Modernist-Cuisine-Vol.-1-Small

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Agnes Marshall ran a cooking school,
authored several cookbooks, and sold her
own line of cookware and ingredients,
which made her a celebrity chef in late
19th-century England.
Technical terms set in boldface, like
“cryogen” at right, are defined
briefly in the Glossary of Technical
Terms, near the end of volume 5.
André Daugin was the first chef to use
liquid nitrogen tableside in 1974 and the
first to describe it in a cookbook in 1981.
Dippin’ Dots, invented by biologist Curt
Jones, are made from ice cream base that
is cryopoached, freezing it into spheres.
is little point in trying to hide; it’s much better to
participate and be part of the community of
people sharing ideas.
Culinary Modernism’s focus on originality and
constant evolution raises some interesting questions.
What dishes were created when? How did
the cuisine evolve? Who came up with the key
ideas first? These questions consume a lot of
discussion among Modernist chefs, in part
because the answers are more elusive than they
might seem.
The Culinary Life of a Cryogen
Consider the fascinating history of liquid nitrogen
in cuisine. It might seem like a very straightforward
thing to find out who first used this cryogen
in the kitchen. In the late 19th century, several
scientists, including Michael Faraday, were
working on liquefying gases by cooling them to
extreme temperatures. The first measurable
quantities of liquid oxygen and nitrogen were
made in 1883 at Jagiellonian University in Krakow,
Poland.
Liquid gases might have stayed a scientific
curiosity, but Agnes Marshall, the proprietor of a
cooking school and a famous Victorian-era
cookbook author, attended a demonstration of
“liquid air” by James Dewar (inventor of the
Dewar flask, the design still used to contain liquid
nitrogen), held at the Royal Institution in London.
Marshall wrote the following in 1901:
Liquid air will do wonderful things, but
as a table adjunct its powers are astonishing,
and persons scientifically inclined may
perhaps like to amuse and instruct their
friends as well as feed them when they
invite them to the house. By the aid of liquid
oxygen, for example, each guest at a dinner
party may make his or her ice cream at the
table by simply stirring with a spoon the
ingredients of ice cream to which a few
drops of liquid air has been added by the
servant; one drop in a glass will more
successfully freeze champagne than two or
three lumps of ice, and in very hot weather
butter may be kept in better condition on
the table and make milk free from any
suspicion of sourness by adding a drop of
liquid air to an outer receptacle into which a
jug or butter dish is placed. Liquid air will,
in short, do all that ice does in a hundredth
part of the time. At picnics it would be
invaluable and surely ought to be kept freely
on hand in hospitals.
The amazing thing about this quote is that Mrs.
Marshall (as she was known to her readers) clearly
understood some key Modernist culinary principles
more than 100 years ago. Unfortunately, the
balance of evidence suggests that she never tried
this ice cream trick. If she had, she might have
discovered that using liquid oxygen is quite
dangerous compared to using liquid nitrogen.
In 1957, William Morrison, an employee of the
Union Stock Yard and Transit Company in
Chicago, filed a U.S. patent for making ice cream
by putting liquid nitrogen directly into the ice
cream base and stirring. Morrison’s method
clearly implements at least part of Marshall’s
vision, but it is unclear when his patent was first
put into use commerciallyor whether it ever
was. Like Marshall’s idea, Morrison’s invention
seems to have been a dead end.
Our research indicates that the next milestone
in the history of liquid nitrogen was in 1974, when
Walter Chamberlin, an engineer working for
Martin Marietta Corporation on a joint project
with the Bendix Corporation in Ann Arbor,
Michigan, took some liquid nitrogen home from
work in a thermos bottle. He decided to try to
make liquid nitrogen ice cream (see page 4·236);
he says that the idea came to him as he was
working with cryogenic material for his job. After
a few failed attempts with a blender that left
ice-cream mixture splattered on his ceiling,
Chamberlin developed a method of using a
kitchen stand mixer to make liquid nitrogen ice
cream.
This technique was so successful that he started
throwing liquid nitrogen ice cream parties. He held
6–10 of these parties every year for the next 36
years, many of them at or near the Los Alamos
National Laboratory where he worked. Many
engineers and scientists were exposed to liquid
nitrogen ice cream over the years, and they then
took the idea to the institutions where they worked.
As Chamberlin was hosting his first parties,
thousands of miles away, the French chef André
Daguin was starting to experiment with liquid
nitrogen. Daguin was the founding chef at the
restaurant Jardin des Saveurs at the Hôtel de
France in the small country town of Auch in
southwestern France. At the time, Daguin’s
restaurant held two Michelin stars and was a
leading example of the regional cuisine of Gascony.
Around 1976, the chef visited a facility in
nearby Aubiet that did artificial insemination of
cattle. Part of the tour included a demonstration of
liquid nitrogen, which was used to keep bull
semen in cold storage. This visit inspired Daguin
to try using liquid nitrogen in the kitchen.
He made a number of novel ice creams and
sorbets and served them at his restaurant, where
he mixed liquid nitrogen into the ice cream base
tableside with great drama, just as Marshall had
suggested. Daguin also prepared liquid nitrogencooled
dishes at dinners around the world, including
a banquet for the prestigious international
gastronomic society Chaîne des Rôtisseurs at The
Pierre hotel in New York City. Daguin was the first
chef to write about the cryogen: he included a
recipe for liquid nitrogen ice cream in his 1981
book Le Nouveau Cuisinier Gascon.
Daguin’s work with liquid nitrogen attracted
considerable notice at the time. It is mentioned in
many reviews of his restaurant, including one by
influential food critic Gael Greene that appeared in
New York magazine in 1980. Greene wrote, “Now
Daguin appears, armed with a jet-spewing liquid
nitrogen to turn white Armagnac into a granité
before our eyes … a snowy palate refresher.”
The stunning thing about this part of the story
is that Daguin was a famous French chef, yet his
role in the history of cooking with liquid nitrogen
has been underappreciated to the point that it is
virtually unknown. Even more surprisingly, he
does not seem to have influenced any other French
chefs of the era to use liquid nitrogen.
In 1979, I (Myhrvold) entered graduate school
in physics at Princeton University. I recall discussions
about using liquid nitrogen to make ice
cream or frozen whipped cream as a classroom
demonstration or a trick at parties. I never attended
such a demonstration or party, but the story
was passed along by word of mouth. We have not
been able to find any journal articles or other
written evidence referencing liquid nitrogen ice
cream in that period. It is possible that this oral
tradition started with Chamberlin’s parties.
At the University of Bristol, Peter Barham had
been looking for a new way to explain the concept
of entropy to his physics students, when in 1982
he hit upon the idea of making liquid nitrogen ice
cream for them. He thought at the time that he
was the first to do this, but later colleagues at
government research laboratories in the U.K. told
him that it had been done as a stunt since the
1950s. Barham tried (and failed) to find any
written documentation of this; it seems to be part
of the oral tradition, just as it had been at
Princeton.
In 1987, Curt Jones, a biologist who was familiar
with liquid nitrogen in scientific applications,
discovered a method for creating miniature frozen
spheres of ice cream. A year later, he launched the
company Dippin’ Dots and began producing and
selling this ice cream. Dippin’ Dots are simply ice
cream base dropped into liquid nitrogen, which
freezes the base into solid spheres—a process we
call cryopoaching (see page 2·460). This is very
different than the other approaches, which create
churned and aerated ice cream.
Note that Dippin’ Dotswhich is now a successful
ice cream franchise in the U.S.uses liquid
nitrogen as a preparation technique, but this is
done in a factory. The performance aspect of the
customer witnessing the creation is not part of the
process.
In 1994, Barham demonstrated the technique to
Nicholas Kurti and Hervé This. Barham reports
Liquid nitrogen chills ingredients quickly, even
at a rolling boil.
Greene began her article in New
York magazine with the provocative
statement, “The Nouvelle cuisine is
dead. Finie. Morte. Tombée.” She
then proceeded to discuss the
virtues of “La Cuisine Bourgeoise.”
Despite Greene’s high profile as a
food critic, both her description of
Daguin’s liquid nitrogen and her
proclamation that Nouvelle cuisine
was dead have largely been
forgotten.
Ariane Daugin, the daughter of
André, later became CEO of
D’Artagnan, a New Jersey-based
company that played a crucial role
in bringing fresh foie gras and other
delicacies to the American market.
60 VOLUME 1 · HISTORY AND FUNDAMENTALS
HISTORY 61