Prose Poem: Cooking with Snow. (Dedicated to Maura Judkis.)

 

Passive-aggressive cooking was first reported on by Washington Post reporter Maura Judkis in 2020 during the opening stages of the Covid pandemic.  She wrote about chefs who no longer catered to their own whims or their customer's tastes, but instead made up dishes like snow with sauerkraut and ant egg remoulade.  Feeling threatened and angry at the sudden demise of their livelihoods and security, many chefs reacted by creating dishes that mirrored their sense of an elegant way of life suddenly turned ugly and insubstantial.  Feeling useless, they created meals that were not meant to be eaten but to be gawked at, or even installed as works of art at MOMA.  Pierre Bonsat's "Cooking with Snow" became the bestselling work of non-fiction for sixteen straight weeks.  And McDonald's came out with their infamous McMush -- fried mush topped with stir fried dry ice on a bun.  Now that things are getting somewhat back to normal, post-pandemic culinary schools of thought are turning away from passive-aggressive dishes.  They are returning to consumer-friendly items like mac & cheese and bacon jam on toast.  This is good news for everyone, except, perhaps, food journalists like Judkis, who now have to dig up ways to make pork and beans sound interesting and trendy.  Me, I've always stuck with Ball Park Franks dipped in mambo sauce.