There is a trend going on, and I don't like it. Schmancy restaurants are indulging in an eggy orgy of flans, crème caramels and crème brûlées, often doused with lily-gilding accoutrements like espresso, crystallized ginger, Grand Marnier, lavender, and lemongrass. Has the world gone mad?

This is only my opinion (and it is why I get to write the humor column, because I can be dismissed as a harmless crank, and I hate that, and one day I will spit food on all of you) but why must every restaurant now serve its own perverted variety of ungapatchkert chicken-embryo dessert?

"Basically, they're all custards," says Andrea Baumgardner,sous-chef at the Stanford Faculty Club, formerly of Chez Panisse and Eos. "Cream or milk, egg yolks and/or whole eggs, sugar and flavorings. They're all a crème anglaise recipe with a little sugar and cream instead of milk. In crème caramel and flan, the sugar is on the bottom of the ramekin and you unmold it, and in crème brûlée the sugar is on the top and you caramelize it." And why are they suddenly so ubiquitous? "We're running out of things to make statements with," offers Baumgardner.

Custard desserts are very mid-late-mid-'90s. They're homey, soothing, texturally redolent of childhood--befitting Faith Popcorn's assessment that we're all into cocooning and hearth-y crap. They're not goofily excessive, like the last dessert-de-la-moment, tirami su, or the bombastic multi-tiered marzipan and fondant and exotic fruit creations (see ungapatchkert) of the late '80s. But neither are they virtuous and abstemious and good-for-you, like the sorbets of the early '90s. No, these creamy treats are very much of their time -- subtly ostentatious, like a flash of fur lining inside a cloth coat. They're unpretentious, but pretentiously so; they still have foreign names. And they are most definitely part of the backlash against deprivation: tiny ticking timebombs of cholesterol, full of cream and eggs, a bitter snort in the face of Dean Ornish. To be truly perfect, they'd have to have some flank steak in them.

I actually love crème brûlée. The contrast of the perfectly crackly top and the creamy goodness beneath. The ratio of delicate placid custard to assertive flirting-with-burnt hard sugar top. I'm a bit annoyed that a) my special treasure is everywhere now, and b) certain deviants in toques think plopping weird herbs and alien foodstuffs in it improves its glories. (I am all over Francois Payard's classic recipe.) However, I admit I have always had a problem with flan. I find its wobbly egginess quease-inducing, its Cronenbergian quiver repulsive. And I'm glad to know I'm not the only one. My friend Daryl-Lynn characterizes it as "snotty and nasty, pudding running amok." Sue shudders, "Big globular melty mass of flan....eeeuw." Richard puts it most concisely: "Flan is Satan's headcheese."

All right, maybe Rick Bayless's recipe is the ur-flan, the right flan, and I hereby promise to make it and find out. But Richard has to taste it first.