The chef in her kitchen is busy drizzling olive oil on healthy kale to pair with sausage that she locally sourced.
Yuk. Not the kale or the olive oil or the sausage. It’s the vocabulary that stinks.
I know our language is a living thing, that it expands and changes, assigns new meanings to words, invents new words, drops old words, and that we constantly tinker with acceptable forms of grammar.
I’m so old that I can remember the fuss raised over “Winstons taste good like a cigarette should.” The grammarians among us said not “like” but rather “as” a cigarette should. It is hopelessly old-fashioned of me, I know, but I still can’t stand split infinitives, (She had to quickly dash to the ferry), or the use of the word suspicious for a fire or person (suspicious is what we feel when we see someone doing something suspect). I can’t stand someone talking about having less deer on the island when what we want is fewer deer, or less taxes when we want less taxation.
It is how I know I am getting older. A friend of mine said, “We are shaking our wattles over this,” we older people with flabby, loose, under-chin skin; old farts complaining about the constant degeneration of this or that; in this case, me moaning about how language is going to hell.
In food writing, as in every pursuit, I suppose, there are terms meant to convey certain ideas in verbal shorthand. At present I am heartily tired of how the terms chef, drizzle, healthy, pair and sourced are used. This rant, I promise, will be my last stab at making a dent in anyone’s consciousness about them.
Chef. This word is used to describe anyone who knows a stove from a refrigerator, a pan from a bowl, and a carrot from a hamburger. “Oh, she is a fabulous chef,” someone will say about someone who can cook a delicious meal. I blame this one on TV, and maybe it even dates to early Julia Child, as the French Chef, even though Julia was all alone in the kitchen, cooking food for a family meal.
Chef, I am sure you’ve heard, means “chief,” as in the head, boss, or leader of a group. Most of us work in our kitchens alone, with no one to take orders. If someone comes in and offers to peel potatoes, I still don’t think that makes you a chef. Alas, we don’t get to be chefs. If we do the job by ourselves, we are cooks. At best, when we are in our kitchens making dinner, we are loving mothers or fathers, husbands or wives, companions, helpmeets, friends and sometimes servants, who are cooking, but we are not chefs.
As cooks, we shouldn’t drizzle anything. Most of us who live along the coast are terribly familiar with drizzle. It happens outdoors, often in winter and spring, and leaves our hair damp, and us in a bad mood, if it goes on for many days. It is done by nature, with water, that fine barely visible mist in the air that we feel on our faces, but when we hold out our hand, does not make drops.
In the kitchen we dribble. Drizzling olive oil, or chocolate sauce or balsamic vinegar is nigh a physical impossibility. In nature, a drizzle of olive oil would be a nightmare, and on a plate a mess. A dribble, on the other hand, can be kind of attractive, according to modern food styling.
A dribble puts a reasonable amount of oil or vinegar or sauce in several places at one time. You can drizzle if you want; the food writers in the magazines and newspaper can drizzle if they want. I am going to dribble.
I might dribble it on wholesome food that will make me healthy. A kale plant can be healthy when it is growing; in fact, in order for it to be wholesome, it really must be healthy. Once I pick it and cook it, it is healthful, conducive to good health. Sigh, even Merriam Webster has accepted the phrase “healthy food” to mean something good for you to eat. Oh, these degenerate times!
Don’t get me started on what makes for healthful food. There are, obviously, some foods that are not conducive to good health. That terrible whipped topping beloved of my mother, for instance, that is so stable you can leave a spoonful out on a plate out for weeks and it won’t change shape or condition. Most food is healthful consumed moderately. Moderation in all things, I say, including moderation: it is good to feast sometimes, and sometimes it is good to be hungry.
Why should I pair my kale, when I can merely add, combine or cook it with, say, onions, or sausage and pasta, or anything else that kale goes with deliciously? While grammatically correct, I find this use of pair to be so irritating, especially when the phrase is, “It pairs well with x, y, or z.” The word is used a lot for wine and food combinations and, somehow, irrationally enough, the pompous, pretentious sound of it doesn’t bother me in that context. But when we are talking about green beans, give me a break.
And don’t ask me to source them locally or anywhere else. You can source ingredients if you want. I will continue to find, locate, purchase, search for, obtain, acquire, discover, buy, or, in my more usual case, go outside and pick them right out of my own garden.
Sandra Oliver writes, but never “minces” her words, on Islesboro.