and good taste: A Campbell’s soup can is charged with meaning bigger than the sum of its everyday values. It doesn’t have to take an Andy Warhol or Roy Liechtenstein, however, to add this value to the banal artefacts of everyday life in an industrial society. To view the world through pop glasses is something most people do to an extent, and it applies to a lot of food we eat too. The way we cut an apple might be something we picked up from an old movie, and while exactly no one might notice that, we revel in the knowledge ourselves; eating ramen will never be the same after having seen Tampopo. Pop is an appeal to charge our industrialised surroundings with aesthetic meaningfulness, and thus make our lives a little more beautiful.
PRANK YOUR WAY UP TO THE TOP: URKER VISTAART
New traditions are born every day, and, in the Netherlands, so is land. When the province of Flevoland was reclaimed from the meres in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, it swallowed up the small island of Urk, known for its fisheries and strong Christian beliefs. Half a century later, a couple of teenagers were messing around on the internet, creating nonsensical Wikipedia articles. They invented the ‘traditional Urk fish pie’, made with dried mackerel, sauerkraut and cured pork sausage. Despite the lethal amount of salt this dish would contain, the recipe was picked up to represent the province of Flevoland for a special twelve-province-season of the Dutch adaptation of Top Chef, a reality cooking competition. When the pranksters found out, they could not hide their pride. After they gave an anonymous interview to Vice, the host and creator of the Dutch Top Chef was asked about the ordeal. When researching regional dishes of the now thirty-something-year-old province of Flevoland, he said, the Urk fish pie was the only dish he found. To make it palatable, the sausage was omitted, the sauerkraut turned into a kind of slaw to go alongside, spinach and lobster were added. Because this was the first actual recipe for an Urk fish pie, we shall consider it The Original.
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Text and collages: Yannic Moeken
Copy editing: Charlotte Faltas
Animation: Junshen Wu
