so all this hype and hatred, eh
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/03/21/110321crat_atlarge_lanchester?currentPage=1
(admittedly, i do wish they'd gone into the mcdonaldization of food issue at stake here, which is something gastronomica was willing to ponder about sous vide years ago...)
The other techniques offered some successes: slow-and-low is a great way to cook beef, as long as you can spare the time, and can go to the trouble of making a sauce separately. The most instructive dish, however, was one of the failures, a slow-and-low chicken, cooked for several hours and served when its internal temperature had hit 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem was that, with all its juices still inside, it tasted far too chickeny. If you oven-roast chicken the regular way, you get used to the drying effect of the heat, and to the fact that some juices go into the pan and are recycled as gravy. With this version, the bird was so moist that its texture was almost jellied, the flesh was a faint pink, and the chicken-explosion of flavor was overwhelming. In a sense, it was too good. My roast-chicken-obsessed children threw down their cutlery in protest after a single mouthful.
The lesson was that no taste is inherently better than another: within certain physiological constraints, tastes are not innate but learned, and the acquisition of tastes is a kind of dance between the person at the stove and the person at the table. The dance between the cook and the eater goes on longest at home, which is why we grow up loving a food from our first and most sustained encounter with it: nothing will ever beat your mom’s chicken, or meat loaf, or whatever it was. No food can ever mean as much to you as that food once did. That is why most of all the cooking in the world is comfort food. It is food designed to remind us of familiar things, to connect us with our personal histories and our communities and our families. That has always been true and it always will be true.
This doesn’t mean that all food must be comfort food, everywhere and always. Ambitious chefs do a version of what Wordsworth was said to have done in his poetry, which set out to “create that taste by which its productions are to be appreciated and admired.” The chefs whose taste creation has been the most influential in recent years are those, led by Alice Waters, who have stressed the primacy of ingredients and the connection between the farmer and the cook. There was a time when that emphasis on ingredients seemed quaint; now it is at the center of what chefs do, and it has also had a big impact on the way ordinary cooks think, shop, cultivate, and prepare food, from the elementary-school kitchen to the White House garden. Perhaps the best thing about this movement is that we can put it into daily practice for ourselves.
Modernist cooking is different from that: instead of inviting us to think about what we can do at home to copy the model offered by the best restaurants, it enacts a break between the high end of cooking and the levels below. In return, it proposes all kinds of new possibilities for food that takes us beyond familiar sensation and familiar language; food that is, to some deliberate extent, uncomforting. In the dance of cook and eater, some cooks have some new moves. Thanks to modernism, we can look toward tasting things we didn’t know before, even things whose existence we didn’t begin to suspect. The restaurants that are inviting their customers to follow them down these unfamiliar paths will always and necessarily be a little bit ahead of us. “Modernist Cuisine” is going to be the definitive reference point for this new cooking for many years to come. There’s something exciting about that, and there’s a sense of loss in it, too—a little like the nostalgia we feel for the time when the most advanced composers alive wrote tunes that anyone could hum.
(admittedly, i do wish they'd gone into the mcdonaldization of food issue at stake here, which is something gastronomica was willing to ponder about sous vide years ago...)
The other techniques offered some successes: slow-and-low is a great way to cook beef, as long as you can spare the time, and can go to the trouble of making a sauce separately. The most instructive dish, however, was one of the failures, a slow-and-low chicken, cooked for several hours and served when its internal temperature had hit 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem was that, with all its juices still inside, it tasted far too chickeny. If you oven-roast chicken the regular way, you get used to the drying effect of the heat, and to the fact that some juices go into the pan and are recycled as gravy. With this version, the bird was so moist that its texture was almost jellied, the flesh was a faint pink, and the chicken-explosion of flavor was overwhelming. In a sense, it was too good. My roast-chicken-obsessed children threw down their cutlery in protest after a single mouthful.
The lesson was that no taste is inherently better than another: within certain physiological constraints, tastes are not innate but learned, and the acquisition of tastes is a kind of dance between the person at the stove and the person at the table. The dance between the cook and the eater goes on longest at home, which is why we grow up loving a food from our first and most sustained encounter with it: nothing will ever beat your mom’s chicken, or meat loaf, or whatever it was. No food can ever mean as much to you as that food once did. That is why most of all the cooking in the world is comfort food. It is food designed to remind us of familiar things, to connect us with our personal histories and our communities and our families. That has always been true and it always will be true.
This doesn’t mean that all food must be comfort food, everywhere and always. Ambitious chefs do a version of what Wordsworth was said to have done in his poetry, which set out to “create that taste by which its productions are to be appreciated and admired.” The chefs whose taste creation has been the most influential in recent years are those, led by Alice Waters, who have stressed the primacy of ingredients and the connection between the farmer and the cook. There was a time when that emphasis on ingredients seemed quaint; now it is at the center of what chefs do, and it has also had a big impact on the way ordinary cooks think, shop, cultivate, and prepare food, from the elementary-school kitchen to the White House garden. Perhaps the best thing about this movement is that we can put it into daily practice for ourselves.
Modernist cooking is different from that: instead of inviting us to think about what we can do at home to copy the model offered by the best restaurants, it enacts a break between the high end of cooking and the levels below. In return, it proposes all kinds of new possibilities for food that takes us beyond familiar sensation and familiar language; food that is, to some deliberate extent, uncomforting. In the dance of cook and eater, some cooks have some new moves. Thanks to modernism, we can look toward tasting things we didn’t know before, even things whose existence we didn’t begin to suspect. The restaurants that are inviting their customers to follow them down these unfamiliar paths will always and necessarily be a little bit ahead of us. “Modernist Cuisine” is going to be the definitive reference point for this new cooking for many years to come. There’s something exciting about that, and there’s a sense of loss in it, too—a little like the nostalgia we feel for the time when the most advanced composers alive wrote tunes that anyone could hum.