Line Cooking Narative: Formative idea 1

Have you ever really thought about what goes into the compilation of a completed and ordered plate which is only a part of a whole? Let's have a quick look at a basic plate, some piece of shit – a sandwich with a side of fries. You have the plate and god help us if you work in a small locally owned diner where the manager is some crazy old lady that thinks it makes the presentation of the food better if everything comes on a differently designed plate which she probably found lying about in thrift stores – if that's the case you can throw presentation right out the window – just do what she says if the job is really that important to you. So crazy old ladies aside what we have is a general cliché in which there is probably a mottled-tannish plate- you're going to cut the sandwich diagonally so that you can have a triangled wedge of sandwich leaning up against the chunk, and then you make as big a pile of fries as you can; and the reason for all of this is because it's 'classy' – yes, it's not classy, it's 'classy' with quotation. Ask me why. I'm glad you asked – the reason for this is that you want sharp angles to be a part of the focus, where the fries are not considered the focus as much as a necessary evil. Sharp angles make it interesting to view – not that it's really considered heavily by the customer since every time they order a sandwich it's the same goddamn thing over and over again. You say to me, “but it's sandwiches – you can't make sandwiches different,” and I say back to you, “not with that attitude – sweetheart.” If we're lucky that's all the diner in question will do. Usually we are not so lucky. Rather than sticking with a tried and true formula they decide that in order to make this plate look a little nicer than everyone else's it needs a pickle and a frilled toothpick and a sprig of parsley or if we are really unlucky a sprinkling of chopped wilted parsley and besides that who knows what else – a wedge of lemon – maybe it's a fish sandwich, and in that case we would obviously have to add a ramekin of coleslaw, and a ramekin of tarter sauce; the point is: in the cooperate world the way to make something look nice is to garnish the hell out of it – this is not classy. Do not be fooled. Let's make a decision about the sandwich – let's say that it's turkey. While still giving the idea (possibly more than an actual physical image of one) of a sandwich how can we actually genuinely create an interesting presentation that will – given the ingredients without doubt shock the customer or recipient of the plate? What we need to do in our minds is strip everything to the bare bones. Sandwich. Maybe we need bread, maybe we need lettuce or something to substitute for it, onions and possibly something to convey flavour to an otherwise completely bland sandwich: gravy – essentially the condensed flavour of turkey. Of course a turkey sandwich usually has a side of cranberry sauce, and in our case what we really get from that, besides a warm sense of familiarity is colour, actual and real, interesting colour; so we want that stuff. Finally the starches: bread and potatoes. Now you can take a thanksgiving turkey with stuffing and if you think about it, it's just like an elaborate sandwich only less convenient to eat – but people don't think that to them, the only relation to a sandwich that they will get from that is cold and tomorrow. To maintain the idea of a sandwich we decide that maybe hot would be the preferred style and to assert the idea of a hot sandwich we can convey say toasted bread with something crisp – but rather than giving them toasted bread we give them quite crisp hash browns. Put these in the center of your very plain white plate. To give an angle to our viewers eyes we place the turkey partially on the hash browns – at an angle. Now we choose to top either the turkey or the hash browns with some caramelized onion and lay some sautéd spinach directly along one side of the browns. If we feel that the image is still blurry we can intensify the effect by applying the gravy in a straight line at an additional opposing angle. This down we add a small quenelle of cranberry sauce to one side or even partially overlapping the turkey – it should be in the acute angle between the turkey and the browns. This all done the last step that is required is to remind the person eating the 'sandwich' that it is what it is – and that is with a very lightly buttered and grilled toast triangle which we should be able to stand straight up among everything else, and so long as it is not perfectly centered the plate is presentation ready – no garnish required, only the necessary flavours on the plate with nothing to distract you from them. It's a diner-to-pseudo-huete-cuisine conversion. The only real work left is ensuring that the flavours are intense enough to carry what we've already taken in visually.