'Vegetarian mushroom shawarma pitas' - boring

"Novelty, the most potent of all attractions, is also the most perishable." Andre Maurois

Once again I'm repeating myself, and also waffling about something that could be summed up in one sentence - like the one above. Nevertheless it struck me again, when I viewed the two dishes above recently.

On the left is last Thursday's dish on my New York Times desk calendar - a recipe from Alex Weibel with the title of this post - Vegetarian mushroom shawarma pitas. It looks exotic, it sounds exotic - but really in today's world it's so very ordinary. Let's take each of those words individually:

Vegetarian - I don't think I even knew that such a thing existed when I was a child - although of course it did. Eventually we became aware that some people ate no meat or fish, although initially this was considered a very hippie, back to nature kind of thing - women with flowers in their hair and shapeless long rustic dresses, and unwashed men with a lot of hair everywhere. Eventually though it became mainstream - first perhaps with the 'clean' and ethical way of eating, and even more recently as truly creative vegetarian cooks - Ottolenghi is the most famous, but there are many others - created dishes that all of us, whether vegetarian or not actually wanted to eat.

And then came vegan - a kind of return to an almost puritanical view of life it seems to me. But I won't go there except to say that veganism is overtaking vegetarianism in the publicity stakes at least.

Mushroom - I think when I was a child there were only button mushrooms and field mushrooms, which either formed part of breakfast or a mixed grill and the fanciest thing that happened to them was soup. I wasn't really a fan. Today there are many more varieties of mushrooms in your local supermarket, most of them, other than the dried porcini, morels and other European kinds, of Asian - largely Japanese? origin. I'm not an expert though. Suffice to say that mushrooms are trendy - maybe that explains the recent poisonous mushrooms hysteria. To the regular cooking world they feature in a huge variety of dishes particularly it seems to me as a meat substitute in a lot of vegetarian and vegan recipes. The New York Times is relatively traditional in the choice of mushroom - Portobello mushrooms, which to me are the same as the field mushrooms of my youth. And possibly they are.

Shawarma - I think I first became aware of shawarma in Australia in one of those Greek places in the CBD - those ragged slices of meat, arranged in a spinning upside-down cone in front of a grill, with the slices being carved off and put into a pita bread with other things. I think that initially I thought that this was souvlaki, but no - that's usually a kebab kind of cooked thing. Then there's gyros as well. A topic for another time I think. In general practice I suspect that the names are often confused, because all of them tend to end up rolled in a pita bread, and topped with other stuff. In our New York Times recipe, they are not rolled in the Pita bread - just placed on top.

I suspect a lot of the shawarma recipes you see - like this one - if you are being 'authentic' - just aren't because the main ingredient is either - baked as here - or grilled/barbecued. I checked Ottolenghi - a Middle-Eastern guy, who, if you believe in being 'authentic' should know better - has a number of shawarma recipes - none of them using meat cooked on one of those rotating grills - there's even a cauliflower one.. You can even buy an Ottolenghi shawarma marinade. In fact I suspect that the term has actually become a term for a particular kind of spice mix.

Pita - So commonplace that every supermarket has a home brand, Baker's Delight et al. as well. And every cook/chef/recipe writer has a recipe as well. It's interesting is it not that at the same time as Middle-Eastern food has become so very, very popular the peoples of the Middle-

East have become so unpopular, even hated? So much for the theory that loving a nation's food, helps with understanding, and appreciating that nation's people.

We've probably all had a go at making our own pita as well - the success of mine is very variable.

In my NYT recipe the pita bread is a base slathered with yoghurt - another ingredient that has appeared and evolved over the times since WW2.

And what of my other recipe - Coles Pumpkin and bolognaise lasagne which graces the cover of its current magazine? I turned to Coles, because as I flicked through the magazine I found myself thinking it was all same old, same old stuff that I didn't really feel like cooking. Beginning with that lasagne. And yet, having just flicked through it again, I see that there are many, dishes that would be hugely exotic to my young self. Including that lasagne. The recipe includes ingredients such as fennel seeds, crispy sage leaves, mozzarella, pumpkin, Parmesan, canned tomatoes, garlic, lasagne sheets and yes pumpkin. All of them very, very common and everyday, and none of them known to my young teenage self. So I picked out a few more recipes, that today I find boring which would certainly not have been back in the late 50s and 60s.

Curried chicken and rice noodle stir-fry

Apart from the exoticism of curry and rice noodles, and the entire concept of stir-frying and therefore woks, this recipe also demonstrates how much prepared foods have changed. For the curry paste comes from a jar, and the stir-fry mix comes out of a packet. I think I'm quite prepared to tell my chidlren and grandchildren that curry pastes out of a jar are fine - after all I'm pretty sure that lots of Indians - well all Asians, actually buy prepared spice mixes and pastes in their local markets and shops - but I'm not sure about the stir-fry mix. No I don't like vegetables in packets, particularly mixed ones. Better than the whole thing out of a packet or tin though. Although of course you can get that too.

Chicken and pesto pasta with broccoli - for some reason this recipe is not online, but I include it because it is so very, very typical of the kind of pasta dish that we all throw together at some time or other. I mean it's just pasta, pesto, chicken and broccoli and it's firmly aimed at the lazy cook - the pesto comes from a jar, the chicken breast is ready diced and the broccoli florets are frozen. And yet even with the worst prepackaged ingredient - the jar of pesto - doesn't it look delicious, and isn't it nutritious? But boring - and I can do my own thing with this kind of dish.

Teriyaki pork belly udon noodle soup - this comes in an 'educational' section on the different kinds of Asian noodles - and all praise to them for doing this, although of course, they are just encouraging you to buy them. And their teriyaki sauce is in a bottle. Well you could buy other people's teriyaki sauces too. The pork belly comes already sliced. As for the exotic - miso paste, fresh ginger, snow peas - yes snow peas - we didn't know about them back then - and frozen edamame - well we did have broad beans. And it's not just the ingredients - we didn't think of shredding carrots like that - or spring onions - and noodles in a soup?

Greek-style lemon chicken - from Curtis Stone no less. The ingredients are not the exotic thing here - well maybe the garlic, but it's the technique - particularly the idea of frying lemon slices and smashing your partially cooked potatoes before frying them. I don't think we even fried chicken when I was young. Chicken was sort of special and served as a Sunday roast.

Indeed the Coles magazine had a recipe for a roast chicken which, today I would consider boring, boring, boring - but it was rubbed with a mix of butter, thyme, rosemary and garlic before roasting in a tin with onions, and red wine. It was a promotion for a particular red wine, and it does look delicious, as I'm sure it would be - but it's sort of ordinary isn't it?

Loaded spicy chicken and pineapple nachos Now I will admit that Mexican is just not my thing, but I also admit that it's (a) hugely popular and (b) unknown in my youth. Exotic ingredients? - avocado, Mexican spice mix and sauce as a well, corn strips, Mexican cheese, coriander, jalapeño chillies, lime - but curiously they go old-style with tinned pineapple slices. Another lazy, everything from a packet or jar kind of dish, but I guess it's relatively healthy. But so, so common - even, dare I say, downmarket.

But then supermarket magazines are, I suppose downmarket. The New York Times is not. And to be fair to Coles, some of their recipes are more genuinely upmarket, in that everything in them is a 'real' ingredient. Besides if you really wanted to be authentic you could make your own pesto, or teriyaki sauce ...

It's all a demonstration of how far we have come since the 50s and 60s. Of course, the 'foreign' foods shown here were just what the people of the countries they came from cooked all the time. So globalisation has played its part, both in the way almost everyone has travelled to at least one foreign country, and in the way that cooks and chefs, and writers have introduced us to the food of their homeland, or the food that has inspired them, in books and on media platforms, and then how they have experimented with those traditional dishes:

"the original Ottolenghi, published in 2008; a book which introduced the UK to the then exotic joys of tahini, sumac and za’atar. It’s not yet 15 years old, but to flick through its pages is to glimpse the self when young, before charring broccoli was a thing. To think, there was a time when all we did was boil it." Jay Rayner/The Guardian 2021"

Creativity it sometimes seems has accelerated from the aftermath of WW2 - a defining moment in modern history when everything changed. Not least in the world of food. It was such a restricted time and so we all looked for something new, and were guided in that quest by the changers of the time - Elizabeth David et al.

"There are three things which the public will always clamour for, sooner or later; namely: novelty, novelty, novelty." Thomas Hood

Particularly when you have just endured hard times.

Besides:

"Where there is no novelty, there can be no curiosity." Aphra Behn

And when there is no curiosity there is no progress.

All of those recipes represent progress of a kind, even if some of that progress is kind of regressive, or damaging. For the present moment I wasn't tempted by any of those recipes, but on another day who knows? And I bet I shall be making at least one very similar pasta dish to the broccoli and pesto one some time very soon.

YEARS GONE BY

July 20

2024 - Inertia

2023 - Bee or fly - real or fake?

2022 - The Bordelaise challenge

2021 - Treacle tart

2020 - Deleted

2019 - Success or success - it's all relative

2018 - Taste le Tour - Gabriel Gaté - I'll have that

2017 - Renewal in the bleak midwinter - back from France

2016 - Fasting