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Our Culinary Journeys
When I was nine years old, I announced to my
mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving
dinner. During a trip to the library a week or so
earlier, I had become fascinated with a book called
The Pyromaniac’s Cookbook, which was all about
items served flambé. Amazingly, she let me do the
cooking, including nearly setting the dining table
on fire. I soon learned the limitation of flaming
dishesalthough they may look great, their taste
is another matter.
I got more books from the library and started to
learn about cooking. I soon discovered Escoffier’s
Le Guide Culinaire and pored over it, along with
books by Julia Child, James Beard, Richard Olney,
and other authors of classic cookbooks about
French cuisine.
My interest in cooking was so strong that I
might have become a chef, had my interest in
other thingsparticularly math and sciencenot
intervened. I was very good at school and often
skipped grades, to the point that I started college
at 14. Every topic related to math and science
fascinated me, so by the time I was finished with
school, I had a quite a collection of degrees: a
Ph.D. in mathematical physics, a master’s degree
in economics, another master’s degree in geophysics
and space physics, and a bachelor’s degree in
mathematics. By that point I was 23 years old. My
next step was to become a postdoctoral fellow at
Cambridge University, where I worked with Dr.
Stephen Hawking on the quantum theory of
gravitation. My career in science was off to a
roaring start.
Life takes many unexpected twists and turns,
however. Partway through my fellowship with
Stephen, I decided to take a summer off to work on
a software project with some friends from graduate
school. By the end of the summer, venture
capitalists had expressed interest in our project, so
I extended my leave of absence. We incorporated
the project as a startup company, and I became the
CEO.
Two years later, the startup was acquired by
another software company: Microsoft. Within a
couple years, I was working directly for Bill Gates,
and in time I became Microsoft’s first chief
technology officer.
While working at Microsoft in the late 1980s, I
read about John Willingham and how he had won
the world championship of barbecue (actually
both of them; like many fields, barbecue has
competing organizations that each host a “world”
championship) by using an amazing barbecue
cooker of his own invention. I contacted him to
buy one, which took many months of delicate
negotiations; John won’t sell his cooker to somebody
he doesn’t likehe won’t even sell one to
most of his friends!
When the Willingham cooker arrived, I made
some great barbecue with itbut it wasn’t as good
as the food samples that John had sent me. So I
told him I had to come to Memphis for a lesson.
He invited me to visit while “a little contest” (as he
put it) was going on there. The little contest turned
out to be one of those world championships.
I expected to just observe this master at work,
but to my great surprise, John put me on the team
of five people competing in the contest. “Son,” he
said in his distinctive Tennessee drawl, “it’s the
only way you’re going to learn.”
It was a baptism of fire … and smoke, and meat.
For three days, I worked 16 hours a day trussing
whole hogs, trimming ribs, and stoking the fire.
Partway through the contest, he even put me in
charge of two of the dishes we entered. Fortunately,
we took first place in both of my dishes and
came in third in the grand championship. It was
quite an education in barbecue.
By the mid-1990s, I had decided that I needed
to make more time for cooking. Although I was
entirely self-taught up to that point, my barbecue
experience suggested that I might do better with
some instruction. I negotiated a short leave of
absence with Bill and applied to chef school in
France.
The admissions people at École de la Varenne
were a bit mystified by my résumé, which listed no
cooking experience; they politely suggested that I
take one of their amateur courses. I declined. The
advanced professional program with “Le Grand
Diplôme” was what I wanted.
Unsure of what to do, they asked Cynthia
Nims, a La Varenne alumna living in Seattle, to
give me an exam over the phone to see whether
this could possibly make sense. I passed the exam,
so they asked that I work as a stagier at a restaurant
before they would accept me.
For nearly two years, I reported one day a week
to Rover’s restaurant in Seattle, run by Chef
Thierry Rautureau. I arrived at noon to start on
prep and worked through dinner service.
I learned a lot from Thierry. At the school, one
of the chefs assigned us to bone ducks. The chef
watched me closely. When I was finished with the
first one, he came to me and said, “You! Where did
you learn this?” I thought he was mad, but before I
could answer he smiled and added, “You know a
duck like a Frenchman!” Thierry had taught me
well.
Chef school was also quite an experience.
Besides cooking, the students would go to great
restaurants for dinner. That’s how I first ate at the
Côte Saint Jacques and the restaurants of Marc
Meneau and Marc Veyrat. I was told of a chef
working in Spain near the border with France in a
restaurant called elBulli, but it was too far away. It
would have been fascinating to visit, because the
year was 1995, and I would have seen the Modernist
revolution at an even earlier stage than I did.
Learning about cooking requires a lot of eating,
and I have been an enthusiastic eater on my travels
around the world. Long ago, I met Tim and Nina
Zagat, who became dear friends and recruited me
to be the chief gastronomic officer of their company,
Zagat Survey. I’ve eaten a lot of great food with
them over the years.
My career at Microsoft kept getting in the way
of my cooking, but when I retired from the
company in 1999 to start a small company of my
own focused on invention, I found myself with a
bit more time to explore Modernist cooking
techniques. In 2004, I started a discussion on
eGullet, an online forum for chefs and cooking
enthusiasts, to collect knowledge and observations
about cooking sous vide, a remarkable way to
control the temperature at which food cooks with
a precision that other methods cannot match.
The writing I did for that eGullet thread ultimately
led to this book. In another twist of fate,
Cynthia Nims, who vetted me for chef school, also
was a contributor to this book (see The Modernist
Cuisine Team, page 5XLVI) some 15 years after
letting me into La Varenne.
If my history and circumstances had been
different, I might be a chef today. But I am not
unhappy with the way things turned out. I have
derived enormous enjoyment from cooking and
eating over the years. Ultimately, my strange
culinary journey has given rise to this book, and to
a way to try to make a contribution of my own to
the world of cooking.
Nathan Myhrvold
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