A Requiem for Grilled Cheese

By WALTER SHAPIRO

While upscale foodies have been proudly learning the gastronomic alphabet (A is for arugula, B for balsamic vinegar and C for imported chevre), mainstream America has been mounting a kitchen counterrevolution by mastering new cooking techniques like zapping and nuking. With microwave ovens now installed in three-quarters of the nation's kitchens, the U.S. is in the midst of a food upheaval that may leave taste buds as imperiled as the Panamanian drug trade.

The microwave oven is not to blame: it is not machines that kill taste but the people who use them. What is destroying American cuisine is the growing fetish for cooking entire dinners during the commercial breaks on Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. "Unlike in Europe, where someone might savor the experience of food," says Joel Weiner, the former executive vice president of Kraft, "Americans have gone the other way in a rapid-fire, lowest-common- denominator world."

Make no mistake, America has not yet reached that degraded state where most people gulp down microwavable products rather than food. But in a nation of harried two-income families, where meals are primarily an opportunity for refueling, it is hard to dismiss market researcher Faith Popcorn's bold prediction that "there aren't going to be stoves very soon." Others forecast that by 1995 half of all American kitchens will play home on the range with two microwaves. A Wall Street Journal survey found that 75% of Americans believe the microwave oven has made "life a lot better." Consumer demand is so keen that the food industry is racing to catch the microwave. Packaged products primarily designed to be hyperheated in these kitchen reactors have exploded into a more than $2 billion-a-year industry. To distinguish old-line cooking from microwave preparation, food-marketing experts are actually beginning to use "stovetop" as a verb (as in "Most Americans still stovetop dinner").

There are, of course, food purists who treat the microwave with the disdain once reserved for Cheez Whiz -- a product, incidentally, that is undergoing a dramatic resurrection because it is so gooily microwavable. Julia Child generously calls the microwave a "wonderful invention" before adding with a sniff, "I don't go in for it myself. I like regular cooking. I like to smell the food, poke it and look at it."

Still, there is a grudging consensus that the microwave prepares certain foods, like fresh vegetables, very well indeed. Roger Berkowitz, co-owner of the highly regarded Legal Sea Foods restaurants in the Boston area, has become a convert to microwaving shrimp and lobsters at home, though he warns that "you have about ten seconds to leave the room, or you see their claws hit the oven window." Both microwave-oven size and New England tradition militate against applying this technique in his restaurants. As Berkowitz puts it, "How do you tell someone, 'I just nuked your lobster'? "

Cookbook-author Barbara Kafka (Microwave Gourmet) has quieted many culinary Luddites with dishes like her almost effortless microwave risotto. A sampled batch was creamy, a bit chewy and nearly identical to risotto made from the traditional Italian recipe that requires 35 minutes of nonstop, laborious stirring. "Microwaves don't cook everything well," Kafka cautions. "Manufacturers originally claimed that they were a magic pill that could do anything. They can -- badly."

The microwave industry is now willing to concede that the ovens have built- in limitations. They are maladroit at browning and frying, stymied by breads and pastries, and even the ubiquitous four-minute microwaved potato comes out closer to boiled than baked. But many Americans are so entranced with near instantaneous, one-appliance cooking convenience that they seem oblivious to these deficiencies. In response to consumer demand, Campbell's Soup puts microwave directions on all its products, even those ill suited to zappity-doo-dah cooking. The Corning Glass Works has had only limited success in marketing special cookware designed to enhance the sensory quality and texture of microwaved meals.

"We've found that people don't want to spend $29.95 for something to help brown their food," says Cornelius O'Donnell, consumer-products spokesman for Corning. "There's a whole new generation who won't remember what traditional food used to look or taste like -- or care."

Food companies have been reformulating zap-resistant products in an uphill struggle to make them palatable -- even though "microwave crunchy" is an oxymoron. Whether it is Ore-Ida Microwave Hash Browns or Taste o'Sea Fish Fillets, the glutinous pseudobrowned coatings make one long for the aesthetic pleasures of airline food. So too with breads. Swanson (owned by Campbell) puts out a "Great Starts" microwave breakfast bagel that is filled with a decidedly unkosher ham-and-cheese combination and may represent a food maven's worst nightmare. Forget the affront to Jewish tradition; American culinary history, after all, is the story of the blanding out of ethnic cuisine. What is unforgivable is what the microwave does to the crunch of a bagel: the Swanson product is akin to a sawdust doughnut. But as Richard Nelson, Campbell's director of market research, gamely puts it, "For someone who doesn't know about bagels, this may be a great taste."

That is the problem: palates are adjusting to microwave mania. Nelson himself loudly mourns the passing of the traditional grilled-cheese sandwich in favor of microwaved glop masquerading under the same name. "I've got two teenage kids, and they've never used the stove," he complains. "For them, taste and texture have been redefined by the microwave." So savor every crispy piece of fried chicken, each old-fashioned baked potato and -- yes -- each brown and toasty grilled-cheese sandwich. It could be your last chance to eat a truly endangered species, American home cooking.