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| It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a fish! |
There’s a Chinese proverb that says “Man who waits for roast
duck to fly into mouth must wait very, very long time.” The point of it is
twofold: a) you can’t sit around waiting for people to do things for you, and b)
roast ducks can’t fly, duh.
Here we have a cooked fish leaping through the air from a
river of toasted almonds.
At first you might think this is a tad ridiculous, because
well, duh. But think about it from the food stylist’s point of view: the trout
doesn’t appear to be suspended in any way; it really does seem to have been
photographed mid-leap — and those almonds don’t do that by themselves.
Therefore, someone had to rig a fish-flinging mechanism of some kind under the
bed of almonds in order to shoot it through. But even when cooked, trout are
somewhat floppy. So it probably had to be made stiff by the insertion of a
projectile or stiffening agent of some kind. Lacquer, maybe. Glue.
The result is a rather dynamic leap off the page, sure — but
does it have to be so brown?
Great Dinners from LIFE, Eleanor Graves, 1969