When it comes to the culinary arts, I can put up with just about anything. I can tolerate ‘jus’ even though my heart longs to leap out through my chest and scream ‘pretentious!’. I can even put up with a wanton use of the term ‘reduction’. Heavens above, I can even turn a blind eye to things that have been ‘caramelized’ beyond recognition. When it comes to food, I can endure all sorts of chicanery. Anything, that is, except a dish that has been ‘deconstructed’.
When it comes to the culinary arts, I can put up with just about anything. I can tolerate ‘jus’ even though my heart longs to leap out through my chest and scream ‘pretentious!’. I can even put up with a wanton use of the term ‘reduction’. Heavens above, I can even turn a blind eye to things that have been ‘caramelized’ beyond recognition. When it comes to food, I can endure all sorts of chicanery. Anything, that is, except a dish that has been ‘deconstructed’.
Let’s start with the term itself. Put simply, if something is ‘deconstructed’, it is either yet to be constructed or, worse still, it was previously constructed but some bludger has decided to pull it apart for no reason other than to be a bit of a twerp. The former smacks of laziness. The latter screams of the nastiest kind of sabotage imaginable. Why ruin a perfectly good meal by disassembling and making it appear as though it fell onto the plate from a great height?
Deconstructed food is all about giving you much loved classic meals in a form that makes them totally unrecognizable. It’s the Renee Zellweger principle, except it’s served either with chips or salad. Let me say right here that I’m absolutely against it. I realize that the principle of deconstruction is rooted in reinvention, whereby overly familiar things are re-presented for a modern age. But you can go too far.
It’s like that old saying: don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. Granted, it’s an odd turn of phrase. Truly, who would ever empty a bath and lose a child? You’d have to either be in an incredible rush or wholly indifferent. In fact, when I think about it, it’s not so much a proverb as it is an act of criminal negligence. At least it doesn’t involve animal cruelty. It’s quite shocking when you think of how many of our key proverbs involve brutality to animals in some form, especially felines. ‘There’s more than one way to skin a cat’, ‘not enough room to swing a cat’, ‘dead cat bounce’ and ‘busier than a three legged cat in a dry sandbox’ to name but a few. As for not throwing out the baby with the bathwater, despite it’s apparent endorsement of infant cruelty, the proverb is neither about babies nor bathwater. It’s about remembering what made something special in the first place.
Let me be clear. When I order a meal, I like to be able to recognize it when it turns up. It’s no good if your plate of food has to be explained to you by the waiter. In fact, when I cook something from a recipe, one of my key performance indicators is whether it looks anything like the picture in the book. This is the first sign that I am (hopefully) on the right track. But deconstructed meals take the exact opposite approach. If a deconstructed meal bears any resemblance to the original meal, it is regarded as a colossal failure. It’s the abstract expressionism of cooking. It’s food in disguise. When I order a lasagne, I don’t want a dish that looks as though it’s entered the culinary equivalent of the witness protection program. I want something I know and love. In short, I want exactly what I asked for.
We’d had a lovely dinner when I decided to order dessert. It’s an unusual step for me. Usually, I go overboard on the bread and the idea of pudding is dismissed as gluttony. But having enjoyed my meal and not wanting the evening to end, I decided I’d ask for the menu. Looking through the list, all the favourites were there – crème brulee, chocolate mousse, tiramisu. All of them fine in their own way, but not the kind of showstopper I had in mind. I wasn’t just looking for the end of a meal. I was looking for an encore. A final bow that would have me leaving the restaurant, raving about the whole night. I wanted a curtain call that would knock me clear off my feet. Then I saw it – Pavlova.
Pavlova is pretty much Australia’s national dessert. Except if you’re from New Zealand. Whilst there’s some room for improvisation, particularly in terms of which fruit you’re going to put on top (strawberries versus kiwi fruit versus mixed berries), all other aspects of the art form are pretty much settled. Or so I’d thought. Meringue, a crispy shell and maybe some cream – these are the heart and soul of any pav worth it’s salt (there’s no actual salt in the recipe, although there is vinegar). They’re what I expected. And, truth be told, I got them all. Just not in one piece.
It was as though my dessert had been run over by a large vehicle. The meringue sat in the corner as if it’d been given detention. The fruit was ganged together, hiding from the meringue. The cream had the whole dessert surrounded, smeared around the edge of the plate. But of all the indignities, it was the crust that suffered most of all. It appeared as a chewy tube, resting on the meringue like a fallen girder. I was outraged. If I want to buy something I have to assemble myself, I’ll go to IKEA. I’m all for reinvention, but you shouldn’t destroy the classics. I don’t want the constituent parts of my meal looking as if they’ve just had a falling out and aren’t presently speaking to each other. When I asked for waiter for the instructions, he took my little fork, replacing it with an Allen key and a diagram. Suddenly, I’d lost my appetite. I’m used to BYO meals, but DYI is simply too much.