In praise of ugly food

Let's start with chicken and dumplings.

Some foods are closer to what I imagined that the heavenly cafe rations taste mercifully like the perfectly executed chicken and dumplings. Then again, maybe no other food looks so much, well, regurgitatedwill. So a recent Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium, Mississippi, Oxford, when world-famous chef Sean Brock served an item that was cooked with my own mother-to-a few dining rooms.

During the event, we all sent hundreds of pictures of each course to our Instagram accounts. The golden pan were cornflake, the glittering bowl of butter beans and the technicolor-green pickles were objectively kind. But it seemed that the chicken and the dumplings were the whiz kid who couldn't find a date. And as the people waved, they lowered their cameras without jumping a shot, I found myself upright nervous. I mean, it was a rare privilege: a list of a list and a woman who taught her how to cook and placed home food on a pedestal in front of one of the biggest names of the food world. And we flooded because he was home? Screw it in, I thought. This is a sincere food, and this must be honest. I set my phone, clicked and gave up. The inscription: “Some foods are not pretty and you don't have to be.”

As a food writer, I found myself an annoyed and a little mysterious that the social media value of breakfast, lunch and dinner is almost as important as their gustative attribute. While the nose is never lying – and the taste buds, the eyes, the damn time.

I was thinking about ugly food and usually ugly things, now a terrible time. I still remember that I used my post as a high school yearbook editor to make sure that the Wallflower kids were represented as well as our class high poppies. Of course, they weren't the most beautiful of the knot, but I felt some solidarity with them. I knew we had a special value for our own. Like a girl who thought I would never measure it nice enough (mainly because so many people told me), I always identified the ugly and the ignored teddy bear, with the wonderful eyes, the Holey economical store dress. I understood these things. I celebrated them.

Foods that were most satisfied were objectively ugly: stews, graves, gumbos, curry, goulashes, mashes, braises and sauce, which were cooked long and low until they fall and thicken. I may have known that these foods, like every ugly duckling in the world, had to work harder to become due. It takes time and effort to transfer flour and fat to the cocoa-dark roux, a rough muscle sophisticated brother, and raw, hard leaves and top into sweet, delicious greens. Time seems to do foods like heaven and look like hell.

It is a good reminder that aesthetics is a bad predictor of goodness; That there are other qualities that need to be taken into account – at least for me, smell. For example, when I introduced me with a muddy bowl of beef stew, I have to sweep my nose and breathe like the Hawkeye Pierce on the powdered eggs in the messy tent m*a*s*h. He was probably a preventive for him. For me, this is the teasing of the imminent joy. But before I make my first bite, I love to take a photo of it and send it to Instagram or Facebook, I chronic my food as my Dorky classmates in high school.

I know it may seem crazy using a visual medium to seize the way you eat, but until the Smatstagram and Snaptaste Technology appear, this is one of the best ways to celebrate the ignored attention while documenting the not so much camera-ready collookquial chow for the next generations. Unless, of course, we do not want to think that we are a civilization that is entirely green smoothies, avocado toasts and bakery goods, which are tied with a red and white baker along with the mini Milk bottles. Such a Twee -formation of our culinary culture would be a tragic misconception of food that America best does. I am afraid that Instagram, blogs and bright magicians are constantly colliding with my favorite foods from collective menus for the benefit of the sugar. I am frightened that the less kind and monumentally delicious ducklings are lost for the ages that are shaded by nicer foods in this new era of visual gloves. If they are not well documented, Pinterested or published, they may not be worth it.

When did we start losing exactly on this slippery slope? I can't help, just show one or two fingers to Martha Stewart. Since the 1980s, he was the one who helped home chefs, instead of the Bailiwick of restaurant chefs, hosts and civilians, Cash, Cash to burn personal kitchen staff. In the arsenal, with beautifully packed features and photographic technology (not to mention a food -style team who had to suffer the weakening pinch cramps), he was the driving force for the Physical Physical Skills of Food. And though I never found myself under my swing (mostly from self-preservation and long time, personal brocure), I saw some of my favorite people-the common people who are deeply interested-almost tears because they are perfectly delicious because they are perfectly delicious choux paste He didn't sit up as little as Martha.

However, Martha was not the first to challenge us at such an impossible high standard. A paw through a collection of vintage magazines and home entertainment books –The art of serving food more attractive (1951) and The perfect host: Husband's guide to home fun (1975) Especially the importance of pets – the importance of polished silver service and a wide range of mold groups, from which they are used to install aspic, meat rings and disturbing desserts. (One chapter of the former contains detailed instructions for building the salad skirt for “Lady China Figure”, while the other suggests that they make a clown clown from spicy peaches, rubber tract and cream cheese!) Then these books are again intended for the entertainment company. THE Martha Stewart Living However, in 1990, the magazine was promoted to such aesthetics as it needs to be incorporated into a daily lifestyle that allows, even adherence, for time and energy to optics on a daily basis.

Until the age of bloggers with DSLR cameras, we had no mortality on the hook to make our food look as good as Martha and its predecessors. But he was still shocked when a commentators at my Instagram account took time out of his day to tell me how much my dad goulash and my mother-in-law chicken and dumplings were to be. He was as much as I remember, not on the guest list. I'm not the only one who kept the task. Even Marta was lifted with his own petard after taking pictures of the food (restaurants, not from his own kitchen, but more …), which the commentators resembled to all kinds of physical secretion (“skewer”, “poo,” more “cat vomiting!).

Yes, Martha's pictures were ill, blurred and strange. Yes, the error was clearly the photographer. But behind the big, steaming pile of Schadenfreude condemned the food. And it was upset. Martha was partly responsible for leading food and photography to an almost absurd level. And he was sure to contradict what he taught us to take some very terribly illuminated and non -targeted photos. But is the French onion soup supposedly allegedly very nice? Isn't it the task of the chicken liver to be good? Do you really need to cross the round version of Instagram? Any food, regardless of being unattractive, should strive for food porn levels? (And what is the food porn, anyway? Have you ever found your grandfather's food porn, which was woke up behind the scandalous toaster and kidney beans in the basement workshop? When you grew up, your mother from the pantry with a puffy sour pan, some Demerara sugar and a bishop?

So warn that next time someone gets out in the presence of “eyes”, I seriously consider testing this theory by turning biscuits to their tears and at room temperature (I'm not a monster) cream until their faces are smooth from the cheekbones.

I don't know your life. I hope to be great and delicious and satisfy all your senses. I just know that when I'm hungry, my vision is the last thing to feed. And while I continue to document my favorite foods with one point and one click, no need for perfect recording, no mandate to try to make it nice. If I share a photo of a bowl of soup or a whitewash vegetable, I share it because there is something more than meeting your eyes. Unsurposed beauty. If you see a nasty duck, look closer; Imagine what it smells and how it tastes. Behold, here you can only see a swan.

December 2015