Reading about contemporary food lately, I keep running into something called Banana Everything Cookie. Why banana everything? That’s like calling the earth Banana Everything Planet. If these cookies have everything, why not call them The Cookies?
Too many elements. It’s a trend. Did you know that Krystal recently offered a burger embellished with “BBQ bacon cheese” (whatever that is) or pimento cheese? So there is such a thing now as a classic slider. Elegant, exemplary, timeless. But that’s just one category.
I appreciate a basic Krystal, or six. Say you’ve had a little too much to drink. Or more than a little and spilled some of it. In either case, a traditional Krystal will absorb some of that. If it’s got “BBQ bacon cheese” on it, though…
Too many elements can throw anything off. A musician’s sound in New Orleans is described as “hillbilly-post-punk-goth-rock,” and “Hank Williams meets the Smiths meets Siouxsie and the Banshees.” I have tried to eat burgers like that lately. Ostrich meat gamely fighting its way out of a pretzel-dough bun roughly enfolding chili and fries (slopping around inside the bun, do I make myself clear?) and onions and bell peppers and so many other layers, there’s no way you can pick it up by hand or get a comprehensive cross-section bite of it with any imaginable combination of utensils.
I’m not calling for throwback austerity, like Michael Pollan when he says, “Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” In my case, that would exclude yogurt, garlic, and boudin, not to mention sushi.
You didn’t think I was recommending a combination…? Good.
In Esquire I read of an eatery called Nudibranch, which provides “a mash-up of occasionally Korean foundations with everything from bottarga to aji panca peppers to Shaoxing wine to huitlacoche [what, no raw goat meat?],…and alpaca tartare [ah, there it is!]…[the food] made me laugh along with the sheer chutzpah of it all.” Turns out a nudibranch is a kind of sea slug. And huitlacoche is corn smut. As my great-grandmother might say, like Hattie McDaniel in Gone with the Wind, “Hm!”
But Nudibranch is in New York City, the East Village. The Bob Evans “farmhouse kitchen” chain is a Middle America concept. So why does Bob serve not only “Cinna-biscuits” (with warm cream-cheese icing) but also, to quote the menu fully, “CHICKEN-N-NOODLES DEEP-DISH: Signature house-made Deep-Dish Chicken-N-Noodles and our famous mashed potatoes atop a freshly-baked buttermilk biscuit.” That biscuit is buried under eight hyphens, a stack of two other starches (one of them famous: “Hey, aren’t you a celebrity? You resemble somebody’s famous mashed potatoes!”), and some chicken.
A reaction is bound to come. Simplify, simplify. But we have been conditioned to expect multifarious bites.
In a supermarket the other day, I encountered a whole separate display for these:
“Muddy Bites, the best part of a sundae cone.” The pointed tip of like a Nutty Buddy or a Drumstick, with all the layers. “Now available as a bite-sized snack. The best bite, over and over again. It’s…Happiness Multiplied!” I don’t know how they could get a drop of melted ice cream in each one, though.
Here’s what you can get at one pizza chain:
Papa Johns Papa Bowls. No crust, just myriad toppings, together in a bowl. Eat it with a spoon? I guess—not, surely, with your hands. What this does is, it eliminates the original foundation of pizza. The foundation has been overtopped. I would miss the crust. Emotionally.
What’s next? Iterations of that perfect forkful of casserole you dropped on the floor? Full cups of the next-to-last milkshake slurp?
Much, no doubt, will depend on marketing. I would never have considered eating scraps of whale meat fried by the sun, until I read Melville’s description in Moby-Dick. Whale fritters smell like “old Amsterdam housewives’ dough-nuts,” he writes, and “they have such an eatable look that the most self-denying stranger can hardly keep his hands off.”
“My partner and I,” says Ishmael,
“Don’t need a several-dish meal.
Since it’s just Queek and me
(When he’s not at sea),
We’re fine with a blubber-and-fish meal.”
