Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

1
Greek-born entrepreneur Daniel Carasso
(shown) popularized yogurt with his
Groupe Danone (later Dannon), one of the
first companies to industrially process
yogurt. By 1947, fruit was added to satisfy
the American taste for sweet flavors.
cooking of Carême and others, and it introduced
numerous innovations in everything from kitchen
organization and management to food service and
presentation. One of Escoffier’s most enduring
contributions to cuisine was organizing brigades
of chefs to cook for large banquets. His system for
managing both kitchen and service staff has been
the foundation of kitchen organization for the
past century.
Escoffier was known in the press of his day by a
title very similar to the one applied to Carême:
“the king of chefs and the chef of kings.” Like
Carême, Escoffier spent much of his career outside
France, working with César Ritz to create the
Savoy Hotel in London and later The Ritz hotels
(including The London Carlton).
Although Escoffier cooked for kings and
dignitaries, most of his career was spent preparing
food for the public in these fancy hotels. He
also planned the menu and staffed the kitchens
for the cruise ships of the Hamburg-Amerika
Line. His clientele was wealthy. But compared to
Carême’s era, sophisticated cooking was now a far
more democratic and public event, available to
anyone who could afford it. It was no longer
confined to royalty or private households of the
ruling elite.
Many food writers hail each of these major
shifts in cuisine as something of a revolution. Yet if
you trace the development from La Varenne to
Carême and Escoffier, there are far more similarities
than differences between their philosophies.
Innovation surely occurred, and the cuisine
changedsometimes dramatically. But there was
no revolution to speak of. It would take another
generation or so for that to take place.
Fast and Cheap: The Revolution
at the Low End
The story of gastronomy is usually told from the
perspective of the high end: the great chefs and
their wealthy or privileged patrons. Even the story
of peasant cuisine is typically the story of well-fed
peasants who grew their own food. But the masses
have to eat, too, and just like everyone else, they
would prefer to eat tasty food.
The second half of the 20th century saw a revolution
in eating unlike anything that had occurred
before, because it was a revolution of the masses, at
least in the highly developed nations of North
America and Europe. Several trends combined to
utterly change what the typical person ate, yet this
story is not often told by chefs or food critics.
The fundamental impetus for the change was
economic: the newly minted middle class needed to
eat. They had disposable income but little time. They
also lacked much of the context present in traditional
societies. City dwellers didn’t have gardens or
farms around them. They may also have lacked an
extended family in the community. And the adult
women were more likely to have a job or career than
to be dedicated to homemaking and food preparation.
Millions of people did not have the time, the
skills, or the help to cook for themselvesbut they
did have enough money to eat well.
As busy people demanded food that required
little or no preparation, a new type of food company
rose to meet the need. Soft-drink manufacturers
had already helped pave the way: In 1900, Coca-
Cola introduced premixed, ready-to-drink sodas,
and other beverage companies soon followed suit.
These drinks were very different from the beverages
that people made at home (such as coffee, tea, or
punch) and were far more convenient. These new
beverages caught on quickly, creating a market in
soft drinks that did not previously exist.
Next came yogurt. The fermented milk product
had been popular in places such as Greece, Bulgaria,
and Turkey (“yogurt” was originally a Turkish
word) for at least 4,500 years. Daniel Carasso was
born in 1905 to a Sephardic Jewish family in
Salonica, Greece, where his family settled after
being cast out of Spain in the 15th century. In
1916, the family returned to Spain and started the
Groupe Danone yogurt factory in Barcelona.
Fleeing Nazi fascism, they moved to New York and
changed the name of their company to the more
American-sounding Dannon.
At the time, Americans were unfamiliar with
yogurt, and initially the company operated at a
loss. Then, in 1947, Dannon’s owners made a
concession to the American taste for sweet flavors
by adding strawberry jam to their recipe. “Fruit on
the bottom” yogurt was born, and sales grew
tremendously as Americans started to embrace
the seemingly strange and exotic new product.
In the early 1920s, Jay Catherwood Hormel was
creating a new market of his own. Hormel, an
alumnus of Princeton University and a veteran of
World War I, returned from the war to work in his
father’s meatpacking business. He developed a
number of innovative new packaged meat products,
starting with America’s first canned ham.
Then, to use the scraps left over after the hams
were trimmed, he introduced Spam, a processed
meat product that has been famousand infamousever
since.
Ettore Boiardi came to the United States at age
16, landing at Ellis Island. He worked his way up in
the kitchen of the Plaza Hotel in New York City,
starting as a dishwasher and eventually rising to the
position of head chef. He then moved to Cleveland,
Ohio, and opened his own restaurant, Il Giardino
d’Italia. It was successfulso much so that he was
barraged with requests for his pasta sauces.
In 1928, he opened a factory to produce
canned sauces, marketing them under the name
“Chef Boy-ar-dee” so that Americans could
pronounce his name correctly. To maintain
quality control, he grew mushrooms for the
sauces in the factory basement. His canned goods
became a sensation, and by the time of Boiardi’s
death in 1985, his company had annual sales of
more than $500 million.
The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company
began as a tea shop in New York City, with a
thriving mail-order business. In 1912, its owners
branched out and opened a self-service grocery
store with a standardized layout. It sold everything
a household might want. This model quickly
became popular, because it was faster and cheaper
than going to separate stores for dry goods,
produce, and meat. The grocery company, which
went by the less formal name A&P, continued to
innovate, receiving patents on shopping carts and
what we know today as the checkout counter. By
the 1930s, A&P had nearly 16,000 stores in the
United States and combined sales of $1 billion
annually. The era of the supermarket had begun.
Next, some remarkable innovations took place
in the restaurant sector, led by entrepreneurs such
as Ray Kroc, Harland Sanders, and Dave Thomas.
In 1954, Kroca paper-cup salesmanmet the
McDonald brothers, who ran an unusually efficient
hamburger stand (and bought a lot of Kroc’s paper
cups). He decided to go into business with them
and do something nobody had done before:
Normal Rockwell painted this portrait of
the colonel himself, Harland Sanders.
20 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 21