Why Everything Must Taste of Bacon, Cheese or Cake. Even Christmas Dinner…
Yup, not even Christmas dinner can escape the ravages of modern tastes as we seek stronger flavours, blander textures and even more sugar.
Christmas used to be an actual feast. This relative extravagance and gluttony only came around once a year so people quite rightly got excited about it.
Now, many of us are fortunate enough to have access to energy-dense food whenever we want it so when Christmas comes around we feel obliged to elevate our everyday “treats” to a whole new level of “treatiness” with additional sugar and fat.
Our palettes have also been blunted by the strong flavours that industrial food processing exposes them to. The excessive use of salt and sugar in particular means that a succulent Roast Turkey is rendered tasteless and vegetables are only contemplated if they have been transformed into something that no longer tastes like a vegetable.
Texture also plays its part as industrial food reinforces the appeal of foods that are either smooth or crunchy. Even the idea of Christmas Pudding, Christmas Cake or Mince Pies seems to make many people gag — they’ve got “bits” in them you see.
I think it all started with the sprout haters. Granted there has been some abuse of the humble Brussel Sprout over the years but there is no excuse for overcooked sprouts today. Regardless, the sprout-haters still attract pages and pages of recipes designed to prevent sprouts from tasting like sprouts, the author of each one guaranteeing the conversion of even the most ardent sceptic. But conversion to what? By covering a sprout in bacon and cheese you are not converting anyone to a love of sprouts.
There are over 40 festive sprout recipes on the BBC Good Food site alone, including:
Roasted Sprouts with Bacon and Chestnuts
Pan-fried Sprouts with Crunchy Chorizo Crumbs
Creamed Sprouts with Bacon
Brussel Sprouts with Bacon Chestnut Butter
Buttered Sprouts with Pancetta
Roasted Sprout Gratin with Bacon Cheese Sauce
Roasted Sprouts with Bacon/Prosciutto/Pancetta
You get the idea. My grandmother would be turning in her grave. She always declared when cooking sprouts that:
“They just need to be kissed.”
She embraced a more gentle cooking method which accentuated the subtle balance of soft and crunchy, bitter and sweet that the delicate sprout can deliver. Not roasted with bacon.
Then came the Christmas Pudding haters with their Sticky Toffee Christmas Puddings and the latest one I’ve seen — Caramelised Biscuit Christmas Pudding with Caramel Sauce.
Surprisingly, it is not the presence of suet which scares people away from this traditional, festive treat but the presence of “bits”. Being neither cakey nor crunchy and being full of varying proportions of indistinguishable pieces of actual fruit appears to confuse the modern palette and arouse so much suspicion that it gets flatly rejected.
The consequence of this, like for so many things is that it gets morphed into something that more resembles a cookie or a cake.
The humble latte, for example, started life as a soothing cup of milky coffee. Now we like it to taste of caramel or gingerbread. McDonald’s has just introduced its Caramel Waffle Latte. At what point is this not even a cup of coffee? At what point do you say:
“Actually, scrap the coffee. I’m just gonna have some cake.”
I digress. The Mince Pie has suffered a similar fate. Aldi now stocks 14 varieties including their Millionaire Mince Pie which contains Chocolate, Salted Caramel and Shortbread. There’s another one in their range described as:
“6 All Butter Pastry Cases Filled With Rum Infused Mincemeat And A Salted Caramel Filling, Topped With A Caramelised Biscuit And Walnut Crumb And Finished With A Sweet Dusting…”
Source: Aldi.com
Sounds like a very thinly disguised cake to me.
A couple of other alternative Christmas desserts also caught my eye. Mince Pie Stuffed Croissants (involving not only the mutilation of some innocuous mince pie but of some unsuspecting French patisserie too) and Clementhyme Profiteroles. Poor little choux buns pumped full of thyme-scented cream and drowned in a chocolate orange sauce — the desecration of another classic in the name of Christmas. It’s barbaric really.
So, it would seem that all desserts must taste like cake and green vegetables are only edible when they are drenched in rendered pig fat.
But, not to worry, it will soon be Easter when we can look forward to a new selection of treats such as Aldi’s 11 varieties of Hot Cross Bun. What will you go for? Chilli Cheese or Salted Caramel and Belgian Chocolate?
Available in stores from December 26th. Probably.
