2012: how did it taste to you?

For me, this was the year of pimped dirty food, as burgers, chicken wings and hot dogs all went gourmet.

• • Jay Rayner
  • The Observer, Saturday 8 December 2012 21.00 GMT.  
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  • As it stutters to its end, let me ask: how did 2012 taste for you? Twenty years from now what flavour would catapult you back to the year we hosted the Olympics, Jimmy Savile turned out to be exactly the sort of man so many of us thought he was and a Tory MP nobody liked resigned her party whip by going into the jungle? For me it is a mixture of tomato puree, brown sugar and a hit of vinegar and chilli. Or barbecue sauce, as it's known. For 2012 was the year of pimped dirty food, when a deepening recession sent skilled cooks heading towards the gutter, the better to look up at the stars.
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    There were long smoked ribs and vajazzled hot dogs and chicken wings smeared with the salty hit of Korean chilli sauce. There were pulled pork buns, and slabs of pork belly, long braised, quick seared, and wrapped up with more Korean hot sauce and the crunch of spring onions. There was butter milk fried chicken. There was an epidemic of filthy burgers in glazed brioche buns. In 2012, if eating it didn't require you to mop your wrists with 14 tissues afterwards it wasn't real food. Come 2032, if you give me a hockey puck of minced prime Aberdeen Angus, pink at its heart, a crisp rasher of dry cured streaky, and a slice of west country cheddar with such a tang it's almost on the turn, I'll be right back there. Which is to say, right back here.
    
    Not everybody can use flavour as an access point for memory. The crown prince of all this is supposed to be Marcel Proust, who apparently conjures up an entire universe from one Madeleine and a cup of weak tea. It's a nice literary device, but I've never completely believed it. You have to be constantly hungry to use food as a route back to experience, not the sort of person known for coughing plaintively into a handkerchief then checking it for spotting.....
  • http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/dec/08/2012-year-in-food