The marketing of food - or "would you really eat that?&

I like to enjoy some nice fruit with some simple, wheaty cereal in a bowl of milk every morning. The ideal for me is blueberries with shredded wheat, but I also enjoy bananas, peaches, raspberries and strawberries. If I feel particularly indulgent, or the berries are too tart, I add brown sugar. This is, for me, an almost perfect meal.

A while back, I had some blueberries, but not enough. So I opened a container of raspberries and threw some of them in. The result was less satisfying as the two tastes muddied everything up. This set me to thinking.

Baker's Square makes a pie they call a Razzleberry. It is a mixture of blueberries, raspberries, and one or two other berries, probably blackberries. I have tried it a few times, because I like Berry pies quite a bit, too. It sounded good to me, but for the same reasons I did not enjoy my mixed breakfast as much as a single fruit, it has not pleased me as much as a plain raspberry, blueberry or blackberry pie would. This did not crystalllize for me until that morning.

Some devious marketer set about desiging that pie, and describing it so people would be pulled in. It sounds so special; if blueberry pie is good and raspberry pie is good, this must be three times better, or at least that seems to be the implication. And it worked on me, though I pride myself on being an independent thinker and sophisticated consumer.

This "combine as many good things as you can into one dish and it must be great" theory is spreading, and not just in the world of fusion travesties. What horrors have you encountered, or disappointments when you were pulled in by the marketers' devious creativity?

Dickson,

An almost perfect dessert that uses mixed berries is the English summer pudding. They have become popular of late, so you should be able to google and get a decent recipe. I am still using a recipe from my mother's old copy of Elizabeth David's Summer Cooking, which doesn't much specify.

As sweet or as tart as you like, I prefer to make it with Pepperidge Farm sandwich bread.

It is a lovely thing. Serve with a mexican crema, plain or whipped cream, or ice cream, to your preference.

While you can't taste the individual berries, it is a case where the whole is somehow more than the sum of its parts.

shredded wheat, blueberries and brown sugar - that's MY perfect breakfast meal too!

there was this marketing ploy i fell prey to that combined pancakes, sausage and eggs, the McGriddle. i bought, i ate, i left longing for my shredded wheat...

leesh

The signature cake at A Taste of Heaven in Andersonville is the Jeanine cake, so named for a relative of the owner, a yellow cake with a combination whipped cream/buttercream frosting, and blueberries, raspberries, and strawberries. He generally uses frozen (which stand up better to the treatment they're given, he said), and distributes them on different layers to some extent. It is one of my favorite things to eat in Chicago and thus I recommend it.

This may be a tad off point (but, so far as I can see, so are all the other replies so far - 2 cheers for non-laser focus!) but:

I am invariably pulled in by (and invariably regret) menu descriptions that seem to promise that instead of making a choice, I can actually have it all in one dish. It's my own fault and I never learn.

(I also have a tendency, now somewhat tamed, to do the same thing as a cook. I.e. use all my favorite seasonings all the time, rather than the pure expression of a single flavor. One of my college roommates -- the Italian from New Jersey who made the most amazing meat lasagne, not with ground meat in the sauce, but with about 1 billion tiny individual meatballs carefully layered-- was eating something I had made for dinner and said, gently, "you know, if you use all the crayons in the box, you just get brown.")

In pastas, say, I always like wine in a sauce, also mushrooms, and garlic is great, and I love rosemary, can't resist capers, and sun-dried tomatoes are yummy (the global decline in yumminess of SDTs is a whole other topic), so why not get the dish that has them all in there? Why? Because it's an awful, bland mess with no distinctive flavor, that's why. But I never seem to learn.

Of course, there are great combinations - stews of all kinds where flavors marry and breed. But often, as in the ghastly-sounding "razzleberry" it's just a way of disguising the lack of quality of any single ingredient.

And yet, to come full circle to the OP: in cereals, I don't mind random combos. I'll pour out the end of a box of corn flakes, and if the bowl isn't full, I'll just top it off with some Chex. I'll throw some granola over some Grape Nuts for a bit of sweetness and texture contrast. Almost any dried cereal combo seems to work OK for me.

"Chacun a son gout-lessness."

If thisisn't some new barrier crossed in the creation of fake foods, what is?

Combinations and Overkill

mrbarolo wrote:(I also have a tendency, now somewhat tamed, to do the same thing as a cook. I.e. use all my favorite seasonings all the time, rather than the pure expression of a single flavor. One of my college roommates -- the Italian from New Jersey who made the most amazing meat lasagne, not with ground meat in the sauce, but with about 1 billion tiny individual meatballs carefully layered-- was eating something I had made for dinner and said, gently, "you know, if you use all the crayons in the box, you just get brown.")

Mrb:

I know it wasn't me, cause I didn't have any roommates in college (lots of luck and a few strings pulled for me by the the soccer coach when I was a freshman)... But it could have been! The little meatballs are a pain to make but the finished dish tastes and feels and looks infinitely better. Loose ground meat in lasagne is looked upon in some circles as the height of barbarism and culinary slovenliness; I myself would never resort to such hyberbole but find the mini-meatballs (piccoli polpettini) superior (please pardon the alliteration). But that's a digression from the topic.

dicksond wrote:This "combine as many good things as you can into one dish and it must be great" theory is spreading, and not just in the world of fusion travesties. What horrors have you encountered, or disappointments when you were pulled in by the marketers' devious creativity?

It may be just that I notice this trend more in the realm of Italian food than in other cuisines (or approximations thereof) but the kitchen-sink approach is both very prevalent in American takes on Italian food and also very much antithetical to the way Italians generally use their palette of flavours. As Mrbarolo indicates, the busy-is-better idea rears its Medusa-like head in pasta sauces very often and now that the pasta course as main course has become a common feature in all Italian restaurants here, the problem seems to have gone a step further, with the exuberant chef trying to get both protein and vegetables and various seasonings all mixed in with those overworked angel hair and farfalle.

One manner of marketed overkill that has become really widespread in recent years is the proliferation of things with quattro formaggi: four cheese sauce, four cheese ravioli etc. Such combinations can be very good but as always, if the ingredients are all of really high quality, simplicity is still hard to beat. The more-ingredients-is better-approach has really taken off in designer ravioli and related stuffed pastas (and I've tried a few of them), as well as in inventive versions of lasagne. In the end, my favourite stuffed pasta is a raviolo filled with ricotta, parsley and possibly -- but certainly not necessarily -- one further seasoning used with restraint. Many, more complex fillings are both traditional and delicious but the more complex the filling, the more simple and less assertive the dressing should be.

Here is a genuinely overblown pasta dish, as described in the menu of a higher end Italianish chain, which is a pure expression of the marketer's more-is-better approach, to which dicksond has called attention:

[i]"Four Cheese Ravioli. 6.95. Homemade ravioli stuffed with ricotta, parmesan, mozzarella, and provolone cheeses; topped with pesto alfredo sauce & finished with marinara. Available as an entrée."

Here the overkill involves the stuffing (how can one taste anything in that stuffing alongside the provolone?) and the saucing: pesto + alfredo + marinara?!?!? The sauce-combination here is really over the top.

Antonius

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Here are some further comments on specific items that are commonly made in too baroque a fashion to my (current) tastes:

- pizza: here, to my mind, several problems come up: not just too many ingredients but imbalance amongst the ingredients, as well as problems with basic elements (most especially the crust), but some of those issues fall outside the topic at hand. I stand by the belief that pizza is first and foremost bread which should be soberly dressed. The multiple toppings and extra cheese, culminating in the aptly named 'garbage' pizza, is a monstrosity (though it admittedly has a place in the universe, e.g., for college students struck by hunger late at night after a long session of killing brain-cells).

- subs: a sub is a sub and diversity of meats and cheeses and condiments and garnishes is part of what the thing is. I can enjoy a busy but well constructed sub. But in some cases, I think the combinations don't work so well and some ingredients are more or less wasted in such a busy context. My favourite "sub" in the world involves just three things beyond high quality bread: fresh mozzarella, prosciutto di parma, and black pepper (maybe it's really not a sub but just a sandwich). Luckily, the combinations in subs are wholly up to the consumer and so, one has no one to blame but oneself if one overdoes it and overdoes it badly.

- tacos: the garnishing of tacos is to a degree an open issue to be addressed by the individual fresser. But the tendency in restaurants is increasingly to put a bit of everything or at least a lot of different things on them. Cheese, guacamole, various vegetables, multiple salsas, sour cream... Some tacos of that sort are swell (e.g., at Nuevo Leon, the tacos de Sabinas are relatively busy but really good), but then the really simple combinations of meat and, say, just a little raw onion and a squirt of lime juice, are so focussed and refreshing (and more neatly consumed).

- burgers: I went through a phase in life when I got into the routine of ordering 'pub' burgers with multiple toppings and garnishes. They can be good but no longer interest me. I rarely eat burgers anymore and so now I really enjoy a good one that's presented simply. Not too long ago I had a big old pub-burger at Mighty-Nice-Grill (circumstances beyond my control led to this choice of restaurant) with nothing on it but a wee amount of steak sauce, lettuce and tomato. The flavour of the meat could really come through and it was a very nice meal.

Antonius wrote:As Mrbarolo indicates, the busy-is-better idea rears its Medusa-like head in pasta sauces very often and now that the pasta course as main course has become a common feature in all Italian restaurants here, the problem seems to have gone a step further, with the exuberant chef trying to get both protein and vegetables and various seasonings all mixed in with those overworked angel hair and farfalle.

I mourn the death of pasta.

Pasta used to be prepared and cooked al dente for just the right paring of homemade sauce, and lift the flavors from the sauce and give them life. Orechiette, Bucatini, where have you gone? Now they're made up in cute bow ties and chilled, never to touch or illuminate a sauce, only to be thrown next to sliced grilled chicken breast, iceberg lettuce, carrots, and broccoli, and showered with a dressing, never to be heard from again.

I hadn't thought about the pasta-as-entree contribution to this problem. Of course if you're trying to make the pasta dish carry the load of the entire meal, you will end up stuffing too much into it. (I suppose the rapture will come when they finally add tiramisu to a pasta dish.)

I had thought that the problem was also largely driven by our societal glomming onto successive "hot" ingredients - and restaurants (particularly mid-level chains) simply dumping each new trendy thing onto their menu: so first come the sun-dried toms., then portabello mushrooms, then balsamic in the sauce (along with the wine that was already there), and of course a boat-load "roasted' garlic, etc. All swimming around confusing each other.

I still remember my first pasta dish in Italy: some tomato, some basil, some noodles. There seemed to be only a couple of tablespoons of sauce skimpily alone in the center of the dish of noodles. I was nonplussed, but I tossed the noodles a bit, and dug in. Revelation. Bright tomato-y wonderfulness with every bite, though barely enough visible to change the hue of the dish.

P.S. On the barbarity of ground meat in lasagne; it occurs to me to wonder about bolognese. Would not that involve loose meat among the lasagne layers, and is not bolognese considered the culinary height of civilization? Just occured to me as I thought about all those little meatballs.

mrbarolo wrote:I still remember my first pasta dish in Italy: some tomato, some basil, some noodles. There seemed to be only a couple of tablespoons of sauce skimpily alone in the center of the dish of noodles. I was nonplussed, but I tossed the noodles a bit, and dug in. Revelation. Bright tomato-y wonderfulness with every bite, though barely enough visible to change the hue of the dish.

And the noodles themselves had real flavour and good texture, no? I hate to complain so much about certain American food habits but the lesser quality of basic wheat-products (bread, pizza dough, pasta) is tolerated and (sort of) 'compensated' for by piling on secondary items. It all seems backwards to me.

P.S. On the barbarity of ground meat in lasagne; it occurs to me to wonder about bolognese. Would not that involve loose meat among the lasagne layers, and is not bolognese considered the culinary height of civilization? Just occured to me as I thought about all those little meatballs.

There was recently a thread on the Shopping-and-Cooking board, initiated by Messycook, called Why Can't I Make Ragù? in which Bolognese was discussed at length. I like Bolognese and when it's done really well (and simply!!!) it's spectacular. But I -- and I would bet your college roommate too -- grew up with Southern Italian and especially Neapolitan cooking. Loose ground meat is not used much if at all in Neapolitan sauces or the traditional raù and, unless one goes to the considerable lengths that Bolognese ragù involves, loose ground meat tends to tighten and give a grainy texture to the dish. The little meatballs in lasagne also allow for all the advantages that meatballs always bring to chopped meat, i.e., lightening/stretching with bread, nicely balanced flavouring.

I would add that lasagne or tagliatelle with ragù alla Bolognese and its gently cooked ground meat(s) are wonderful and Neapolitan style lasagne with those pain-in-the-ass-to-make little meatballs is a very different beast and, to my mind, no less wonderful. I am less keen on an otherwise Neapolitan-style treatment of lasagne in which loose ground meat is used. That strikes me as a version that falls short of what it should be, while the loose ground meat in ragù alla Bolognese is what it's supposed to be. But of course, my perception is framed by my experience.