During the last decade or so there has grown up a fashion to serve vegetables half cooked. The perversity of this is most obvious in the case of the carrot.
Raw carrots are delicious, crunchy, sweet and juicy.
A carrot thoroughly cooked is soft and yielding to fork and tooth, and mingles happily with the gravy.
In between those two desirable states is an intermediate one of minimum utility, when the carrot is still hard, but no longer either crunchy or juicy, and it is at that point that it is fashionable to serve it.
I gather that health is given as the reason for this gastronomic barbarism; I just don't believe it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments
(
Atom
)
Posts
2 comments :
People seem to have a schizophrenic attitude to carrots. On the one hand there's the notion of a carrot as an incentive or reward, coming from the idea of a carrot on a stick. On the other hand, there's the notion of the carrot as something unpleasant that has to be endured in order to get to something nicer, as in the old saw "you have to eat the carrots to get the dessert".
"you have to eat the carrots to get the dessert".
I'd never come across that before. I've always assumed that the idea of carrots as incentives is derived from the supposed partiality of donkeys and horses for such refreshment.
It would, in some circles at least, be thought impolite to refer in a similar way to the less wholesome titbits that often delight scavenging dogs.
Post a Comment