Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Many people call me uncultured in the ways of food. I can't cook. I can't stand any level of spice. My favourite meals are cheese sandwiches for lunch, beef stew for dinner (no herbs) and plain toast for breakfast; and when alone I live off a diet of various configurations of egg, bread and cheese. I don't really have a penchant for foreign cuisines (except Japanese because I'm a weeaboo), and when I do eat them I prefer any heat or exotic seasoning fully Anglicised away. However, I am not in any way a "food is fuel" guy, and accusations of that ilk let slip a culinary arrogance more befitting a Parisian restaurateur than a guy who went to a Laotian curryhouse once. However I will admit a degree of voluntary ignorance on the topic of food. I have no interest in "expanding my palette", or being a "foodie" or even spending a great deal of time worrying about food at all. For me food exists as a pleasant constant, I eat just as I breath or sleep. These are natural functions which I take delight in, especially when they are of good quality, but don't worship or idolise or spend my time thinking about. I just want normal food that tastes like its meant to.
Like many things, I find exposure to diversity dangerous in food. Often the people who forgo the simplicity of bread and cheese for extravagant oriental flavours find it difficult to return to normality after their fling with ambrosia, such as we were warned about by the Greeks. It isn't that bread & cheese are worse that these other foods, on the contrary, but that these exotic foods overload ones sense of taste and make it impossible to appreciate a more delicate beauty. A flower won't look as pretty after you've stared into the sun for a few minutes after all. Personally I don't feel ready to move beyond bread and cheese, and I doubt I ever will; there's so much more to explore in that world that tofu and foie-gras will have to wait another few lifetimes for their turn. I like eating plain toast because then I can taste the toast, yes one could smother it in jam (strawberry please), but then you will never understand the true nature of the toast underneath. And its not like bread (or cheese) are "boring" foods, they are two of the most developed food categories in Western civilisation. You could spend a lifetime dedicated to searching out every rare form of the two from across the myriad communities of Western Europe alone, and every year there are still amazing innovations that shock the bread & cheese world. There are 927 recorded varieties of cheese in England alone, and so many in France nobody has been able to count. How could I possibly try a whole new type of food when there are still so many cheeses I've yet to encounter? It would be madness! For me to explore the depths of these few is worth far more than a skimming of the surface of "world-cuisine" in the name of vanity, greed or even curiosity.
The reason I'm writing this article (apart from it being Sunday evening and nearly forgetting to write anything) is that I was recently pressganged into watching the film "Ratatouille" in a vague attempt to babysit my nephew/nieces. It's not a bad film, I liked it when I was younger, but while watching it I realised that there are a surprising amount of references to the real-life culinary scene of Paris which I spent most of the runtime googling, taking me down a rabbithole (rat-tunnel?) of "Haute Cuisine Parisienne". The film was created partially in remembrance of the the lead story writer's favourite chef: Monsieur "Bernard Loiseau". A melancholic and intense personality, Loiseau was the prodigy of the chef who spearheaded "Nouvelle Cuisine" in postwar Paris. To understand where I am going with this we will have explain some terminology. In general, French cuisine is split into high and low styles: high for restaurants and low for homes. After the French Revolution and the (supposed) dissolution of the class system, high "Haute Cuisine" evolved from "Cuisine Bourgeoise", which emphasised exotic ingredients and ostentatious wealth, to "Cuisine Classique", which instead emphasised the delicate and skillful preparation of traditional French ingredients available to the peasantry. Classique became so popular that it came to symbolise "France" in the Victorian Era, and is still where we in Britain get most of our stereotypes about French food from. This includes "fancy" forms of food preparation such as "Dauphinoise Potatoes" (proudly read "Dolphin-noise" in English), or weird foods like frogs-legs and snails which were eaten by the middle classes in a pretend solidarity with the poor, in the hope they could retain their heads (which to be fair is one of the few acceptable reasons to eat such things). The genre of food was modernised by the legendary chef "Auguste Escoffier" at the dawn of the 20th century, who codified the central rules of French cooking and developed a pan-French menu that bolstered national identity in line with the nationalist political movements of the time. Soon after, and potentially as a result of such movements, France suffered two world wars and about twenty rewrites of their unwavering constitution. This upheaval in postwar France was fertile ground for the development of that specific form of abstract modernism which quickly spread from Ile-de-France to the rest of the world and became a marker of the new world elite. In the culinary space this movement was known as "Nouvelle Cuisine", which emphasises lightness, freshness, presentation and required a meaning behind every dish.
Here we return to the chefs of Ratatouille: Claude Verger was a prominent chef in Paris who was a important player in the development of Nouvelle Cuisine, raising the young Bernard Loiseau in its strict principles. From a young age, Loiseau was pushed by Verger to develop a style of cuisine so personal it would be immediately recognisable as his own to anyone who had eaten his food before, but without straying from the fundamental ingredients of the art. At the age of just 24 Loiseau was installed as head-chef at Verger's Michelin Star restaurant (the youngest Michelin star chef of all time), and by 31 he owned his own restaurant, which was awarded the ultimate prize of three Michelin Stars in 1991. The epitome of a French chef, Loiseau was eccentric, dedicated and probably insane. He was a common sight on French television, and used his quirky personality and (weird) charisma to propel himself into culinary stardom and the peak restaurateur of "Nouvelle Cuisine". Away from the cameras, however, it seems Loiseau was a depressive character, often disappearing from his restaurant for days at a time. So dedicated to his craft he was that his mood was controlled entirely by the reviews of critics and newspapers. In the late 1990s "Nouvelle Cuisine" was coming to be seen as old, and in France "L'Ancien Regime" is always out, and the whatever is new is in. And what was new was "Cuisine Fusion", a term that very happily moved across the channel in its unaltered form, but had its birth in France. But while in Britain we see fusion cuisine as a quirky, but not serious movement, in Paris it most certainly was serious as all food-related things are. The critics of the age began to focus almost solely on the new flavours it brought over, and restaurants like Loiseau's were all but left in the dirt. To Loiseau "Cuisine Fusion" was against everything he loved in "Haute Cuisine" both Classique and Nouvelle. Fusion was a return to the days of "Cuisine Bourgeoise", ostentatious meals prepared with ingredients whose exotic flavours and foreign names were the main attraction rather than good food. The simplicity of a fresh tomato or a clove of garlic were being shunned for plantains and acai (whatever they are). Sacrebleu! C'est honteux! There was no way Loiseau was ever turn his back on the ingredients of his beloved "La France". But the momentum of the movement left him behind, and his anti-revolutionary stance was looked at harshly by the "progressive" world of Parisian cuisine. In 2003 a report on his restaurant was released which hinted that his restaurant was to knocked down to just two stars by Michelin. Several weeks later he shot himself in the head with a shotgun behind his restaurant.
The plot of Ratatouille takes place after Loiseau's death in his restaurant, with the a chef and his rat carrying on Loiseau's tradition of Cuisine Nouvelle. In the climax of the story we see famous food critic "Anton Ego" (great name) return to the restaurant. He is a caricature of the man who wrote the original report which caused the real-life Loiseau to commit suicide. In the intervening time he has become tired of the newfangled meals of the modern Parisian scene, and is ultimately charmed by the titular dish "Ratatouille", a simple peasant meal made from common ingredients and served plainly. Ego experiences some form of "ego-death" (not really but its funny) and gives up his pretentious ways of chasing "la mode", retiring from criticism forever. In a way I think this conclusion was meant as a "good end" for Loiseau, dreamt up by the film's writer to prove Loiseau right. A way to reconcile his beliefs with a world that thought it knew better. A world that rejected bread and cheese only to come crawling back after its too late...
