Food, History, Money and Math
Posted by David | Filed under article
When last we left you, I teased a new feature/series/focus for the website related to a new cookery book of almost mythic girth. A thousand-page testament to food on paper that we would not only use in exercise by simply picking up, but also something that we would be cooking from. And I’m here to tell you a little bit more about that.
The title in question is a lime-green offering by the name of Gourmet Today. And oddly enough, it arrived on my doorstep just a handful of days after its namesake magazine closed its doors. To be honest, I’m not that familiar with the reasons for the magazine’s closure, although if I had to speculate (because, seriously, what else are you expecting me to do on a food blog) I would offer that the actual word “gourmet” is at an oddball crossroads at the moment.
American cuisine has a rather young history. It’s really only been within the past few decades that we’ve emerged from our more predominant history of industrialised and processed foods long enough to cook real meals with both style and intention. And in the beginning I’m sure that such a wild idea was considered “gourmet.” Cause why else would you wrestle from scratch what a box could more easily do for you, unless you were just trying to show off and be fancy? Taking the long way around a meal was hard work! Potatoes had to be peeled and mashed instead of just adding water to flakes! You had to find, chop and administer spices instead of just sprinkling them from a tube!
So it was a slow process to bend our minds toward this new concept of making things from scratch, and in effect spitting in the face of all Henry Ford and his assembly lines had done for our progress. But we are slowly and surely catching on, and slower still realising that it’s actually better for our health to do so. “Gourmet”? Perhaps still a bit so, but now for another reason. I think we’re mostly comfortable with the idea of cooking for ourselves (as the proliferation of books, tv shows and mass-market gadgets can attest). But where once it might have been considered more work, now it’s considered more expensive.
For those of you who have just woken up from being cryogenically frozen for the past few years, the world has run short of money. Pretty much everybody is either worried about having enough, losing what they did have or going to jail for losing what others thought they had. It’s all kind of a mess, and as a result people are pinching pennies like it’s a naughty new game. So it’s no wonder that with a name like “Gourmet”, the obvious connotation to “more expensive than necessary” rears its ugly head, becoming a liability to something that, ironically, could actually save people money: cooking good – and perhaps even nice – food for themselves.
What am I trying to say? I’m not entirely sure, other than I can see how it happened, but that it’s a shame. Because as I thumb through the pages of Gourmet Today I see a lot of recipes that look surprisingly practical. The suffix of “today” seems to be the key, as most of it appears to be very approachable fare. Soups? Check. Vegetarian dishes? Yep. Cocktails, desserts, or things with chicken? Sure. I will keep looking, but so far I haven’t found a single recipe calling for elk’s blood as an ingredient, and neither have any of the instructions required gold leaf decoration. And that’s unfortunate, really, because I think if you put those two things together you’d have quite the gourmet dish.
So we’re going to be cooking through it, and so far I haven’t seen anything that scares me. Other than the sheer size of the book. After all, have I mentioned in the last few paragraphs that there are a thousand recipes? Because there are. A thousand of them. Let me see if I can break that down for you:
- If we cooked a recipe a week from this book, it would take us over nineteen years to go through.
- Let’s say we get really industrious and cook one every other day. That would still take us five and a half years.
- Alright, let’s assume a laser focus on this book and decide we’re going to cook a different thing for every meal of the day (avoiding cocktails for breakfast as much as possible, but we make no promises). That would still take us about eleven months.
That’s a lot of recipes, dear friends. We should probably stop yapping and get started.
