Had enough pumpkin soup yet?

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A lunch two weeks ago was the first day in weeks when I wasn’t offered pumpkin (poitiron) soup as an amuse-gueule or first course.  Yes, it’s winter, yes it’s probably at its height and well-priced, but does everyone have to follow the leader.  Indeed, who is the leader?    In the good old days, people searching for ideas went down to Lyon to see what the masters were cooking up and often brought back dishes to Paris that were practically homages to the gods who created them (Point, Troisgros, Bocuse, etc).  One website recently even devoted several pages to talking about recreating Alain Ducasse’s famous mashed potatoes.    That’s all well and good.  But this pumpkin business has a different origin I think.  Remember the Fall, I think it was 1968, when all vegetables in Parisian restaurants (from Quick to Lucas-Carton) were pureed; you got purees of stuff that had never seen a blender before in their gastronomic history.  Sure, part of that was technology, e.g., the birth of the Cuisinart, but part was fad and follow.    Then there were the millefeuilles of everything under the sun: meat, game, offal, vegetables, fruits, you name it.  And who can forget the year of the “exotic fruits” – kiwis, passion fruit, mangos, papayas, etc.  Then we had tarts, again of a wide variety of ingredients, old-time desserts (ile flottant, rice pudding, baba au rhum), grains of salt (boeuf gros sel), foamed sauces (Detourbe being the Master of Fluff), chestnut soup, fish with red wine sauce and raw fish and raw crustaceans.  Just when you thought they’d run out of weird fads – we now have frozen oysters.    Now I read a lot of magazines, too many I’m told, but I never see them say – “hey guys, next season we’ll all be doing melons filled with Campari with baie berries.”  But there must be a central trend center somewhere out there that disseminates such precious information so that no one, no matter how lowly, is left out.    So what’s the solution to this culinary copycat epidemic?  Remember the gas crisis in the US when you could only get gas on odd or even days depending on your license plate’s last digit? Well, I propose that next year, 1/3 of the chefs get instructions to do one fad food, 1/3 another one and the final 1/3 fend for themselves; it would make it more interesting, wouldn’t it? 
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