Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

1
Tomatoes were imported to Europe from
the Americas by Spanish conquistadors in
the mid-1500s, but three centuries
elapsed before the fruits were fully
accepted, due to lingering concerns over
their safety.
Of course, very simple dishes, such
as grilled fish or roast chicken, are
not unique to any time period.
(Chickens originated in Asia, by the
way.) But once you get past these
dishes to those that express
characteristic preparation techniques
or characteristic flavor
profiles, you rapidly discover that
everything was new and radical at
some point in time.
That may seem like an unfair criticism. After all,
Pollan’s rule is driven by his concern that much of
what we eat is not good for us due to modern
interference with natural foods. It’s easy to assume
that generations long ago didn’t face the same kind
of technological processing of foodstuffs.
Actually, they did! The history of food shows us
that just this sort of concern about health has
shaped the adoption of many culinary changes
throughout the ages. Tomatoes were considered
poisonous when first imported to Europe. This
worry was false, but it had some rationale behind
it: tomatoes are part of the deadly nightshade
family. Lingering suspicions about tomatoes kept
them out of the diets of many Europeans for a
hundred years or more. Ironically, people in
Florence and the surrounding region of Tuscany
were among the late adopters of tomatoes, lagging
more than a century behind other Mediterranean
regions. Many other imported foods, including
potatoes, suffered similar delays as health suspicions
made people wary of them. Ironically,
tobacco, which we now know is very harmful to
our health, was adopted very quickly in Europe.
A lot of progress has been made in our scientific
knowledge of what is good and bad for us, which is
another reason to question the great-grandmother
rule. Would you really want to be treated by your
great-grandmother’s doctor rather than by a
physician today?
A major theme of this book is about changes in
what we eat. These changes are controversial and
are opposed by culinary traditionalists. We
believe everyone is entitled to personal culinary
preferences. If people want to eat only what they
think of as traditional foods and avoid recent
innovations, that’s their prerogative. But as we
make these choices, it is important to remember
that every aspect of cuisine was an innovation at
some point in time, and in many cases not that
long ago. Making a choice based on tradition alone
is worse than drawing the proverbial line in the
sand; it is like trying to draw a line in a river.
True Revolution
Gradual change is the norm. Every now and then,
however, culture is altered more radicallyby
revolution rather than evolution. Disruptive
changes of this kind are relatively rare in the food
world, but they are common in other disciplines,
such as music, art, architectureeven science.
Indeed, much of our understanding of art and
cultural history is based on the study of revolutionary
cultural movements.
Visual art is perhaps the best example. Throughout
the history of Western art, movements or
schools have set the criteria that defined the look of
the age. Sometimes these movements were inspired
by technological advancessuch as the development
of oil paints, which provided a vastly different
range of color and tone than did the egg tempera
paints that came before. But more often, the origin
of a new school or movement had to do with
aesthetics pioneered by a group of artists who broke
away from their predecessors with a new look.
Of all of the artistic movements in history,
Impressionism is probably the most relevant for
understanding the development of modern
cuisine, in part because of the movement’s familiarity.
In many ways, Impressionism blazed the
trail for the rest of modern art. It was part of the
first wave of Modernism, a metamovement that
would ultimately shake the foundations of art,
architecture, graphic design, and literature.
The Impressionists were among a group of
artists who painted in disparate styles but were
united by their rebellion against the strict and
formulaic rules of their time. Their starting point
as a group was that their paintings were refused
entry to the exhibitions organized by the art
establishment of that era, so they put on their own
exhibitions (and were heavily criticized for itsee
The Rough Start for Impressionist Art, page 18).
The Impressionists were the first artists to be
self-consciously modern. They believed that art
wasn’t just about creating a realistic rendition of a
subject; to them, art was first and foremost an
intellectual dialogue. For the Impressionists,
simply rendering the subject accurately was beside
the point; indeed, excessive attention to accuracy
would get in the way of what the artist was attempting
to communicate. We accept that idea
today; in fact, it is central to our definition of art.
But in the 1870s, when the Impressionists were
getting off the ground, it was a still a radical
concept.
Impressionism was the subject of public ridicule
when it first emerged. Indeed, the very word
“Impressionism” came from a bitingly satirical
newspaper essay by an art critic, who based the
name on Monet’s painting Impression, Sunrise.
The critic’s goal was to ridicule the movement, but
the young artists accepted the name and moved
forward undaunted. Ultimately, the Impressionists
won. Public perception changed, and what was
previously considered ugly or unfinished came to
be viewed as beautiful and artistic.
Today, Impressionism is probably the most
popular artistic style. People who like modern art
regard the Impressionists as the progenitors of the
modern movement. And those with more classical
tastes still find the paintings beautiful. Impressionism
is the ideal crossover genre, beloved by
people who still feel a lingering desire for representational
and realistic art as well as by those who
buy into a more abstract agenda.
The greatest legacy of the Impressionists is that
they were among the first to establish the model of
artists rebelling against the system. Following the
Impressionists, one wave after another of artists
launched new movements or schools: Cubism,
Dadaism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism,
Minimalism, and many more. In this model,
bands of artists, sharing some common goals but
disagreeing on others, challenge the status quo to
determine the course of the art world.
At first, these movements are the avant-garde, a
French term synonymous with “vanguard”literally,
the troops sent out in advance of a main
military force. Typically, avant-garde movements
are at first controversial and misunderstood, and
the participants revel in that outsider status.
Ultimately, at least in successful movements, the
artists are accepted to some extent by the art
world and gain some degree of fame.
We have become so used to this pattern that it is
almost viewed as a job requirement: young artists
are expected to be part of an avant-garde. They
either join the movement du jour or conspire to
create a new one. It would seem very strange, at
least within popular perception, for young artists
to be willing conformists to the existing order.
The specific artistic goals differ, of course, and
both artists and art critics might violently disagree
with this broad-brush analysis. Amusingly, toward
the end of their careers, most of the original
Impressionist artists disliked Picasso’s Cubism
and other artistic movements that had become
current at that time. Their reaction was little
different from the reaction of the art establishment
in their day, because by that point they had
become the establishment.
Impressionism was the most famous of the
artistic movements that marked the late 19th
century, but broadly similar trends were happening
in architecture, literature, music, and other
fields of human cultural endeavor as well. Critics
and analysts have termed this broader metamovement
“Modernism,” a megatrend that did much to
Monet’s water lily paintings are classic
examples of Impressionism. Today, we
think they are beautiful, but they were
highly controversial when they were first
exhibited.
16 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 17