Sweet salads are back. Don’t be afraid

The nutritional criticism that is presented with a side of SNARK has amazingly long proportions, which extend beyond the Instagram world, Yelp or even newspapers. This type of criticism did not start with the appearance of food blogs or viral restaurants; It was boiling, and sometimes it ends, for hundreds of years. Take the early seventeenth century, when the humble power was unexpectedly sweet – before denying the French cuisine sugar Firmly to Candy cycle.

Enter Giacomo Castelveto: Italian Protestants found himself a negative in England, where he was only able to see him with the increasing terror while his new citizens were boiling their powers in a state of absolute chaos. In his book “Fruits, herbs and vegetables in Italy“The index of how the Italians eat their products, but not before it takes some strikes in the English power. His criticism was not mere cooking, but rather a strange contempt for the practice that seemed – well. Under it. As if the idea of ​​treating vegetables in this way was an Italian sensitivity.

As the food historian and the author Kane Albia said, Castelveto said mainly: “These English people have no idea how to make salad. Cooking vegetables! They are crazy. Just put the oil and vinegar on and throw it. You do not need to do anything. Thinking like Italian, clearly. “

Quickly forward a few decades to 1699. This is when John Evelyn published “Actoria: SALLETS speech“People are accustomed to putting sugar on their powers, but I cannot believe what it is in the authorities,” says Albala. Only the “female palate” puts sugar on the salad. This is stuck. always.”

I can only wonder what CASTELVETO and Evelyn, who are from the Patriarch of the Orthodox Authority, will achieve from the Age of the Renaissance of the Sweet Authority today – those vulgar creations, despite all the difficulties, can be sophisticated in an advanced manner as much as it is developed. Even when the chopped snacks appear and the output was released. One imagines their horror deepening when facing it.Sweet farm!“The new cooking book from the food network star and the author Molly yes Issued in March.

It is devoted to a full chapter of the sweet salads, from the salad of classic cookies to Roasted and strawberry With a lash yogurt, Pretzel Streusel and SUMAC; Black and white cookies salad. Coconut gelatin molds pomegranate. And ube fluff.

However, yes, it is not strange to criticism. In fact, you welcome it. At the forefront of the chapter, the coastal skeptics urge to get out of their high horses and look at what these dishes already do.

“Duff Goldman was my favorite skeptical,” told me yes via email. “My argument is that it is good. My second argument is that there are many socially accepted sweets that are technically the authorities of cookies that most people have already had, such as Banana Banana, Tiramisu and Eiton chaos. It is just the name that people enjoy.”

Tiramisu? Cookie salad with the best public relations.

This idea – that what we consider “bad taste” often says about cultural perception than the actual flavor – it extends quietly throughout the “Sweet Farm”. YEH classifies sweet powers with affection and anger: cookies salads, Jell-O, candy bar salads, parking. While they are often rejected as unclear, their DNA is not far from polished sweets. Even Panna Cotta has more common denominators with the Jell-O salad more than most food critics are interested in confessing.

However, she admits that some frequency is not completely basis. “I cannot blame them, any kind of food where the main ingredients are cold and a generation or make me think twice.” “But the turning point came to me when I realized the extent of the use of these delicious and satisfactory powers from the ingredients of scratching such as the fresh whip, from the cookies of the deceptive correlation and the inconvenient generations with fresh fruit juices. Once I started playing with the flavor groups that I love-such as Reynberb, Mitt, Samak and black and black.

But yes, it is not alone in realizing the slip between what is considered refinement and what is absurd.

It is something that Ken Alabia encountered while writing his book.Reviving the great gelatin-A book, it is worth noting that he only wrote about daring. ” I do not like gelatin, ”told me laughing. However, his research revealed the existence of a great line: the line between the high kitchen and the kitchen is always foggy, and the gelatin powers are an ideal case study.

The pendulum of food tastes wider than most of us perceive. According to Libya, the sugary authority mainly disappears for a few hundred years after the late sixteenth century-until it returns with a tremendous revenge in the middle of the twentieth century.

“This is when mayonnaise“Jell-O and Marshmallows all begin to appear together, it is very short, but it is unusual,” he says.

To understand the reason for the outbreak of these sweet and treatment authorities, then he fell hard, one must look at what they represent. In post -war America, food science was a beacon of progress. Albala said: “In the fifties of the last century, people truly confident in science – after all, the science won the war for them.” “They were at comfort, speed and fun in the kitchen, embracing new inventions and technology. So the Jell-O position in a salad was not crazy at all. It was not unusual; it was a way to be experimental, creative and fun with food.”

But just after two decades, this optimism began to roam. With the emergence of environmental awareness in the 1960s and seventies – the “silent” Rachel Carson, the opposite reaction of pesticides, the suspected treated foods. The two generations? Childhood. They were marketed for children and pushed from dangerous cooking spaces.

“There is no luxurious restaurant in their right mind that will serve Jell-O after that,” said Alabia. “It is very simple, made of artificial flavors and artificial colors and all of that.”

But this pendulum maintains the swing.

The sweet authorities are back – not with the paradox, but with curiosity. Among them, gelatin powers have a certain moment. Molly, yes, they see them as a gate. She told me, “They are visually attractive and live in the Instagram era.” “But also because it can easily make it reserved.”

It was the same visual seduction that Peter Dimario first drew, co -author of “.Park!: Cooking BookHe told me when I called him in the New York City apartment in the spring of this year: “To the middle.” I am not a chef.

He said, “I was thinking about it as a means,” more than one dish. “

His neighbors have become unintended test audience. They learned to expect ways on the door, which is a small dish of gel on the path. Sometimes shine. Sometimes it retreated. “It was practical. It is not like cooking something by which you can rob, taste and control as you go,” admit. “There is knowledge for him and if the balance is not correct, you start again.”

Dimario did not start writing a cook book. But when Judy Chawat, a veteran collaborator in cooking projects, saw what he was doing, she made a call. I told him: “If you are good at anything, this expects trends.” “I think the gelatin will have a return.”

It is a dove in.

One of his early experiences was Ambrosia – a very counter -authority, which is the boundaries of satirical simulation, but it shines in his hands that it is practically glowing. He told me that its copy is attached to the mandarin slices in the gelatin of the darker pineapple, and the layers with optional coconut chips and chopped roasted Baqan (“The total family controversy,” some told me. Some people love them.

Dimario said: “Embross was definitely something we had at the family parties that originated,” Dimario said. “I came from a large Italian family on both sides, and my grandmother-even my great grandmother-was always cooking. The food was always central to our family. It is still. It was the authority of Ambrosia one of those things that always appeared. But then there was a kind of fashion. We stopped seeing it.”

He laughed. “I also remember the wategate salad, which I did not include in the book – most of them because I was trying to keep everything naturally. It is very difficult to do the natural Watergate power. I mean, you can break the open pistachio and make your dessert, but …” Why do you suffer?

“He found some old recipes online, including one of his mother, who originally belonged to his grandmother.” We grew up, we always had a large bowl on the table, but I wanted to do an unintended version. “He added enough of the unparalleled gelatin to put the salad without making it very strong.

“I still want this gentle texture that everyone remembers.”

Imbris from Dimario, unrestricted carefully and accurately, is more than just a candy – it’s a memory performance. Both oscillation, fluff, quiet alchemy for gelatin are designed to stir the version he remembers from his childhood table, only made elegance. As in the Middle West, the heart of the country of sweet power, the recipe is rarely the entire story.

In the words of Molly Yah and based in Minnesota, the real archive lives in stained cards and stories that move from one to another.

Jeh said: “What we lack in the culture of restaurants that we put in Potlucks and dinner parties, yet family recipes that have been made over generations come.” “There is no great attention to cooking trends here as much as the tradition, which I love. It seems that everyone here has a recipe box with a stained stained card and when you ask someone about a recipe, it comes with a story of that recipe.

For those who are still on the fence with a sweet salad and are not fully prepared to adhere to the exit of the gelatin template, YEH suggests simply starting: “The whip of some heavy cream, folding in yogurt, and solving it, as you want-spread from powder sugar or spray from cute honey-add any new upbringing, then throw on any day of old bread goods. Cookiesand Cakesand cakeand Cakes”

The cream relieves the edges. The old becomes new.

In a world in which “good taste” was often used like a woman-against women, against working class food, against anything very sweet, very defeated, too much-there is a quietly radical thing about this type of dessert. It is not the type to win the tasting plate, perhaps. But the type you write on a card, entered the box and I hope someone will find it.

It is not modest. generous. A little unconventional. I can only think that if Giacomo Castelvetro and John Evelyn – these first defenders in the purity of the authority – a bowl of this, are still cold from the refrigerator, they may stop. They may take a bite. After that, perhaps a little shame, you reach the recipe card.