Just before Christmas, a friend shared a hilarious find: a Fisher-Price Charcuterie Board Set for the preschooler in your life. It has “marble” plates, marble-and-wood cutting board and wooden spreaders. It has stemmed grape bunches, a wheel of brie, crackers and a small salami, sliced invitingly. Napkins say, “You’re Grape” and “Let it Brie.”
Since then, there has been a surprising uptick of various charcuterie boards on my Pinterest feed. I can only assume it is a trendy trend that is trending.
The classic style would be some sliced meats, your salamis and prosciutto; some cheeses – hard and soft; your seeded olives; and maybe some dried fruits, like figs or apricots. Maybe there are some bread sticks or crackers to round it off.
The next level has multiple styles of the above, plus dipping sauces and oils and chutneys and spreads, plus fresh fruits and nuts.
Or you can go full decadent and have a dessert board, or a s’mores board, or a decorate-a-cookie board, or a rainbow fruit salad board, or a gender reveal board. (I think I made that last one up… but I’m not going to search for one, because if it exists, I will need to unplug the Wi-Fi for a long while.)
Things like this make me think about how we will look back on this, decades in the future. Remember the fondue pots of the 70s? Oranges and yellows and avocado greens, embellished with mushrooms or owls or flower on a table surrounded by people wearing polyester and wide bell bottoms and even wider ties, in a dining room decorated with striped, flocked wallpaper and chairs that swiveled. We snicker now, but melted cheese and bread is not ever going to be not delicious.
Or how about Jell-O salads, with everything from carrots to pear chunks to cottage cheese? Was it even a holiday if there wasn’t one brought out in a Pyrex dish? No.
Some trends have stayed with us a little longer than others. When I was a little girl, bread was served with dinner. Let me clarify: Wonder bread slices, generously slathered with butter. (That’s if the butter wasn’t cold – if it was cold, you had chunks of butter on torn up bits of dough, which is as scrumptious as it sounds.)
On Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter we celebrated with Parker House rolls – fancy! Then it evolved to French bread, then croissants, then rustic French bread and garlic bread, then gluten-free bread. Somewhere in there Hawaiian bread and breadsticks – plain and garlic – made their way to the table, but always, bread.
Salads, too, have undergone evolutions, while remaining a constant: from plain old torn up iceberg lettuce to spring greens, basic macaroni to marinated pasta, bunches to bagged, torn to chopped, layered to tossed, with everything in between.
I have vivid memories of being served a scoop of cottage cheese on a pineapple ring, nestled on a leaf of iceberg lettuce, as a salad. It had a festive sprinkling of paprika and a maraschino cherry on the top, as if it were a festive sundae next to the meatloaf and mashed potatoes. (I was a suspicious child, always alert to someone trying to sneak something past me. If it is delicious on its own, it needs no decoration!)
I guess if you think about the pretend charcuterie board, it isn’t so strange. To today’s littles a tea set means nothing… to be relevant, it should be a tall latte cup, with an expresso machine and device to froth milk, right? The accompanying pieces could be shelf-stable containers of various milks –everything from nonfat to almond and soy – and scones. And what about little protein boxes with mini carrots, wedges of brie and a pretend hard-boiled egg?
Hang on. That box sounds very similar to the charcuterie set, doesn’t it? Maybe the foodies at Fisher-Price have been paying attention to real life, after all.
I guess the items and trends don’t matter so much as the pretend play, and the interactions they solicit. I will happily accept a pretend bunch of grapes or a cup of imaginary tea, and delight in the giggles as I extend a pinky. Cheers!
