PLATING MANIFESTO FEATURE AND PHOTOS BY MAYA OSMAN-KRINSKY No matter how hungry I am, I always take the extra thirty seconds to make my plate look nice. Doesn’t matter if it’s a laborintensive sauce-glossed pasta or butter spread on crackling bread: I lay every component out in an attempt to marry form to function, aesthetic to taste. I plate to impress, even (read: especially) when I am eating alone. It is an act of self-care, a hail-Mary proclamation of love, a final display of affection.
communal activity. Especially now, when it seems like cooking and doing dishes is all we can do to uneasily fill our abundant downtime, it’s important to take extra care in doing the things we absolutely must do to survive. If not for gastronomical purposes, it’s at least an attempt at a pastime that hasn’t yet been exhausted. It’s a wonderful feeling to be excited about the food in front of you, and plating nicely does that.
I get a lot of shit for this. I am the friend who will stand up to take aerial shots of a restaurant spread, who will get up close and personal with a sliced beet, a tangle of fresh fettuccine, a mess of glistening schmaltz. It’s true that my phone often eats before I do (here’s the shameless plug for @inmayasbelly, my (self-)indulgent food Instagram account), but I’d argue that the same people who poke fun at me don’t realize that the eye eats even before the phone. So much of how a plate looks is responsible for how excited we get to eat it.
I’m a big fan of beautiful food to begin with—anything bright in a shallow bowl has my heart—but I do think there’s a special circle of hell for food that sacrifices flavor for looks. Presentation, when it accompanies good flavor, is as much of an ingredient as olive oil, spices, aromatics, or salt. It’s another way to showcase effort and infuse that much more love into a dish; tinkering with all the bits and pieces forces us to slow down, to think about a way that the composition of food on the plate can mirror the dance the flavors will do in the mouth.
I won’t deny that in this social media-riddled era, there is a part of the process that begs to be photographed. Especially in a moment where the only social interactions we can have are through networking platforms, there’s a certain joy in visually sharing meals—my family sent dinner pictures back and forth almost every night during the most intense points of lockdown. But the goal of cooking, for me, is not to post the final product on the internet. It’s an escape.
This is not to say that food that isn’t plated with extreme intention can’t look (and taste) good. Some of my favorite things to eat are so beautiful in their simplicity: piles of pappardelle drowned in ragú, lumpy compotes over a bowl of equally lumpy yogurt, and a good old baguette-end elbow with a thumbprint of butter shoved inside. Not everything will look fussy, and sometimes forcing it too hard negates the intended effect. In fact, sometimes not putting the food on the plate is equally appetizing—there’s something so beautiful about standing over the stove eating straight out of the pot, or balancing a burning hot piece of toast on your fingertips as you spray crumbs all over the kitchen floor— but when you are presenting something to yourself and to others, a plating aesthetic comes into play, even if it is still in the pot or the pan. Understanding your meal as art and highlighting its key parts, especially when eating alone, is an indication that you’re having fun with it; food is more satisfying when paid attention to. So I will keep drizzling, sprinkling, and smearing, for myself and for the foreseeable future.
Having the time and resources to access fresh food and be able to thoughtfully prepare it is a huge privilege right now, and one that I am leaning on heavily to stay sane. Creating something delicious that is also pleasing to look at helps me focus on eating, and forces me to put down whatever else it is that I’m doing and appreciate how all of the flavors on the plate and in my mouth interact with one another. It also preserves something of the ritual of the meal, setting it apart from the rest of the day both psychologically and temporally. The beauty of this solo act is knowing that it is a new way of understanding a traditionally 22 bite | fall 2020