Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

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Much of the motivation for the
discovery of the New World was
related to cooking. Christopher
Columbus and other early explorers
were looking for better ways to
trade spices—an extremely
lucrative and strategic business,
due to the high reliance on spices
in European cuisine at the time.
By some measures, Spain has had
more influence on Western cuisine
than any other country in the
world. The new fruits and vegetables
that Spanish conquistadors
brought back to Europe from their
explorations of the New World
utterly changed European cuisine.
Explorers from other European
countries—including the Norwegian
and Icelandic Vikings, the
Portuguese, and the English—also
imported New World foods, but
Spain took the lead in making
agricultural use of the newfound
plants, including tomatoes,
potatoes, beans, corn, cocoa, and
chili peppers.
EVOLUTION AND REVOLUTION
One of the themes of this book is exploring the
culinary revolution that has occurred in the past
20 years and that continues to unfold in cuttingedge
kitchens around the world. Like all revolutions,
it is defined in part by its contextthe
previous world order that it is rebelling against
and changing. Understanding this context is
essential to appreciating the new regime.
The Myth of Tradition
There is a large and vocal school of thought in the
world of food and gastronomy that celebrates
tradition. People who advocate this point of view
seek out the authentic and original aspects of
cuisine, placing in high esteem food experiences
that conform to traditional styles and values. This
group’s motto might be, “Old ways are best.”
People in this camp are generally more interested
in a recipe from Grandma’s farmhouse than they
are in a contemporary chef’s latest creations.
This view is possible, however, only if you shut
your eyes to history. What we call “traditional”
cuisine is a convenient fiction. Culinary practices
have been changing constantly throughout
history. Investigate a “traditional” food closely
enough, and you’ll find that it was new at some
point, perhaps not even all that long ago. Tradition,
at least in the food world, is the accumulated
leftovers from changes wrought in the past.
Italian food provides a great example. It is one
of the most popular national cuisines in the world;
you can find Italian restaurants in every major city
on earth. The cuisine is a favorite of many traditionalists,
who see it as a deeply authentic, artisanal,
homey kind of food. Italian cuisine is certainly
wonderful, but the notion that it is steeped in
native tradition is unfounded. Almost all modern
Italian cuisine is based on ingredients and recipes
borrowed from outside Italy.
Pasta isn’t Italian. The Chinese ate noodles at
least 3,000 years earlier than the Italians did. One
theory says that pasta was brought back to Italy by
Marco Polo in the late 13th century, but more
recent scholarship suggests that Arab traders
introduced pasta to Muslim Sicily several centuries
before Polo’s trip. Either way, pasta is surely
not of Italian origin. Mozzarella di bufala is
Italian, but the water buffaloes that produce it
aren’tthey are native to Southeast Asia. Tomatoes
are indigenous to the Americas, as are the
corn used to make polenta and the chocolate and
vanilla used in desserts. Potatoes, which work so
nicely in potato gnocchi, are from South America,
as are the hot peppers that flavor many Italian
sauces. Rice, now used in Italy to make risotto,
originated in Asia. Eggplants came from India.
Carrots came from Afghanistan. Almonds came
from the Middle East.
How about espressosurely that counts as
Italian? Indeed it does, because the technique was
invented in Italy, though of course the coffee bean
was originally imported from the Arabian Peninsula.
And espresso only seems traditional now; it
was originally invented as a fast food in the early
1900s (see Espresso’s Invention, page 4·372). The
word espresso actually means “fast.”
It would be difficult to find a traditional Italian
menu based only on ingredients that are native to
Italy. Even if you did, that menu would likely bear
little resemblance to medieval Italian or ancient
Roman cuisine.
What caused these shifts? Why did the ancient
Romans avoid basil and garlic, while modern-day
Italians love them? Why do Italian cooks now
eschew fermented fish sauce, cumin, and lovage?
And what about the medieval phase, when there
was no Italian food as such and Italians ate the
same heavily spiced foods as the English?
Those changes didn’t happen overnight. A
period of gradual evolution de-emphasized some
flavor profiles and increased the popularity of
others. Certain ingredients lost their appeal, while
other, newly discovered ones came to dominate
the culinary landscape.
This is not to devalue Italian foodfar from it.
Italian chefs deserve tremendous credit for creating
a delicious and varied cuisine. The point we are
making here is that it’s wrong to view Italian
cuisine as a collection of carefully maintained
culinary traditions from the past. Indeed, it
devalues the creativity of Italian chefs to imagine
that they are just passing along their grandmothers’
recipes verbatim. The history of Italian food is
not about faithfully preserving authentic traditions;
it is about creativity, innovation, and novelty.
Similar stories occur around the world. At a
recent Sichuan-style dinner in Beijing, one of us
tried to find a dish on the table that was entirely
Chineseand failed, because most Sichuan food
has chili peppers in it, and they are native to South
America. The Chinese province of Sichuan has a
long-standing interest in spicy foods, including the
native Sichuan peppercorn and imported black
pepper. However, the imported chili so appealed
to people that they adopted it with great enthusiasm.
Chilies weren’t the only foreign imports on
the table; other dishes had eggplant, okra (from
Africa), and corn.
This pattern holds true even in less prosperous
societies, such as subsistence-farming communities
in Africa, where the major staple crops include
cassava and corn (both from South America).
These two foods are the most important sources of
nutrition for Africa. Other major crops in Africa
that originated elsewhere include bananas (from
Southeast Asia) and peanuts, sweet potatoes, and
beans (all from South America). The only staple
crops native to Africa are millet, sorghum, and
okra, but they are very much in the minority.
Imported ingredients gain acceptance at
different rates. New World explorers brought
many new ingredients back to Europe, but they
didn’t all become popular right away. Some, such
as chocolate and tobacco, were instant sensations.
Others took decades or longer to infiltrate a
country’s cuisine.
A recent example is the kiwifruit, which was
introduced to England in 1953 and the United
States in 1962. In the U.S., the kiwi’s chief champion
was Frieda Caplan, a distributor of exotic
fruits and vegetables. At the time, kiwifruit was
grown only in New Zealand, and marketing it was
an uphill battle. But Caplan’s efforts, along with its
adoption by chefs of the Nouvelle cuisine movement
(see page 24), made the fruit popular
worldwide.
Today, kiwifruit can be found in practically any
supermarket in the United States. An Internet
search in 2010 for kiwifruit recipes returned more
than 1.5 million hits. At some point in the future,
recipes that include kiwifruit will be considered
part of traditional American cuisine, and likely the
cuisines of several other nations as well. Interestingly,
the kiwifruit isn’t even native to New
Zealand; it originally came from southern China.
Like new ingredients, new techniques are
typically introduced one or a few at a time. Thus,
people don’t actually experience a “change in
cuisine” as such; they just try a new dish. If they
like it, more people begin to make and eat it.
In 1981, chef Michel Bras invented a chocolate
cake with a liquid center. Its fame spread, but it
was a complicated and exacting recipe to to make.
Then, in 1987, Jean-Georges Vongerichten prepared
a simple chocolate cake (based on a recipe
from his mother) for a catered party of 300.
Hurrying to serve the group, he and his team
crowded their ovens and rushed the cakes to the
table, only to discover they were grossly underbaked
and still liquid in the center. Expecting the
worse, Vongerichten entered the banquet room to
apologize, only to be greeted by a standing
ovation. They loved the liquid center cake. It
created a sensation, and “molten chocolate cake”
of one form or another is now found on restaurant
menus and in home kitchens around the globe.
In this evolutionary approach, nobody sits
down to a totally new cuisine all at once; instead,
the culinary development occurs gradually, one
new dish at a time.
This is also what happens with biological
evolution: wildly divergent species are produced
by the accumulation of small changes. And it’s the
process that shapes human language. English and
German split from a common Germanic ancestor
language, just as French, Spanish, Italian, and
Romanian diverged from the Latin of the ancient
Romans. As with a language, you can’t change a
cuisine overnight, but over a surprisingly short
period, you can nonetheless change it completely.
People who subscribe to the traditional view of
culinary history tend to forget this. The influential
food writer Michael Pollan recommends that we
eat only foods that our great-grandmothers would
recognize. At first, this sounds like sage advice,
particularly if you are tired of the recent onslaught
of junk food. But consider this: if your greatgrandmother
and her great-grandmother (and so
forth stretching back in time) had taken Pollan’s
advice, where would we be? It doesn’t take very
many generations of this great-grandmother rule to
erase all of what we know today as traditional
foods.
Michel Bras’s chocolate coulant is a
two-part recipe. A frozen ganache
core is surrounded by a crisp,
cookie-like dough made with rice
starch. The assembly is baked in a
special mold.
Vongerichten’s cake is a simple
one-part chocolate cake batter
made with ordinary flour; it’s only
distinction is being baked briefly in
a very hot oven. Both cakes attain a
liquid chocolate center, but by
different means. The simpler
version was easier for chefs of less
skill to copy, which helped it gain
popularity. Today, the vast
majority of all recipes for the cake
are closer to Vongerichten’s
approach.
Kiwifruit is an example of an exotic fruit
that took a while to gain acceptance.
14 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 15