CHOCOLATE TREND: CHOCOLATE DESSERTS TAKE THE CAKE IN CULINARY HISTORY

With the New Year upon us, we traditionally take stock of the year just ended and look ahead to the future. Thus, The Associated Press selects the top story of the previous year (the presidential election no surprise there), movie critics identify the best and worst films of the past season in anticipation of the academy awards, and financial seers make predictions about the best investments for the coming year.

The food world is no exception. But what constitutes a food trend is not always straightforward, as the Cambridge World History of Food (at more than 2,000 pages the most comprehensive reference work on food ever published and itself one of the culinary highlights of the previous year) points out.

A trend, after all, is similar to but not quite the same thing as a fad, which, according to Jeffrey M. Pilcher writing in the Cambridge tome, often involves socially deviant, cultlike eating behavior. As he notes, "Sophisticated diners who flock to Ethiopian restaurants one month and to Thai restaurants the next ... qualify as faddists but not necessarily deviants."

Moreover, though new trends emerge to replace old ones, a true trend has to give some promise of not being a mere flash in the saucepan, so to speak. As nutritionist Pat Kendall, echoing the work of A. Elizabeth Sloan, reminds us, "It's usually the fringe patterns that become mainstream 20 years down the road." The so-called health food movement is a case in point. Once considered a mere fad, as Pilcher observes, it is now nutritional orthodoxy. More than likely the same fate does not await the gourmet lollipop trend in evidence at many five-star restaurants where smoked salmon, foie gras and goat cheese suckers are served to patrons as appetizers. The eventual fate of the deep-fried turkey, which has become so popular that the New Orleans Fire Department now routinely distributes safety tips for its preparation, remains to be seen.

Then, too, sorting through the myriad of new food crazes and trying to determine which is dominant is not easy when, inevitably, many seem to be mutually contradictory. For example, Eben Shapiro in the Wall Street Journal reports that rapid growth in cookbook sales has coincided with a decline in the number of meals eaten at home. Similarly, Nation's Restaurant News identifies both vegetarianism and red meat specialization (in the form of high-end steak houses) as recent restaurant trends. Likewise, Emily Kaiser in a Reuters dispatch indicates that U.S. consumers want food that is both healthy and indulgent and that they don't want to spend lots of time in the kitchen, yet they still want to feel as if they're cooking. This latter trend has produced a proliferation of convenience foods such as meal kits and precut vegetables, which require just enough work to ease guilt.

So, the hazards of prognosticating notwithstanding, what are some of the culinary trends we can look forward to, or dread, in the coming years? Ornelas and Kiple, editors of the massive Cambridge history, suggest the following: refined foods will become more refined, food and cooking will become faster and home cooking will become increasingly dependent on commercially prepared mixes, frozen foods will become ever more popular, but cooking from scratch, fortunately, will never really die, though it will continue to decline. Finally, they fearlessly predict that Americans will get fatter.

Food and Wine Magazine is a bit more specific in its predictions. It foresees Persian mulberries, raki, artisanal soy sauce, Hawaiian poke, bubble tea, wild boar, goat butter, trash fish and stinging nettles as hot items to look out for in 2001. I will!

CNN identifies pharmafoods or nutraceuticals as a trend that is likely to catch on. These are nutrient-added foods like orange juice bolstered with calcium, cholesterol-lowering margarines, omega-3 rich burgers, vitamin intensified ice cream or the Kitchen Prescription line of soups fortified with St. John's wort. Neutraceuticals are among the fastest growing segment of the retail food industry. I'm looking forward to the day when my doctor will tell me to eat two brownies and call him in the morning.

Health consciousness has also spawned demand for organically grown food which, now that there are government standards regulating it, is likely a growing trend, according to experts. Organic foods now can be routinely found in mainstream grocery stores and giants like General Mills and even the Mars candy company have gotten into the act. But at the same time, according to food futurist Art Siemering, in the next 50 years "massfood," uniformly sized, nutritionally correct and practically imperishable, will arrive making organically grown food the ultimate luxury in a processed food world. He argues that natural foods may actually be prohibited in some counties where the government has a stake in massfoods.

Even more frightening, he predicts that by mid-century chocolate conservation will be all but mandatory as a result of recurring worldwide shortages. Most chocolate bars, he prophesizes, will be artificially flavored and "the real thing will be a prized item available at a princely price."

I sincerely hope this is one prediction that does not come true, because though trends come and go, I think it is safe to say that chocolate will continue to hold its place as the ultimate indulgence, and rightly so. Indeed, one of the latest trends involves experimentation with a wide variety of cocoa beans from places such as Venezuela, Ghana and Mexico to produce chocolates with distinctive flavor profiles. It's hardly surprising that Bon Appetit Magazine again named something chocolate as dessert of the year -- molten chocolate cake. The year before more than half the desserts identified as the best of the year contained chocolate, and the year before that the dish of the year was flourless chocolate cake. Thank goodness some things never change!

Molten Chocolate Cake

Chocolate lava or molten cake was hardly new last year. But it certainly came into its own in the year 2000. As this recipe, adapted from Gale Gand's in the latest issue of Bon Appetit demonstrates, the cake is as easy to make as it is decadent.

Ingredients:

5 ounces semisweet chocolate

10 tablespoons butter

3 eggs

3 egg yolks

1 1/2 cups powdered sugar

1/2 cup flour

Directions:

Melt chocolate and butter over low heat and cool slightly. Whisk eggs and yolks to blend. Whisk in sugar, then chocolate mixture, and finally flour. Pour batter into six greased 3/4 cup custard cups. Bake at 450 degrees about 11 minutes, just until sides are set but center is soft and runny.

Listen to A Harte Appetite every Saturday at 11:59 a.m. following "Whad'ya Know" on KRCU, 90.9 on your FM dial. Write A Harte Appetite, c/o The Southeast Missourian, P.O. Box 699, Cape Girardeau, Mo., 63702-0699 or by e-mail to tharte@semovm.semo.edu.