When I go grocery shopping, I tend to buy whatever’s cheapest. However, once in a while the difference in quality is great enough that it’s worth splurging on the second-cheapest variety. This raises a difficult question. How do you know when the expensive version is actually better, and when it’s just empty marketing?
Easy. Compound French words.
Many French things actually do taste different from their American cousins. Brie, for instance, is a far cry from Velveeta. In my opinion, Yoplait is another worthy indulgence. You’ll notice that both are just one word long. Flowery French phrases, on the other hand, are often invented by American marketers who know that despite all our Freedom Fries, we all secretly want to be French. French is an easy way to sell things to us, especially since being monolingual Americans, we don’t actually understand what we’re buying. (My favorite example of this is a body lotion called Pomme de Terre, which was probably intended to mean “Fruit of the Earth,” but is more frequently used to mean “Potato.”)
Giving your product a French name allows you to jack up the price to a near-European level. How many people do you know who would settle for the $8 dead hen belly in wilted leaves and bacteria-infested milk rather than shelling out for the $17 chat tourné au fromage de chien ? I’m guessing most would choose the expensive rotten cat in dog cheese over the moderately priced Chicken Florentine. (I am not qualified for this thought experiment, because most of the people I know are humanities graduate students who are halfway to being French already.)
You can tell most gourmet food products are scams because they have compound French names. Gourmet salt is just the most recent example. Do you really think fleur de sel would taste so much better than Morton’s had it been called Salzblüte? I know they couldn’t sell Salzblüte for close to $70 a pound.
Many gourmets brag that after a few months of seasoning their pommes frites libres with only the finest fleur de sel, they can no longer tolerate the harsh taste of regular table salt. Fair enough. But what’s the point of spending those few months developing such an inconvenient taste? That’s like getting used to setting dollar bills on fire, then never again being able to tolerate how bland the air smells without the rich, smoky scent of wasted money.
To prove to you that it is possible to make perfectly good food with perfectly cheap salt, I offer you the following Authentic Italian Dish — Italy being the second classiest country by the gourmet’s standards. I personally know an Italian who ate this dish for every meal. Of course, she was two years old, but she was as refined as someone who still frequently peed her pants could be.
Cheap Use of Cheap Salt
Serves one adult or two toddlers.
This is a cheap, easy dish with little nutritional value. I eat it when I’m too lazy to make anything else. Even The Exploited eats it, and he is only allowed approximately five seconds per meal.
- 2 oz. cheap angel hair pasta
- 1 tablespoon (or to taste) cheap olive oil
- cheap salt to taste
- optional: cheap parmesan cheese to taste
- optional: fresh or frozen spinach.
- optional: frozen peas (Warning: not authentic. Consume at own risk of becoming social pariah.)
1. Boil pasta. After a minute or so, add spinach and/or peas if desired. When cooked to your liking (should take about 5 minutes), drain.
2. Add olive oil, salt, and parmesan cheese if desired.
3. Take the money you’ve saved and buy yourself something nice.
The only salt you’ll ever need
Tags: closet francophilia, noodles, salt, yuppies
August 11, 2008 at 5:04 pm |
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