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Edouard de Pomiane was a French
scientist who doubled as a food
writer. He wrote more than a dozen
books on food and hosted a
popular radio show starting in the
1920s. He advocated a scientific
approach to food, but food science
was still in its early stages, so he had
fewer scientific insights to share
than McGee, Corriher, Wolke, and
This have these days.
found that no one knew why a certain culinary
phenomenon occurred, so he engaged with
scientists to find out.
His book became a sensation, in part because it
overturned many long-held but erroneous pieces
of kitchen wisdomsuch as the idea that searing
meat “seals in the juices.” (Searing actually causes
meat to leak more juices.) McGee taught us that
most of the stories we had been told about food
were just thatclever stories that would not
survive a confrontation with scientific reality.
On Food and Cooking isn’t a cookbook; it
contains neither recipes nor detailed techniques.
But it has nonetheless been extremely influential
among chefs. The New York chef Daniel Boulud
calls the book “a must for every cook who possesses
an inquiring mind.” And in the words of the
food writer Michael Ruhlman, “On Food and
Cooking is, in my opinion, hands down the most
important book about food and cooking ever
written.”
Over time, the trend that McGee started has
expanded enormously. He followed On Food and
Cooking with The Curious Cook in 1990, and similar
books by other authors soon emerged: CookWise:
The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking (1997)
and BakeWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful
Baking (2008), both by Shirley O. Corriher; The
Science of Cooking by Peter Barham (2001); and
THE C O N T R O V E R S Y O F
The Origins of Molecular Gastronomy
Hervé This has told the story of molecular gastronomy in
many publications. In March 1988, he and Nicholas Kurti
together decided they would launch a new scientific discipline
and an international conference called “molecular and
physical gastronomy.” Some time later, Kurti phoned Antonino
Zichichi from This’s office in Paris to ask if their
conference could be held at Erice. Zichichi agreed, and in
1992 the first workshop on “molecular and physical gastronomy”
was held. Kurti and This organized that conference
and several more in succession, launching their new discipline.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Or is it? History can sometimes be elusive. In researching
this chapter, we talked to Erice participants and examined
digital scans of original documents available on the website
What Einstein Told His Cook: Kitchen Science
Explained (2002) by Robert L. Wolke (who also
contributed to this book, see page 5·46). Each of
these books expanded on McGee’s objective to
apply scientific principles to food. Many aspects of
McGee’s scientific approach are found today on
television shows about food, including America’s
Test Kitchen and Alton Brown’s Good Eats.
In a strong sense, McGee provided a template
for one of the themes of this book, which is using
science to explain how cooking works. On Food
and Cooking was enormously influential for us,
both when it first came out, and then again more
recently as this book came together. Chapter 7 on
Traditional Cooking (page 2·2) is in many ways an
homage to McGee and the culinary-science
movement that he helped launch.
In 1985, McGee’s book was reviewed for the
scientific journal Nature by physicist Nicholas
Kurti (next page). Soon after Kurti visited McGee,
they became friends. Elizabeth Cawdry Thomas
was a Cordon Bleu alumna who ran a cooking
school in Berkeley, California, and was married to
a prominent scientist at the University of California
there.
In December 1988, she attended a conference at
Erice, a beautiful medieval Sicilian hill town that
had become home to a scientific conference
center. Over dinner with Ugo Valdre, a physicist at
of Harold McGee (http://www.curiouscook.com/cook/erice.
php). A very different story emerged from these sources.
These versions of history appear completely incompatible
on key details about who did what, and when—or perhaps
more to the point, who should get credit for what. Hervé This
reviewed a draft of this chapter, and he told us it was incorrect.
He reiterated his version of events, but declined to
explain how to reconcile it with the documentary evidence.
Instead, he said that other documents in his cellar supported
his story, but he couldn’t waste time digging them out.
Which story is correct? We don’t know, because we were
not there. The narrative above and on the next page seems
to best match the available documents and recollection of
participants, but we note that This has a different account.
B IOG R APHY O F
Nicholas Kurti
An experimental physicist with a passion for food, Nicholas
Kurti (1908–1998) is often considered the father of molecular
gastronomy—both the discipline and the term itself.
Kurti was one of the leading physicists of his time. Born in
Hungary, he worked at Oxford University from the 1930s
through the mid-1970s and specialized in ultralowtemperature
physics. (The Clarendon Laboratory, where he
worked, was nicknamed “the coldest spot on earth” after
Kurti discovered a way to create temperatures a millionth of
a degree above absolute zero.)
Toward the end of his career, Kurti began melding his
scientific knowledge with a keen interest in cooking. In 1969,
he gave a talk to the Royal Institution in London titled “The
Physicist in the Kitchen,” in which he explained the science of
the University of Bologna, she discussed her
dream of having a conference at Erice that brought
chefs and scientists together. Valdre introduced
her to Antonino Zichichi, who ran the Ettore
Majorana Foundation and Centre for Scientific
Culture, in Erice. He liked her idea of a conference
on food and science, but he prompted her to find a
scientist to run it.
Thomas turned to Nicholas Kurti, whom she
had known for years, and recruited him to
sponsor the project. In early August 1990, Kurti
wrote to Zichichi, saying he was writing at the
suggestion of Valdre and Thomas, whom he
described as a “mutual friend of ours,” since
Zichichi also knew her.
Kurti was tentative in his first letter to Zichichi,
asking him whether the topic of science and
cooking might be too “frivolous” for his prestigious
center. Nevertheless, Zichichi scheduled the
conference, provided that Kurti personally run it.
In late September, Kurti replied, saying that since
his August letter he had made progress in recruiting
Harold McGee and Hervé This, who, with
himself, would form a triumvirate to run the
conference. In fact, it was Elizabeth Thomas who
first called McGee and recruited him to the
project; then Kurti followed up. Kurti acknowledged
in another letter that Thomas was the one
who “sparked” the conference, but she was not
microwave cooking and other culinary techniques.
In 1990, after he had retired from Oxford, Kurti began
working with Elizabeth Cawdry Thomas, Hervé This, and
Harold McGee to organize an international workshop on
the science of cooking at the Ettore Majorana Foundation
and Centre for Scientific Culture, in Erice, Sicily.
The first Erice workshop was held in 1992 and drew 30 to
40 participants, including university and food-industry
scientists, as well as some chefs (notably Raymond Blanc
and Pierre Gagnaire). Five more Erice workshops were held
over the next 12 years. After Kurti’s death in 1998, Hervé This
named the next meeting of the Erice workshop in his honor:
the International Workshop on Molecular and Physical
Gastronomy “N. Kurti.”
made part of the organizing group. Valdre was
disappointed with that and took the issue up with
Kurti. In letters to Thomas, Valdre explained it as
being due to a rather odd concern of Kurti’s that
association with the Ettore Majorana center might
appear to improperly benefit Thomas’s private
cooking school. Although not officially recognized
as an organizer, Thomas attended each of the Erice
conferences as an active participant.
Initially, Kurti proposed the conference be
called “Science and Cooking.” In February 1991,
this was changed again to “Science and Gastronomy.”
At some point between then and early 1992,
the name changed again to “Molecular and
Physical Gastronomy.” The first appearance of that
term seems to be the poster advertising the first
Erice conference, which occurred in August 1992.
Six of these workshops were held between 1992
and 2004. Each one attracted between 30 and 40
participants, who informally discussed their work
and presented papers over the course of four days.
No conference proceedings or papers were ever
published. The majority of the attendees were
scientists who were interested in cooking, but a
number of notable chefs attended, including
Raymond Blanc and Heston Blumenthal from the
United Kingdom, and Pierre Gagnaire from
France. Attendance was by invitation only.
The impact of these conferences is open to
Kurti organized the 1992 Erice
meeting with McGee and This. The
1995 and 1997 meetings were
organized by Kurti and This. In
1998, Kurti selected Tony Blake, a
flavor chemist, to take over his role
in organizing the workshop, which
Blake did for the 1999 and 2001
workshops, with help from Hervé
This. The last workshop, in 2004,
was organized by Peter Barham and
Hervé This.
44 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 45