Originally Posted by
JerryFF
Have you noticed how, all of a sudden, certain dishes start to appear widely in so-called fine dining restaurants - dishes that were relatively rare or mundane. A few years ago it was shitake mushrooms everywhere. Then, they got replaced by portabello. Now its mac and cheese. Since when was mac and cheese a gourmet dish?
It seems to happen with desserts too. A number of years ago it was tiramisu. More recently, panna cotta and bread pudding. Again, how did bread pudding get into the gourmet line?
Do you have others like this? I guess someone starts a trend and then, especially if it's a "celebrity" chef, everyone copies.
Macaroni and Cheese was a dish from my youth that was fixed in bulk to fill many stomachs as cheaply as possible - I mean, really, some flour, milk, salt, pepper, macaroni and cheese, maybe some crushed saltines - pretty inexpensive stuff. Bread pudding was something you made to get rid of stale but not yet moldy bread, some sugar, milk and eggs -- again pretty basic stuff, cheaply made.
I have a hard time getting excited about this trend. Not to say that it can't be tasty food, but I don't like paying top dollar for 'comfort' food.