And you sneered at Mom's canned soup casseroles!

An article in Saturday's online Wall Street Journal -- Gourmet Canned Cuisine -- revealed something very interesting:  a lot of megabuck dishes at fancy restaurants owe their spirits to supermarket prepared foods:

It's a little-known fact about today's high-end cooking: Chefs are increasingly using ordinary, low-cost -- you might even call them lowbrow -- ingredients available in any supermarket, stuff that the humblest home cook would hesitate to serve at a dinner party. Take David Bouley, of Bouley and Danube in New York, who is opening David Bouley Evolution in Miami Beach in early December. The sauce for his $21 Hawaiian yellowtail appetizer at Bouley starts with a base of Heinz ketchup.

That's right.  The dishes you pay a week's salary for at places like New York's Tocqueville, Chicago's Avenue and San Francisco's Myth may very well contain things like Frito's Corn Chips, Kraft Singles, Wonder Bread, dehydrated potato flakes -- even Altoids (the secret of a the sauce on a $90 roast lamb au jus at Avenue.)

I'm of two minds about this.  I'm a great believer in what the chef's quoted in the article called the "Alice Waters school of cooking," referring to the use of "farm-fresh local and organic ingredients" championed by Chez Panisse in Berkley, CA.  And I find the already astonishing prices at good restaurants even harder to swallow when the ingredients are the stuff I can find in the cheapest markets.

On the other hand, what *do* we pay for?  An enjoyable meal.  The mark of a great chef is creativity.  Unless you are politically opposed to prepared foods to begin with, does it matter that much that one of the ingredients in a creative dish is Heinz ketchup or Hellman's mayonnaise?  A few months ago, one of the food writers for the New York Times insisted that the secret of creamy macaroni and cheese is processed American Cheese.  Now we know that Mindy Segal at Hot Chocolate (Chicago) agrees, and adds it to Roth Käse Gruyère "'a really expensive' aged cheese".

The lesson here is really for food snobs.  It reminds me of the initial reaction when Cuisinart first introduced consumer food processors.  "I don't eat processed food!" a friend of mine sneered.  Then people found out that the Cuisinarts were versions of the more industrial Robo-Coupe that restaurants had used for years.

If the dish works -- if it tastes good, and the ingredients aren't poisonous -- think twice before you sneer.