The Humble Beginnings of Today's Culinary Delicacies

[Celerity]

Many of our most revered dishes were perfected by those in need, then co-opted by the affluent. Is that populism at play, or just the abuse of power?

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/26/t-magazine/humble-foods-poverty.html


Conway Pearl oysters and Maine lobster — two types of seafood that were once so plentiful they were undesirable, which have since skyrocketed in cost as they’ve become rarefied delicacies.

IN THE NEWLY moneyed Beijing of the early 1990s, a curious type of restaurant started to appear. Limousines idled in the street while, inside, diners hunched on logs or camp-style chairs strung with rope and feasted on the likes of crackly locusts, ants boiled into soup, damp weeds and wotou (a steamed bread of coarse cornmeal) — a subsistence menu that evoked the scant rations served at rural work-unit canteens during the Cultural Revolution, less than 20 years before.

A number of patrons were former zhiqing, among the more than 16 million urban and educated young people who, between 1956 and the official termination of the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside movement in 1981, were forcibly resettled in undeveloped areas and assigned hard farm labor to purge them of bourgeois thinking. (China’s current leader, President Xi Jinping, was himself sent to work in the northern province of Shaanxi at age 15 after his father, a party official and revolutionary hero, fell from grace and was imprisoned; he spent seven years in Shaanxi, living in caves, building dams and cleaning out latrines.) Why would they wish to relive their difficult pasts — and pay a premium for the pleasure? For pleasure is what these restaurants promised: not a sober history lesson but feel-good theme park nostalgia, recreating in denatured form a time of atrocities when, historians estimate, between 500,000 and eight million people died because of political upheaval, and tens of millions more were subject to persecution.

As the anthropologist Jennifer Hubbert argues in her 2005 essay “Revolution Is a Dinner Party: Cultural Revolution Restaurants in Contemporary China,” such spaces memorialized the zhiqing era, with dining rooms decked out in farm tools and attended by waitstaff wearing the army green uniforms of the feared Red Guard, but also exoticized it and turned it into a kind of perverse luxury commodity, “linking leisure to dispossession.” These restaurants, with names like Remembering Bitterness (from yiku sitian, a political campaign of the 1960s and 1970s in which citizens testified to past miseries to underscore the sweetness of life under communism), were private enterprises, after all, implicitly committed to capitalism, in repudiation of the Maoist ideology celebrated by their décor. And the people who could afford to eat at such places — where a meal might cost 10 times the average working-class lunch, as Rone Tempest reported in The Los Angeles Times in 1993 — were far removed from their onetime suffering on the black-earth plains of Heilongjiang, China’s most northeastern province, or the steppes of Inner Mongolia.


Littleneck clams alongside a can of Spam, both workaday regional ingredients that have, of late, increasingly appeared on sophisticated restaurant menus throughout the United States.

But it was precisely this distance, in space, time and above all class (even in a supposedly classless society), that made the food — once the barest minimum, eaten and endured only in order to survive — suddenly palatable. Because that distance meant it was no longer a necessity but a choice. The diners were eating out of a peculiar calculus of desire that had little to do with what the ingredients on their plates actually tasted like or how much nourishment they offered. They were displaying their power, to eat as much as they wanted, to crowd the table with plates, then leave them unfinished; to defy the austerity of old; to dare to waste.

snip


A metal dish containing coq au vin, a traditional peasant preparation in France that’s now celebrated for the labor and skill required to make it — and, too, the price it might command.

[smirkymonkey]

1. I love the shellfish and the coq au vin, but nobody will ever sell me

on Spam. That stuff is just disgusting. Any kind of meat in a can repulses me.

We had delicious littlenecks as an appetizers at T-giving. My BIL got about 200 of them and cooked them in white wine, garlic, butter, parsley and a few other herbs. They were so addicting!

[Wolf Frankula]

2. Spam goes with eggs and rice.

It's for breakfast. Ask Hawaiians.

Wolf

[smirkymonkey]

3. No sale.