Wild Pansies?

Don’t you hate those cooking shows where the chef is practically saying, “I’m going to make something impossible to prepare out of ingredients you can’t possibly find!”

That’s how I feel about the PBS series, New Scandinavian Cooking.

Here’s an example. On a recent episode, chef Claus Meyer prepared a salad. One of the ingredients was first-harvest baby new potatoes from Denmark. It turns out that these first-harvest new potatoes are highly prized; so much, that the farmer can sell them for 150 Euros per kilo. (That comes out to $95.00 per pound - - for taters!)

The salad dressing contained honey from the almost-extinct Scandinavian black bee, only two of which are known to exist. Oh, and also vinegar that had been infused for fourteen days with chanterelles from a nearby forest. (Like I’m going to have that knocking about in my cupboard). Baby Romaine lettuce was the leafage, but it was laced with edible wild pansies from a field in Denmark. They couldn’t be your garden-variety pansies. They had to be wild pansies.

He held the salad up, smiled and said, “Enjoy!”

I thought, “You arrogant prick!”

Julia Child would never prepare such items on her programs. She probably would say the same thing had she seen this Nordic bozo present such a salad. Once when an interviewer asked what she thought about Nouvelle Cuisine, she warbled, “Well, it just doesn’t look very ‘foodey’ to me.”
I love that.

Julia rocks.