The Unbearable Whiteness of White Meat
Dark meat is better. Why don't we love it more?
Thanksgiving turkey: The mortal struggle between dark meat and white meat.: Let me say at the outset, I don't ...http://slate.me/gL3hUw
White meat turkey has no taste. Its slabs of dry, fibrous material are more like cardboard conveyances, useful only for transporting flavorsome food like stuffing and gravy from plate to mouth. It's less a foodstuff than a turkey app, simulated meat, a hyperlink to real food.
But I am fascinated by how tastes get made and unmade, the intersection of culture, class and sensory responses. Not being a postmodernist I wouldn't call the overwhelming American preference for white-meat turkey a form of cultural hegemony. More like a mass hallucination. Why, for instance, hasn't white meat shared the same fate, the same cultural disenfranchisement, as packaged white bread?
"Why White Meat," asks Slate. Editor's note -- "Here are the enthusiastic words of a columnist in the New York Times of May 13, 1941" ... "The Hazards of Making Gravy" RT @TheOldFoodie Solving the gravy problem in 1941 http://tinyurl.com/2fewvfm Ready-to-Cook Gravy Latest Addition to Quick Aids for Harassed Housewife. Editor's note -- and a The Old Foodie "Quotation for the Day" ... "....grease is not gravy. How often I have wished, from the depths of a loathing stomach, that certain well-meaning housekeepers - at whose boards I have sat as guest or boarder - who fry beefsteak in lard, and send ham to table swimming in fat; upon the surface of whose soups float spheroids of oil that encase the spoon with blubber, and coat the lips and tongue of the eater with flaky scales-that these dear souls who believe in 'old-fashioned cookery,' understood this simple law of digestive gravity!" Breakfast, Luncheon and Tea, Marion Harland, (Mary Virginia Terhune) (1875) |
The Gazette wishes a Happy Thanksgiving to Nicole and Terry!
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