Far back in time, when I was still a klutz in the kitchen, a brother in law was sternly admonished by his doctor and advised to stick to a rigid diet of plain boiled vegetables. That’s something you can’t go too far wrong with and I happily volunteered. I chopped up the vegetables and popped them in the cooker, but before I topped it with the lid, a visiting sister-in-law sauntered in (my sisters-in-law numbered seven at the time), took one look and asked me what I was making. When I explained, she told me that bro-in-law would as it is be upset with the diet, the least we could do was make it attractive, ‘Food should not just taste good, it should look good!”. We took out a fresh lot of vegetables (the already chopped up ones were consigned to the soup pot) and set to: the bottle gourd was cut into semi circles, the carrots julienned, the potatoes wedged and the peas, thank goodness, were their own petit selves. Steamed to perfection, with just the right amount of salt and then arranged on the plate, those veggies looked as good as any gourmet meal and the delighted smile on bro-in-law’s face said it all. He really appreciated the effort to make a humdrum meal look special.
EI food has always had that extra-special touch. Be it a birthday, an anniversary or a family get-together for any reason, the table is a delight to the eye; while the aroma urged you to tuck in forthwith, the view made you pause and applaud. The meatloaf usually took pride of place with a covering of sculpted mashed potato, the shape being the product of the imagination and nimble fingers of the hostess. The sausages usually ended up as the ‘hairdo’ on a grapefruit face, the salad was presented as a horn of plenty, and sometimes even the rice would be coloured and moulded. The sweet dish was the piece de resistance – once again a sight to behold. This is just a sampling. Different hostesses had different ways of laying the table, each one a masterpiece in its own right. It is hard to believe that all of this was done by women who had learnt the craft from mother in the family kitchen.
Today, food styling is big business and big bucks. Those in the know will tell you that aesthetics is everything and a meal should engage sight, scent, taste and texture. In short, a work of art in every sense.
Suddenly, I am taken back to mealtime in the nursery. A formidably fussy eater, my meals were always presented as ‘pictures’ on the plate so that I could be coaxed into eating the ‘old man’s nose’ or the ‘little dog’s tail’ without realizing that it was actually the food that was going down. The ‘art’ may have been a little rough, but it certainly pleasured the mind of a child.
Somewhere in my AI childhood I felt the EI touch!
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