A combination of evolving public taste and marketing dollars makes some food and drink trends feel like they’ll never fade away. Here Travel Tomorrow explores some of the biggest culinary hits and misses from around the world and across the decades – and who knows, maybe fondue sets or the ten-bird roast are about to make a comeback?
Fond of fondue?
Cheese fondue could be argued to be as old as the Iliad, Homer’s epic poem from around the 7th century BCE about the Trojan War. In chapter 11, a cook “as skilled as a goddess” makes a “drink” with wine, barley, and goat cheese shredded with a bronze grater. The concoction is more commonly associated with the peasant ingenuity of poor Alpine farmers who eked out meagre supplies of stale bread, cheese nubs, garlic and wine to make a rich, filling meal.
It hit peak popularity in the 1960s and 70s after the Swiss brought an Alpine restaurant to the 1964 New York World Fair. The Yanks went wild for the stuff. Fondue kits with electrified melting bowls and matching forks were ubiquitous in home kitchens until at least the 1980s, with one even appearing in the late 1990s in Sex in the City, when Carrie makes a disastrous attempt to impress Mr Big. More recently, chocolate fondue sets have been seen at prom and wedding parties. With all those dry-clean-only suits and gowns on display, it’s hard to imagine a more inappropriately messy menu offering.
The Atkins diet
You wouldn’t be dipping any bread in your fondue if you were on the Atkins Diet, a fad promoted by a US doctor from the 1960s. It saw further waves of enthusiasm in the late 80s with the launch of Atkins Nutritionals, as well as in the early 2000s, and within the last five years. The idea (the science behind which was later widely discredited) invites people to lower their carbohydrate intake and force their body into a state of ketosis by instead favouring consumption of protein and fat, which led to the diet being associated with heart disease and bad breath.
Sundried tomatoes
A traditional southern Italian way to preserve tomatoes for year-round use was to dry them out in the sun. People in regions like Calabria, Puglia, and Sicily would take ripe, plum tomatoes, halve them and lay them out to shrivel naturally, producing a sweet but tart and highly concentrated flavour.
Chefs around the world appeared to discover the ingredient in the 1980s when interest in the health benefits of Mediterranean eating habits soared. They were used so promiscuously that they were mocked in one episode of Friends, and one restaurant critic from the New York Times decried their presence in a dish as a sign of a mediocre imagination. Part of the problem was the way industry responded to demand, with US producers filling the market with an inferior offer by dehydrating tomatoes in machines rather than letting the sun do its magic.
Sodastream
First launched in England in 1903, then relocated to Israel, Sodasteam International Ltd makes a type of soda syphon that forces carbon dioxide into water from a pressurised cylinder, enabling users to make fizzy drinks at home, with the help of accompanying flavourings. Heavily promoted with the slogan “Get busy with fizzy” in the UK, they were huge in the 1970s and 80s. This writer remembers being very envious of the one at her childhood best friend’s house.
But, despite partnerships with well-known drinks brands like Fanta, Irn-Bru, and Kool-Aid, as well as with household goods manufacturers like Samsung who incorporated the fizz-maker into fridges, Sodastream’s buzz has gone relatively flat, after years of boycotts due to their base in a West Bank settlement, concerns about waste and sustainability, and growing trends for healthier, more natural beverages.
The multi-bird roast
Here’s a trend going back to Roman times and beloved in medieval times, particularly of King Henry VIII of England. Essentially, it involves stuffing poultry inside other poultry or game birds and roasting them together, traditionally inside a presumably enormous pie crust, to prevent the whole from drying out. Geese, turkey, duck, chicken, guinea fowl, pigeon, woodcock … any or all might be found in this dish.
One 19th-century version, made by a chef whose name is almost as layered as the roast itself (for the curious: Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimond de la Reyniere), involved 17 unfortunate creatures. Originally about showing off to guests, the dish is more likely to inspire opprobrium in today’s world, given the spread of vegetarianism and growing distaste for ostentatious displays of consumerism.
