Chowder and the English Language.

Last week, the DI/DO, in the process of pointing out that daishi is, like, so hot right now, offered this nugget:

Dashi’s smoky nose is what appeals to Gabriel Bremer, the chef at Salts, in Cambridge, Mass. He suffuses a light cream sauce with dashi to subtly mimic the smokiness of bacon, applying the emulsion in a deconstructed New England fish chowder.

I am not sure who this Harris Salat is, but let's hope that his appearances in DI/DO remain mercifully intermittent. It was the "deconstructed,"* a noted Cod peeve, that caught my attention, but the entire second sentence is remarkably unalloyed bullshit. First "suffuse" is to "spread over," so unless it's a parfait, it's the wrong world. It sounds fancier than "mix," but "mix" would seem to be the word that describes what's happening. Split infinitives may be my lonely crusade, but as usual, the adverb here can easily be chopped. Then "applying the emulsion in a deconstructed New England fish chowder"? It might be an emulsion, though I am not confident of that, but what the fuck is a "deconstructed New England clam chowder"? It does not appear on the current Salts menu, though lots of wincing quotation marks do, so it's not clear if the name is Bremer's or Salat's. But if you put the ingredients for a chowder on a plate, you have a mise, not a deconstruction. More generally, this is a contemporary example of the kind of nonsense Orwell got after back in the day. Hard to imagine a single sentence that could manage to piss off fans of both Orwell and Derrida, but this is the one. Am I reading journalism more closely than intended? Maybe, but this is America's Paper of record, so are sentences that make sense asking too much?

*It's remarkable how free the NYT is with this word, considering they chose to throw Derrida under the bus when he died.

Comments

[gastropoda]

Oh. Crap. I missed the best thing in the section? I got so distracted by Panchito's plumbing in the forest. And the print version has all gone so grimly gray it's hard to see what to read (once upon a time, though, an obscurity like This One would have been ID'd in the caption for those of us reading along at home who don't know from chefs in Amurka).

[Frodnesor]

But "suffuses" sounds SO MUCH like "infuses," which is what was intended - isn't that close enough? Besides, the author had used "infuse" already - twice!