SC - "No Naked Food" Suprise

[Shari Burnham]

Decker, Terry D. wrote:

> > Cool story! I think, though, that while there plenty of recipes that
> > suggest
> > specific garnishes of fried onions (Hi, Bear!), fried almonds, pomegranite
> > kernels, flowers, a dusting of spice powder, etc., many do not. I'd say
> > it's
> > likely that some foods were garnished, and that many were (gasp!) _NAKED_
> > !!!
> >
> > Adamantius
> >
> Doesn't bother me, I like onions.  I do keep remember the face of a friend
> to whom onions cause severe gastric distress confronted with a feast where
> onions were in every dish and no one told him.  A cook who uses the same
> ingredient in every dish simply has no imagination.
>
> But here's a question for you.  What constitutes a garnish and what
> constitutes an integral part of the dish?
>
> As an example, let me quote Piers Plowman, "Upon my soul, I haven't a scrap
> of bacon, and I haven't a cook to fry you steak and onions."  Are the onions
> a garnish or integral to the dish?
>

To me, reading just from the line above, the onions are part of the dish, the
bacon the flavoring (like butter or oil).  And to go from the next comment:

IMO, a "garnish" is something that is added for its aesthetic (usually
visual) appeal and isn't cooked into the flavor of the underlying dish.  If
you leave the radish flower off the plate, it's drab; if you leave the
onions out of steak and onions, it's a different dish.

It was always my belief that not only should the garnish be aesthetic, but
edible. Using the standard parsley, edible, good for your breath, adds a little
color to possibly dull plate.

Unless it's a plastic frog.  Which appeared in my drink at the bar this
weekend.  And I didn't notice it until the bottom.  What happened to umbrellas?

> Bear
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