Smoking sweet potato
Photo © Lara Kastner
Gimmickry is the cynic’s answer. At El Bulli in Spain, chef Ferran Adrià Acosta, the first legend of molecular gastronomy—Babe Ruth to This’s Abner Doubleday—dazzles his diners with gastronomic impossibilities from liquid ham croquettes to caviar made from apples. At the Fat Duck restaurant outside London, the movement’s reigning king, Heston Blumenthal, is serving up snail porridge and has started encouraging his diners to wear headphones, into which can be piped the sound of their own chewing.
At first, second, and third glances, molecular gastronomy seems a clear-cut analogue of the progressive rock movement that briefly ruined popular music in the 1970s. Both cases involve a handful of nerdy left-brain men taking it upon themselves to grandly overthink, reinvent, and almost take credit for a previously easygoing medium that had been getting on fine without them. The progressive rockers—Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, to name but three—can today at least try to argue that popular music was in a rut when they came along and that if nothing else—such as listenable—their self-consciously intellectual approach to music was at least different.
But since when has food been in a rut? One of the precious things about food is that it’s one of the few pleasures in life whose novelty never wears off. When This invented molecular gastronomy, it wasn’t as if anyone was complaining about being served yet another delicious, lovingly prepared hot meal. Where, then, do these self-appointed revolutionaries get off, with their fancy foams and gels? Who asked them to fix food, when food was one of the few things in the world that wasn’t ever broke?
No one asked them, any honest answer to that question must begin. However, it must then necessarily continue: But where did you get the idea that food wasn’t, or isn’t, broke? Try telling that to a salmonella sufferer or to a nut-allergic baseball fan for whom the phrase “peanuts and crackerjack” is just an abstract string of syllables. Try telling a camp full of refugees that the best meal the guilty rich will ever be able to send them is a bag of uncooked U.N. flour. No, I didn’t think so.
Am I suggesting we feed, and simultaneously enchant, the poor by flinging them handfuls of Wylie Dufresne’s knotted foie gras? At the risk of disappointing my detractors, I am not. But it takes a very blinkered view of the world to gaze upon a chef attempting to redesign our diet from the molecules up and declare the whole thing pretentious and vain—especially since those don’t strike me as very serious charges against a movement with the world-changing potential of molecular gastronomy. The age looms near when a man like Wylie Dufresne will follow his muse into the DNA lab, rearranging the genetic code of a potato to make it dance to his tune in some highfalutin appetizer and accidentally curing world hunger in the process. Scientists are already designing pork chops that go down like health food and tomatoes that vaccinate their eaters against hepatitis.
The need of certain people to understand the science of food has given us everything we have: long, happy lives full of drunken evenings; of campfire marshmallows; of spraying whipped cream across a special lady’s abdomen. . . . That these heroes are no longer unsung, that they have organized themselves beneath the banner of molecular gastronomy and are pushing into the future with more drive and focus than before is not a snub to those earlier science cooks but a fulfillment of what surely must have been their dream. The least the rest of us can do is keep an open mind to the new concoctions of molecular gastronomy.
Is Wylie Dufresne’s fried mayonnaise delicious? Does it eclipse the memory of your grandmother’s meat loaf? It does not. But you should have seen the astonishment that filled the face of an expert on colloidal chemistry, whom I found myself sitting next to at a dinner last week, when I happened to mention Wylie’s fried mayo.
“Fried,” she began, then shook her head. “No. You can’t fry mayonnaise. The heat will break the emulsion. And the colloids . . . They—you can fry mayonnaise?”
Yes, I told her, taking a peculiar pride in someone else’s accomplishment. You can now.
