Nostalgia Cooked
September 1, 2026
No. 11

“Hands, please”

The case against ordering just one entrée, and why a restaurant kitchen has more in common with a baseball lineup than most diners realize; the forgotten turkey surplus that turned into a national obsession the same year televisions started showing up in seven out of ten American living rooms; and three things worth your time this week, including one of the best new steakhouses in the country.

Coffee, then read on.

- Chef Tim

There is a growing case against small plates starting all the way back in 2012, and some of the criticism is deserved. Nobody wants to pay $18 for three carrots, then figure out how four people are supposed to share them. A single scallop does not become a shared plate just because the server tells you it is. Restaurants have stretched the definition of small plates far enough that diners have every right to question whether they are actually getting a better experience.

I still think sharing a table full of food with friends is the most enjoyable way to eat in a restaurant. Give me four or five people who are willing to order six or eight dishes, pass everything around and taste as much of the menu as possible.

A restaurant kitchen works a lot like a baseball team, with different positions filled by cooks who have different skills and responsibilities. Ordering one entrée gives you a very narrow look at what that team can do. When you order across the menu, you get to see the technique coming out of garde manger, for instance how the fish cook breaks down and slices a fish for crudo. Then there’s the sauté cook who is figuring out the new gnocchi dish and how the cook on the roast station is handling thirty lamb racks on a Saturday night.

Each dish tells you something different about the people cooking your dinner, and together they give you a much better understanding of the restaurant. That is a huge part of the joy of dining out for me. When I go to a great restaurant, I want to see what this particular group of cooks can do with ingredients, technique and a menu they have spent months developing.

That is probably part of the reason tasting menus worked so well for so long. They allowed a restaurant to show you different cooks, techniques and ingredients over the course of one meal. As tasting menus became longer, more expensive and increasingly removed from the way many people actually want to eat, sharing food offered another way to experience a broad section of a kitchen without committing to three hours and a huge bill.

Of course, this only works when you bring the right people. If Aunt Peggy does not eat fish, hates anything spicy and prefers to stay firmly inside her comfort zone, a small plates restaurant is probably not the place for family dinner. Take Peggy to Joe Shmo’s Brasserie, let her order the chicken and enjoy the evening.

When you have a table of people who genuinely enjoy eating together, order big and spread yourselves across the menu. Get something cold, something raw, something from sauté and something coming off the grill or out of the oven. Pass everything around, taste what each part of the kitchen is doing and fight over who gets the last bite of the best dish. Don't let the last bite sit there, either eat it or make your friend eat it.

Before service, the whole crew huddles up and someone tells the story behind the food. Pull up a crate, you’re on the line tonight.

In 1953, Swanson has a turkey problem after badly overestimating how much Americans will eat for Thanksgiving. According to the story that becomes part of TV Dinner history, the company is left with 260 tons of frozen turkey sitting in ten refrigerated railroad cars. Swanson needs to figure out what to do with all of it before it becomes an incredibly expensive mistake.

Salesman Gerry Thomas is often credited with the solution. Inspired by the compartmentalized trays used to serve meals on airplanes, he proposes putting the turkey into aluminum trays with cornbread dressing, gravy, peas and sweet potatoes. The whole meal can go from the freezer directly into the oven and requires almost no cleanup.

The story is a good one, but the invention of the TV Dinner is not quite that simple. Complete frozen meals already exist by this point. Maxson Food Systems serves frozen meals to airline passengers in the 1940s, and other companies sell frozen dinners before Swanson. There is even disagreement within Swanson over who deserves credit for its version. Thomas becomes the name most closely associated with the idea, while others credit brothers Gilbert and Clarke Swanson.

What Swanson understands better than anyone is how to sell the idea. The company calls it a TV Dinner at exactly the moment Americans are becoming obsessed with television. In 1950, only about 9 percent of American households own a television. By 1955, that number reaches about 65 percent.

When Swanson takes its TV Dinner national in 1954, it costs 98 cents. The company sells around 10 million turkey dinners in the first full year. Convenience is certainly part of the appeal, but the TV Dinner fits a new way of living too. Dinner no longer has to be prepared from scratch, served on several dishes or even eaten at the dining room table.

Making that convenience possible takes some actual food science. Swanson bacteriologist Betty Cronin works on the difficult task of getting several different foods to cook properly in the same tray. Turkey, potatoes and vegetables do not naturally heat at the same rate, so the portions and preparation have to be designed to finish together.

The TV Dinner soon becomes bigger than the food itself. Folding TV tray tables become common in American homes as dinner follows families into the living room. Over time, aluminum gives way to microwave safe packaging and the meals get faster, but the basic idea never really disappears.

The television may no longer be the newest screen in the house, but seventy years later we are still eating dinner in front of one. The biggest difference is that now we often hold it in our hands.

Top Tip

We are talking Ripi’s Beef Short Rib Ravioli. It’s filled with red wine-braised short rib, Swiss chard and Parmesan, so I’m pairing it with a bottle of Barbera d’Asti.

Barbera has plenty of bright acidity and red fruit to cut through the beef and Parmesan while still letting the ravioli do most of the talking. It also feels appropriate to keep things Italian when the ravioli is this good.

I recommend eating the whole box. The serving size was clearly written for a smaller breed.

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