The Tastemakers Read Free

legacy or simply vanish into history, like the fondue set gathering dust in my parent’s basement?
    Finally, I wanted to come to terms with my own complex relationship with food trends. Were they indeed nothing more than a series of passing fads, a product of hype and bandwagon jumping that had corrupted our dinnertime? Or were they a force for good, opening minds and cultural opportunities, broadening our understanding of what we eat, cook, and grow?
    Could I put aside my prejudices, tamp down my emotions, and once again stuff my face with cupcakes?



T he earliest cookbook references to cupcakes (or, rather, “cup cakes”) reportedly date back to the late eighteenth century, though it’s likely that miniature cakes, in some form or another, arose at the same time as, well, big cakes. On the Food Timeline, an online resource of food history, they are referred to as cupcakes, Vienna cakes, Queen cakes, fairy cakes, and Charlotte Russe, which was a simple sponge cake in cardboard, covered in whipped cream. The twentieth century saw cupcakes rise to their current form thanks to innovations in food processing technology, which allowed for packaged cake mixes and a rainbow of colored icing options. Months after World War I ended, Hostess launched its plastic-wrapped chocolate cupcake, with its iconic loopy spine of white decorative icing, and the corporate cupcake era officially began, bringing them to grocery stores across the country. Betty Crocker and Duncan Hines mixes followed, along with the Easy-Bake Oven, making the process so simple that cupcakes were often the first foods children made themselves.
    For most of the latter half of the twentieth century cupcakes were a North American bakery fixture along with cookies, brownies, and other sweets occupying space in the display case. They came in vanilla and chocolate and were iced in the same twoflavors, though the icing, which could be buttercream, ganache, or some processed variation, rarely amounted to more than 20 percent of the whole cake. Often they were topped with sprinkles, either chocolate or rainbow, or sometimes those silver-coated sugar ball bearings, called dragée, that rip through your molars like a diamond drill and are legally considered inedible by the Food and Drug Administration.
    During the 1970s and 1980s muffins, not cupcakes, were the star of the bakery business, spurned by the high-fiber diet trend, which was believed to combat heart disease and other ailments. Bran muffins were a fixture atop diner counters and coffee shops everywhere, along with their cohorts, blueberry, banana, carrot, and chocolate chip. There were sugar-free muffins and frozen muffins, miniature muffins and giant muffins, muffin mixes and muffin franchises, including my personal favorite, mmmuffins, a Toronto bakery chain where the crisp top of the muffin was the size of a portobello mmmushroom. Every bakery worth their oven was into muffins, and Ann Warren, in New York City, was no exception.
    â€œWe actually opened up doing homemade-style donuts,” recalled Warren, “but it was really part of the muffin thing when we opened in 1987. Muffins were very, very big. I mean literally. People were into very large muffins.” She made these muffins to sell to other cafés and restaurants, but when a retail space opened up in their Chelsea neighborhood a year later, Warren and her husband figured that selling directly to the public might be an easier way to approach baking. They sold coffee and donuts, muffins, pies, and cakes, and because there was so much cake batter and an abundance of empty muffin pans in the afternoon, they made cupcakes as well. They called the bakery Cupcake Café.
    â€œWe weren’t even trying to be a cupcake café,” said Warren by phone, speaking between baking shifts at the Cupcake Café. “We just came up with the name, really, because we liked the association between cake and a cup of coffee,” not,