Doesn’t slice it with me

I know I’m not the only one who gets frustrated with abuse of culinary terms and I’m sure that Vittore Carpaccio is turning in his grave also at the thought of his name being erroneously bandied around on menus the world over. Of course this great Italian painter from the Venetian school died in 1526 long before the dish was named after him but that’s no excuse for not taking his posthumous feelings into account. He didn’t of course do anything special, in the culinary field to deserve having a dish named after him, I mean he didn’t particularily like beef or prefer his food to be finely sliced as far as we know, he just happened to have a famous surname and be an artist and that was reason enough for Harry’s Bar in Venice to honour his memory.
Guiseppe Cipriani, probably gets more upset than me because he created the dish in 1950 on the occasion of an exhibition of the works of Vittore Carpaccio who used lots of reds and whites in his paintings. One of Guiseppe’s customers could not eat cooked meat and so Carpaccio was invented, a dish of wafer thin, raw, red beef drizzled with a white mayonnaise based sauce – simple, elegant, delicious, until that is of course, the culinary cowboys rode into town and having neither any respect for culinary tradition nor understanding of how the dish came about, they started firing off their versions of carpaccio in every direction and flavour, in the mistaken belief that carpaccio was some sort of culinary instruction which meant finely sliced.
Now we have seared carpaccio, tuna carpaccio, salmon carpaccio, beetroot carpaccio, pineapple carpaccio, carpaccio of tomatoes, of strawberries, of smoked beef, and of smoked venison. It’s garnished with rocket, shaved parmesan, balsamic vinegar, shaved fennel, wasabi caviar ( I don’t know – you work it out ), organic peach salad, shaved black truffles, lemon grass froth, mesclun greens, grilled figs – what a cabaret. I have no doubt that all these concoctions taste absolutely fabulous but why, for chrissake, don’t they just describe it as ” Finely sliced raw bulls testicles poised on a leafy woodland bed of soft wild herbs dew picked at dawn and lightly caressed with essence of frog’s glandular excretions and topped with crispy pan seared rabbit droppings” after all that’s how these culinary giants enchantingly describe the other dishes on their menus.
If you want to taste Carpaccio of beef then Harry’s Bar and the Cipriani restaurant in New York still serve it as Guiseppe intended. They also serve a pretty mean Bellini, peach juice and sparkling wine, another of Guiseppe’s painter-inspired creations and aren’t we lucky that cocktail barmen have resisted the temptation to put a ” new twist ” on traditional drinks otherwise God only knows what you would get when you ordered your Gin and Tonic!