Following trends in foods

"Progress might have been all right once," commented Ogden Nash, "but it has gone on too long." You have only to be in a restaurant and have your meal interrupted by the conversation of another diner on a cell phone to appreciate his point. But the fact is you can't stop progress. And this is no less true on the culinary front than anywhere else.

Thus, in this Progress Edition of the newspaper as we take stock of the advances of last year and try to anticipate the developments of the next, it's appropriate that we consider the trends in American food as well.

Evaluating the year

"How do you judge the best in a year when everything turned upside down?" That is the question Bon Appetit magazine asked itself as it prepared its tenth annual Best of the Year in Food issue. As the magazine noted, "Early in 2001, there were foie gras burgers and seven-course truffle-tasting menus. But on September 11 the world changed, and along with it, the food we cooked and the food we craved."

Ultimately the editors, eschewing the lavish and the fussy, awarded accolades to foods that were simple and comforting, even old-fashioned. Thus, their dish of the year was braised short ribs, which the magazine points out are now on the menus of fashionable bistros and restaurants from coast to coast, and their party trend of the year was the simple potluck. In addition, noting that increasingly restaurants in this country are offering European-style cheese trays as separate courses, the magazine designated cheese as the restaurant trend of the year observing, "Even luxury became simple, summed up by a carefully chosen artisanal cheese accompanied by the perfect glass of wine."

Similarly, the magazine identified two major dessert trends from last year: upscale versions of down-home treats (such as the cinnamon-sugar doughnuts with cappuccino semifreddo served at the famed French Laundry restaurant in the Napa Valley) and familiar sweets like cookies, cakes, and ice cream updated with heretofore exotic flavors like chai tea or star anise.

Cookbook editor Fran McCullough, in her selection of the best American recipes of the year culled from books, magazines, newspapers, the Internet, and even advertisements and the backs of boxes, added another retro food to the list--soufflés, which she named the comeback dish of the year. French food is being rediscovered, she says, now that the low fat era is over.

As USA Today noted recently, the market for low fat ice cream, chips, and other products fell off in 2001 even as Ben & Jerry's was packaging two of its most caloric ice creams together in one container and fast food chains were "supersizing" their burgers to the point that in some cases a single sandwich might weigh in at almost a thousand calories.

Future food

So where does that leave us? Predictions about the future, of course, are always risky, perhaps especially so when they deal with something as subject to fadism as are food preferences. But culinary experts and celebrity chefs are remarkably consistent this year in their forecasts, or what Chris Knight of the Ottawa Citizen calls their "Nosh-trodamian" predictions.

Continuing a trend becoming evident at the end of last year, 2002 will be a year when simplicity and familiarity will be the bywords in cooking and eating. As Alison Arnett of the Boston Globe rightly observes, "Eating is a ritual central to our sense of well-being." And when our well-being is threatened, as it continues to be by the prospect of terrorism, we are comforted by the simple and the familiar. As the editors of Food & Wine magazine suggest, "Complicated times require simple foods."

All of this leads to what Anthony Bourdain calls the great turn inward--back to comfort food. "The dining public," he says, "are now expressing the post-Sept. 11 state of mind by returning to the non-threatening, the comfortable and the familiar." Cookbook editor Tori Ritchie calls it "food that equals a hug." As John DeMers, food editor of the Houston Chronicle, explains, after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center we wanted to be hugged and told everything was going to be all right, and if no one was available to provide such assurance, "we looked for it on the nearest plate." Janice Okun of the Buffalo News agrees. "We are talking about the kind of dishes your mother cooked or the stuff you ate in the school lunchroom when life was still uncomplicated," she says. Kathleen Daelemans of the Food Network likewise argues that comfort food will be the dominant trend in 2002. "Sharing a meal with family and friends is our opportunity to control our quality of life and our health in a time we have so little control over anything else." Echoing these notions, Wolfgang Puck foresees people buying more take-out food to eat at home with their families and even goes so far as to assert that TV dinners will come back into fashion.

Comfort foods

This emphasis on comfort food will manifest itself in several ways. For example, The Chicago Tribune predicts that restaurants will start replacing high-ticket ingredients with less costly and more down to earth ones--chicken instead of duck, lamb shank instead of rack of lamb. As chef David Rosengarten observes, "Everyone, including chefs and diners, is getting tired of painfully creative, tortured food that included towers, squiggles, plate pictures, crazy combinations, 16 ingredients in a dish, etc." In keeping with all of this, Okun suggests that the restaurant trend of the year will be informality. Small restaurants with restrained décor will become increasingly popular and casual attire will be increasingly acceptable. As Food & Wine notes with some surprise, at least one of Manhattan's temples of haute cuisine, Lespinasse, no longer requires male diners to wear a necktie.

These developments will be mirrored at home too. The Food Network's Alton Brown predicts that casual home entertaining will make a big comeback in 2002. "I'm not talking about fussy dinner parties," he says. "I'm talking about chili and fried chicken. People are tired of being intimidated by food and especially tired of feeling like they've got to make water from scratch in order to be hospitable." Clark Wolf, a New York industry consultant, agrees. He told the Tribune, "Now cooking is comforting--and when entertaining, it's no more show-off cooking, it's communal cooking."

Thus, there'll be an emphasis on one-pot meals and semi-prepared meal kits will become big sellers (even the famed Jean-Georges has a line out). As Gourmet Magazine's Sara Moulton says, "People want to stay at home, nest, and cook, but don't have two prep cooks. So semi-prepared is the rage."

Getting simple

As part of this surge toward simplicity, people will become more wary of processed foods containing additives, and organic foods will become more mainstream. What some people call slow food, food that is simmered for hours, will become the style of the day.

Finally, the most promising future development in the wake of the burgeoning trend toward comfort food, at least as far as I'm concerned, will be heightened demand for desserts. Statistics reveal that even though restaurants are experiencing a decline in patrons, dessert sales are going up. What could be more comforting than that?

In the final analysis, whatever trends take hold, fundamentally 2002 will not be unlike other years in that our food preferences will reflect what is going on in the rest of the world and how we cope with it. As DeMers puts it, "We want to live and think and feel and, on our best days, understand. In 2002, as throughout human history, food is one of those things that helps us do precisely that."

Four Cheese Macaroni & Cheese

The Chicago Tribune predicts that macaroni and cheese will be the "most yearned-for" dish in 2002, and with good reason. It may well be the ultimate comfort food, taking us back to our childhood days, though this version, adapted from the Allrecipes Internet site, with its four different cheeses is hardly just for kids.

Ingredients:

8 ounces elbow macaroni

1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese

1 cup shredded Provolone cheese

1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

1 cup shredded Colby-Monterey Jack cheese

1 egg

1 cup milk

Directions:

Cook macaroni in boiling water until al dente and drain. Layer cheeses separated by thin layers of macaroni in a greased 8-inch square baking dish. Beat egg and milk together and pour over top. Bake at 350 degrees for 20 minutes or until golden brown and bubbly.

Listen to A Harte Appetite Fridays at 8:49 a.m. and Saturdays at 11:59 a.m. on KRCU, 90.9 on your FM dial. Write A Harte Appetite, c/o the Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or by e-mail to tharte@semissourian.com.