this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2024
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Man, people miss out on so much good eating because of preconceptions and gatekeeping.
Berries go with almost anything. And yeah, technically strawberries aren't berries. But the point is that pretty much every berry is a blend of acidic tartness, sweetness, and complex flavors. There's no world in which berries make something bad.
Any fruit has the potential to go with any standard food. Meats, pastas, breads, even veggies. It's a matter of balancing the specific fruit with the other ingredients.
That's why pineapple on pizza works. Tangy, sweet, and with that hard to describe tropical fruitiness. It brings out the sweetness of a good tomato sauce while cutting through the fattiness of toppings and any oils.
Pork chops and applesauce baby, it's a classic for reason. Pork stuffed with apples; and other things, orange chicken or duck, blackberry glazed venison roast (seriously, you want to try it), apricot beef (or lamb), curried goat with prunes (or apricot, or peaches even), roasted brussels sprouts with apples and cranberries.
It's all about the balancing with other things.
The Polish strawberry pasta? It's balanced out with sour cream that mutes the sweetness some, and works as a bridge with the pasta.
I know I'm talking into a void here, what with this being a meme, but I'm always so amazed that people will dismiss a food combination without trying it, or sometimes without even trying to imagine the possibilities.
I blame Alton Brown.
Hear me out.
Alton Brown is undoubtedly a legendary figure and he did a lot of good for the modern state of culinary entertainment. His scientific, experimental approach was authoritative. He came up with what was scientifically the best way to do a thing, demonstrated why, and did it in a very entertaining way.
But with that, came scores of fans who saw "this is the best way to do a thing" and interpreted that as "this is the only way to do a thing, fuck you you're doing it wrong."
Alton wasn't doing what other TV chefs were doing. Emeril and Julia presented really good recipes, they'd add some flare and say hey, this is how we do it around here. Bourdain explored the world and showed off a lot of great ways to cook. He was reluctant to criticize and clearly just loved the food.
But Alton Brown, for all the good he did, opened up authority to fans who didn't know shit about fuck. He spoke with confidence about how his method was the right method.
Right about the time the Internet was coming in to it's own and arguing about nonsense online became a hobby a person could have.
Now, there's a culture of being right about cooking online. People who log in every day just to bitch about how somebody else cooked something.
Obviously it's not exclusively Alton's fault, and Alton is as open to new and interesting ways to cook things as Bourdain was, a fact you'll discover if he ever happens to visit your home town and read what he says about the food there on his Facebook page.
But there is a through line there, and it starts at Good Eats.
I don't know if I agree with that. I think Alton was vastly more New Guard, Question Tradition than many of the other notable celebrity chefs and cooks during his come up. If you want to talk about people enforcing tradition, let's take a look at Giada DeLaurentis, or hell even Rachel Ray whenever it comes to anything with Sicilian origin.
I think the Old Guard mentality is vastly more rigid about these sort of traditions and giving people a critical understanding of the processes behind cooking doesn't, at least to me, imply any kind of singular authoritarian approach to cuisine.
edit: typos and cleaning up for clarity
Also Brown definitely wouldn't have been the first to enforce faux tradition.
That shit has existed forever and the more meaningless, the more militant.
Ketchup on hotdogs. Folded pizza. Seafood with red wine.
All said with more authority yet far less evidence than anything Alton Brown ever said.