perfidy

Speaking of hardened little cans of sad, faded powders languishing in the backs of spice cabinets, you know what's fun? I have a little collection of community cookbooks from various places I've lived and where I grew up, and they are a hoot. Entire books have been written about these tomes, charting the rise and fall of rise of canned mushroom soup, Cheez-whiz, Velveeta, pesto, and enough ground beef to kill an army. But what really gets me going is the spices.

Almost all these books contain a recipe much like this:

Chili Con Carne With Hamburger

2 lbs ground beef, browned and drained
1/2 a small onion, diced
1/2 a small bell pepper, diced (optional)
1 can kidney beans
1 can diced stewed tomatoes
1 tsp salt
pinch black pepper
1/4 tsp chili powder

Combine all ingredients in a pot and simmer for one hour. Serves 4-6.

Although I'm paraphrasing from memory, I'm not kidding. 1/4 teaspoon of chili powder - or as much as a whole teaspoon for the incurably bold - in a "chili" meant for six people. Let us take a moment to laugh at the rubeness of our past! Haw! Older cookbooks treat spices as practically nuclear, calling for a "pinch" of cayenne or a 1/2 teaspoon of curry powder in a giant pot of "Curry Surprise," and that never ceases to charm me.

Today, it's fats, with perfectly good recipes practically ruined by replacing fat - any fat! all fat!! - willy nilly with water. Water, not being a fat, is incapable of dissolving fat-soluble flavors, thereby making eating these recipes an exercise in self-abnegation rather than absorption. They may taste perfectly okay, but I guaran-damn-tee you that adding a nice half teaspoon of fat per serving (one half of one teaspoon!) it would taste a damn sight better.

Similarly, sugar is now evil, evil, evil. And while, yes, unrefined sugar in immoderate amounts such as may Americans eat is really very much not good for you, let's be real. Sugar is also food, and it tastes good. And if you're supposed to cut back, cut back! Why go halfway with such disappointing half-measures as those little blue and pink packets of lowered expectations they give you at restaurants? I prefer Diet Coke to the real thing because I don't really care for incredibly sweet things, but I'm not fooling myself into thinking that Diet Coke tastes like anything but a miracle of modern chemistry. On the same note, I recently had the misfortune to try cookies made with Splenda, a noncaloric sugar substitute made by swapping out one hydrocarbon on sucrose for three chlorine atoms, making it undigestible and noncaloric. Splenda behaves like sugar chemically in every way in recipes and on the tongue, except that it is perfectly indigestible. At least that's the claim. Well, let me tell you, Splenda might be made from sugar, it might behave like sugar, but no sugar I've ever had tasted faintly bitter and made the center of my tongue go numb. A cookie made with Splenda is like a handjob from a hot chick with hands of fine-grit sandpaper.

There is no content or structure to this rant except to lament once again that some folks just don't know what good food is.

End transmission.