The food pages are rife with promises of perfection. The guardian.co.uk tells us how to make the perfect pâté and the perfect mayonnaise while posting the perfect hummus debate. The telegraph.co.uk headlines recipes for the perfect sponge and the perfect roast lamb cake. And just today, latimes.com revealed how to grill the perfect steak.Â
Personally I think perfection is overrated. While its pursuit can sometimes be a noble endeavour beneficial to the greater good, its realisation is neither possible nor desirable. Neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini, winner of 1986 Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine, titled her autobiography In Praise of Imperfection, her conviction being that human creativity and greatness were the rewards of imperfection.
True perfection would have disastrous consequences. Were we to agree, for example, that the incomparable purée de pomme de terre of Joël Robuchon was perfect there would be no incentive to do better or find better. Never mind that Robuchon’s version of mash should more accurately be titled purée de beurre fondue – “purée of melted butter” – with the odd potato mixed in.
I don’t very much like the look of perfection either. Maybe it’s a class thing. My grandfather, Paul Young (né Yankelovich), was a Polish-born, Jewish-American baker who always sent us home with large brown papers filled with the ugliest cakes imaginable. We identified their unvarnished appearance and plain packaging with the rustic ways of the old country and trusted his marble cakes, sponge cakes, Danish and babkas were vastly superior to the frilly production numbers on display in the window cases of finer French- or Viennese-inspired bakeries.
Imagine my pleasure then when in May of this year I spotted these words across the bottom of menu at the acclaimed and fashionable New York pizza restaurant Co.:
Our pies are not always round.
Co. was created by Jim Lahey of the esteemed Sullivan Street Bakery to recognise and celebrate the art of baking in the form of pizza. And that form, according to the menu caveat also employed as a “company” slogan, does not need to be a perfect circle to be good. A misshapen pizza might even taste better for its faults.
Home-made should look hand-made. Why would anyone want to cut chips (fries) by hand to such precision they would give guests the impression they’d been sliced by a machine? Where’s the satisfaction in shaping burger patties by hand to a tight, smooth, flat, flawless round that only a meat-packing plant could produce?
The trouble with cooking to any mould, be it a block of silicone hearts or the exacting template of an uncompromising chef, is that it thwarts the excitement of the unpredictable. Michelin-star-worthy fussiness is a culinary ideal embraced at the expense of whim, mood, chance and surprise.
Even those who don’t buy into the romance of rusticity should recognise that Lahey has handed home cooks a valuable out, a get-out-of-jail card to be used when we screw in the kitchen: The next time you slide a half-burned, amoeba-shaped pizza out of the oven only to discover all of its molten mozzarella has slid to one side and all its tomato to the other, don’t despair: Just tell your guests this is the way they do it in the old country.
A great post, and I agree with your premise that things absolutely should not need to look perfect to be great!
BUT I think it’s disingenious to criticise the many posts and recipes for the perfect this or that, linked in your first paragraph.
For, most of those I’ve read are focusing on achieving the best one can from a taste perspective, not appearance!
I doubt the NY pizza Co in question would use a slogan along the lines of “Our pizzas don’t always taste as good as they could”!
Kavey – Thanks for your incisive comment. Was my use of those examples in the first paragraph too crafty by half? Could be. BUT, the not-necessarily round pizza was a metaphor in a post about the misguided use of perfection as an attention-grabbing standard. Anyone who promises one thing and delivers another, as you suggest was done here, leaves themselves open to ridicule far more biting than mine. Speaking of which….
Tim – Enjoyed your contemptuous and spot-on rant nearly as much as I relish imagining the look on your face as you read this: the dreaded p word was in fact used by guardian.co.uk in the heading for a teaser link to your post. Is it possible someone deleted the offending word on the actual headline but neglected to make the change on the front page of life&style?
Dan, I’m aghast.
I too loathe the concept of ‘perfection’ in the national culinary discourse and am rigorous in expunging it. I can see no mention of perfection in the pate piece.
Granted, the subs occasionally use it in a headline against my wishes but it could never be my intention.
In fact in the penultimate par of the pate piece you’ll spot a small, admittedly weak, gag based on parfait/perfection.
Can I refer m’learned chum to the following extract. It’s part of a rant I delivered at the last RFF…
“…But there’s one floppy bit of food waffle that I find completely and totally unforgiveable.
It’s the concept of ‘perfection’.
How many columns, recipes, programmes etc have you seen headed ‘The perfect something’
How to make the perfect cupcake
A perfect romantic dinner in 10 minutes
I put the word ‘perfect’ into the search engine at my own paper and got offered the perfect rissotto, roast chicken, cheesecake, spring salad, black pudding, scotch egg, fried breakfast, cup of coffee, cup of tea and detox diet… and that was in the last month.
I should make clear that we writers aren’t to blame for this. We file the stories. The headlines are put there by editors and sub editors who think its what the audience want to read
Let me tell you a story.
Last week My paper sent me to spend a day improving my bread making with Richard Bertinet. Richard is a brilliant Baker. He’s been doing it since he was sixteen and spending a day with him is like working with a tall, handsome French Yoda.
We made some beautiful bread but I know that once the sub-editors get hold of it, that story is going to be headlined ‘Making the Perfect Loaf’.
That’s a hell of a claim. Richard never said it was perfect…the thing that I learned most is that, even after a probable 30 years of daily bashing industrial quantities of dough, Richard is just searching for perfection. Besides which, what if he had an off day? More than that, the headline carries the promise that we can pass on this perfection to you. But what if you have an off day. Hell, what if you don’t like sourdough.
There is no such thing as the perfect loaf, ladies and gentlemen, nor cupcake, cabbage, custard or canape. It’s a fatuous overclaim and it makes everything we write under that heading look into pointless lie from the first to the last word.
We are cooks. We are writers. We strive for perfection. God willing we shall never attain it. And next time you see that headline promising ‘the Perfect’ anything I want you to get as angry as I do at the sloppy thinking. I want you to yell at it. And soon those yells will grow to a steady roar and at that point even our editors will be forced to listen”.