Appearance Matters

[poliphilo]

I cooked pork chops, mushrooms, applesauce , mashed potato.  Ailz thought it was nice, so it wasn't entirely a mistake, but it looked quite awful- like an undifferentiated greyish gloop,  like porridge.  I ate it (I'm almost religious these days about not wasting food) but I didn't enjoy eating it- even though it tasted fine.  I don't normally think about the way food looks, but obviously I should.  A small pile of bright green peas would have made all the difference.

Comments

[oakmouse]

Put peas with the mushrooms, and Bob's your uncle. *g*

120 years ago, would-be graduates of Fanny Farmer's Boston Coooking School had to prepare an entirely white meal for their final exam. Chicken or fish, white starches, white sauces, any vegetables had to be completely bathed in white sauce (the usual choice was apparently either mashed parsnip or boiled-to-death cabbage or creamed onions), the dessert had to be white. When I read about that in a history of cooking, I thought, "Who would want to eat an all-white meal?!?!" It was, would you believe it, supposed to be elegant and upper-class (n a school that catered to working class girls).

:-p

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Well I never.

Looked at another way an all white meal might be considered quite decadent- against nature, even.

It's amazing what people will do to be thought chic.

[oakmouse]

The cookbook for her school is full of things like a recipe to make your middle class husband think that cabbage is good instead of thinking cabbage is a stinky lower-class vegetable that should never enter a respectable household. (You boil it for an absolutely ungodly amount of time, chop it fine, and serve it smothered in white sauce.)

Now I have an image in my mind of Oscar Wilde, Algernon Swinburne, and their ilk sitting down to an all-white dinner and feeling proud of themselves for their wicked decadence. *g*

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Now that's the very last thing you want to do with cabbage.

I don't eat cabbage much- probably because it reminds me of my childhood- and not in a good way, but whenever I do I'm surprised by just how tasty it can be.

[oakmouse]

I love cabbage --- but not boiled! I usually eat it raw as coleslaw, or pickled as sauerkraut, or stirfried/pan-fried. Generally I only eat boiled cabbage in the form of barefit broo.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I used to hate coleslaw, but I've come round to it in my old age.

[oakmouse]

Coleslaw is a food group as far as I'm concerned. *g* But then I grew up in a family where it was made in many different ways, and was a major source of fresh greenstuff in the winter, so I've pretty much always loved it.