Convenience food

My NYC friend Leslie just came for a visit here in Paris. It was the first time someone has come to see me here and it was lots of fun. I had a chance to show her my life here in Paris and find out what is happening back in NYC. As I thought would happen, I am beginning to have different opinions and feelings about living here as opposed to NYC. This was part of the reason I wanted to start this blog so I could capture how I feel at this very specific moment. 

One thing absolutely stood out for me is how I feel about food. I am very much a "foodie" and I feel very strongly about what we eat and what is considered good. When I have had bad food in a restaurant or just out of the house, I usually have to do something about it, which usually entails remaking the dish the way it is supposed to be. I remember once having followed someone's recommendation on a restaurant's banana cream pie. "It is marvellous" someone told me, so, of course I had to have it. It was probably the worst thing I have every had. Not only was there not one banana, but the "crust" was a thin layer of cake. The "banana" layer was artificially flavored "creme" (and I use the commercial word here instead of "cream" since that substance was not found in nature) and then more "creme" on top. My ex and I went home the next day and created a banana cream pie from scratch: real crust, bananas, vanilla pudding and whipped cream. It got the horribleness of the other one out of my mind. Of course six months later, I fell for the same situation with someone else's recommendation of a banana cream pie.

In my wanderings with Leslie around Paris, we stopped in at a random cafe for some hot chocolate and I was struck by how easy this was. In NYC, the quality of a "hot chocolate" varies tremendously. It can be a delicious experience to be savoured, or it can be a packet of Swiss Miss instant cocoa and some hot water. Here it was a sumptuous drink, arriving as a coffee would, with sugar on the side. It is intensely chocolate and slightly thick. In restaurants (and especially diners) in the US you need to give them the third degree before even thinking of ordering it. Is it made with milk? What kind of chocolate do you use? Powder? Marshmallows? And even then, the person you ask could not know and just give you the answer you wanted, so you still may get something unpalatable. Yes, the one here in Paris was not cheap (I think it ended up being 6 euros each, about $7.50) but well worth it. True, you can get a cheaper hot cocoa in the states, but it is never even close to what is the "normal" hot chocolate in any bistro or cafe in Paris.

This experience reminded me of how often convenience trumps taste in the US. We have companies advertising how something is "convenient" before talking about the taste. Instant cocoa, instant pudding, instant coffee: how many of us think these things taste good? It is somehow a placeholder for something delicious instead of the actual item. And these placeholders have, in some instances, taken the place of the actual item in our minds. How many people have had a well-made piece of pie or remember what that is like? Getting a slice of pie from the diner or getting a pre-packaged pie from the grocery store is what people think of when they think of pie, whereas a real pie, from scratch is an amazing thing. Does anyone remember what homemade pie tastes like? Madison Avenue has convinced the country that baking is hard, so most people have abandoned it. I think we are very worse off for it. One example is the cake mix. In the 1950's Madison Avenue convinced America that it was so much more "convenient" with a mix, but what is in a "cake mix"? Just some dry ingredients. Cakes are so easy. You measure the dry ingredients in one bowl, the wet in another, combine. Baking is the same for both the mix and the one you make from scratch. The taste cannot compare. Try making a vanilla cake from a box and one from scratch and taste them side by side. The package cakes have a very specific aftertaste that is really terrible, once you know.

If you don't bake or cook and want to try your hand at it, I highly recommend The New Best Recipe (this is a link), by the team that does the America's Test Kitchen. It is pretty cheap ($21.00) and tells you why the recipe works and what they tried to make it better.