Monday, February 16 2009
What's Cookin'?
Nothing says home cooking like a pan of fried carrots
I had lunch with my publisher, Brad Ring, the other day (ooh, sounds fancy: I had a taco) and he asked me the same question he asks all the time: what was I reading right now? I don't know if it's a standard conversational gambit (not a bad one if it is) or if he's interested in my reading list in particular. I talked about four or five of the books in my pile right now, but I think the most gripping tome I'm reading right now is Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. I bought it because I had read Heston Blumenthal'sHeston Blumenthal: In Search of Perfection. Heston credits McGee with introducing him to molecular gastronomy.
I actually got it so I could sneer at it. I hate the current concept of molecular gastronomy, where some twerp in Spain inspires chefs to take an entire day to carefully puree fresh peas, mix them with gelling agents and carefully drop them into a calcium chloride solution one pea-sized drop at a time to set the gel on the exterior, thus making . . . peas. Or to try to get customers to pay for eating a teaspoon of smoke (I'm not even joking). That's not food science, that's navel gazing and a waste of ingredients, time, and human effort.
Sure, some of the offenders have repudiated the concept, so frustrated by the tiddlers who like the idea of sciencing up their menus and dive in without understanding that applying science to food should yield better food, not conceptually different food. We're opportunivore mammals, and we were never designed to eat anything from a nitrogen griddle, no matter how jaded we've convinced ourselves to be. McGee doesn't use the term molecular gastronomy anymore and the Spanish twerp issued a position paper clarifying his approach to mol-gas.
But McGee's book totally kicks fundament. The section, Flavorings From Plants, was worth the price of the book all by itself. It identifies the various chemical compounds responsible for aromas and flavours, and lists the plants they're found in. As a cross-refernce for a professional wine taster (and even for those playing along at home) it's invaluable, and it softened my rage against the rude and unnecessary excess of the mol-gas folks quite a bit.
Then I came across a very cool blog: Khymos. Written by an erudite and engaging scientist (organic chemist, actually) in Norway, it's a blog about the realities of mol-gas, food and food science, and I highly recommend it if you like to cook or eat. He had a great entry on how molecular gastronomy has reached the productivity plateau. Productivity plateau is part of the 'hype cycle' that surrounds new technologies.
First is the trigger, where some bright boy applies rigorous science to food processing technolgy. Then lesser souls get hold of it and make fake peas out of real peas, (sous-viding all creatures great and small) and then people like me loll in the trough of disillusionment (I'm an early adopter) and finally the chaff shakes off and we're back to real cooks applying the new knowledge correctly and making food even better.
Falling into this category are people like Blumenthal and Alton Brown of the Food Network. A deeper understanding of the chemistry and physics of our food and drink serves to improve our lives, as opposed to Frankenfooding everything in a relentless and joyless pursuit of novelty.
And that's where wine comes in: my pal Alice Feiring (okay, she doesn't know I'm alive, but I like her) wrote a book called The Battle for Wine and Love, or How I Saved the World from Parkerization. She abhors the industrial wines now being produced by the soulless chemists employed by major industrial wineries, craven lickspittles at the boots of The Great Satan, and instead looks for wines that express place and harvest--real wine, in other words. It's a funny parallel between food and wine and the hype cycle, because right now everyone and his dog is making horrible wine with their chemistry sets and manipulations, and is proud as heck about it all. Folks like Feiring and I are in the trough of disillusionment, yelling at people to come join us in curmudgeonery . . . thank goodness I've got a loud voice and good wine to soothe my throat.
Perhaps one day we'll see a plateau of productivity for all the new technologies applied to wine manipulation. That'd be great, and maybe someone will work out what kind of wine you serve with fake peas made from real peas.
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