Flying Bacon
Photo © Lara Kastner
I thought the “pizza pebbles” at restaurant WD~50 had a lot going for them. Into each of the four brownish, marble-size spheres—arranged in one of the straightest rows you’ll ever see—chef Wylie Dufresne seemed to have captured both the essence and the totality of an entire New York pizzeria. You could literally taste all of it: the pizza, the decor, the classic surfeit of oregano, even the jaded, fat dexterity of the staff—all in a small, brown pellet with a soft, futuristic texture. Quite remarkable.
My companion managed only half a pebble, declared it tasted “like sand,” and asked if I wanted to finish hers. I declined with a laugh and patted her knee. She’s a sweet, funny kid, and I like her a lot.
Next up was Dufresne’s famous “knot foie,” a thick, squared-off shoelace of pale pink foie gras tied up and garnished with miniature sugary breakfast cereal. Regular foie gras will break if you try to knot it, the waiter told us. After months of experimentation, Dufresne hit upon the trick of gently melting the foie gras, stabilizing it with agar gum, then cooling it, at which point it apparently becomes as pliant as a pipe cleaner.
“But why knot it at all?” asked my companion.
“Oh,” said the waiter. “This is an example of Wylie’s being playful.”
I apologized to him with my face and he left. He’d given my companion more explanation than she deserved, I reckoned. However not long after, having watched her nibble and reject a cube of Dufresne’s legendary fried mayonnaise, I decided it was time to do some explaining myself.
See, bashing Dufresne’s style of food preparation is in vogue right now, at least among a small but fierce group that includes serious foodies, most culturally literate Europeans, and untold millions of Americans who follow the hit Bravo reality series Top Chef.
If you didn’t watch the season in question, you missed something tragic and beautiful. The villain of the series was a strange young man named Marcel Vigneron. His hairstyle was a gigantic rear-mounted pompadour, like an enormous pair of elf ears rendered in hair. His demeanor was that of a young Peter Lorre, with the swivelly eyes and the permanent smirk and the reedy, snickery voice. And Marcel was a self-declared believer in something he called “molecular gastronomy,” a faith he expressed, to the deepening bewilderment of the judging panel, by garnishing dish after dish with a sticky blob of colored foam.
On TV, at least, the foam looked like the kind of thing insects leave on twigs after laying a bunch of nasty eggs, but Marcel was proud of it. “And Marcel, what do you have for us?” Padma Lakshmi, the world’s most beautiful woman, would ask him, looking concerned, because she could plainly see that there was foam. “Uh . . . just a turkey roulade,” he’d mumble. “With a cranberry foam.” The other contestants called him “foam boy,” claimed to detect a paucity of sexual experience in a cherry tart he made that was supposed to embody lust, and eventually drank a lot of wine and tried to shave his head.
Molecular gastronomy is, you have probably gathered by now, the same high art that Dufresne practices, and the idea that it is a steaming pile of pretentious nonsense is nothing new. In fact it’s as old—some would say exactly as old—as the term “molecular gastronomy” itself. It didn’t help that the term was coinvented and popularized by a grand Frenchman by the name of Hervé This (pronounced TEESS). But to the movement’s many critics, the bigger problem is that molecular gastronomy doesn’t actually mean anything. Gastronomy, after all, is just a fancy term for the practice of good cooking. As for molecular . . . well, what This seemed to be calling for was a new approach to cooking that would embrace Science without apology. But all cooking is molecular, and it always has been.
When the first cavemen impaled chunks of meat on sticks and held them in the fire, they did so in a deliberate attempt to alter the molecular structure of the meat, even if they lacked the fancy words to say so. Not only has cooking always been molecular, but cooks have always looked to Science in hopes of improving their recipes. Ask any Italian chef why he’s so picky about the rice in his risotto, and he’ll tell you that a high starch content (starch being a tidy combination of two molecules) results in a creamier finished product. Ask him how to check the doneness of a piece of meat, and he might suggest a scientific instrument known as a thermometer.
It’s a point so obvious one feels silly making it. The relationship of cooking to Science is the same as that of engineering to Science: an intimacy that approaches identity. Which does raise the question of what This and his co-movementists thought they were bringing to the table.
