Chow has a nifty article up about how to plate food attractively as part of their design week series. Plating is one of the characteristics of a restaurant meal that generally differentiates it from a home cooked one. After all, no one at home cares that your pasta lacks the delicious parsley garnish or your meatloaf doesn't stay quite... loafish.
The part of the article that I found most interesting was this part: "DON’T: Put an even number of items on a plate." Having never really thought about this until today, I wondered how one could ever do it any other way. For example, pasta. Pasta is served by itself, with a separate dish of salad. OR, serve it on a plate with salad and garlic bread on the side. Either two singular plates, or one plate with three. Of course!
Or, take for example, an oddly healthy trio I cooked last week. Lentils with roasted tomatoes, broccoli with with garlic and soy sauce, and roasted acorn squash. Three just make sense. What would the fourth addition have been?
I like threes in other places as well. For example, when I write, I like to use lists of three, i.e. "see X, be amazed by Y and discover Z." Four wouldn't work their. Neither would two. The reason offered by Chow is plausible: "Having an odd number of foods (three is best) on a plate gives the dish visual tension, making it exciting to look at. Even numbers look too geometrically static and staid." Is that my problem? Not enough tension and too staid? I don't usually think about food in this sort of blatantly visual way.
It won't necessarily taste better if it looks better, but it couldn't hurt, right?
Tuesday, November 28, 2006
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2 comments:
maybe i'll think about plating when i graduate to grown-up (read: non-plastic) dishes.
in the meantime, i'd like to see a picture of your visually asymmetrical and healthful vegetarian trio.
one more thing: guess who has suddenly discovered the need for a punchbowl?
Balls. I didn't take a picture.
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