ANTH 205 Lecture 37
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Special Lecture: Modernist Cuisine
Food as Art
Legacy:
- High French Cuisine
- Nouvelle Cuisine (20th century)
- Modernist Cuisine (1990s–present)
3 Individuals:
- McGee
- Adria
- Blumenthal
Abandonment of any rules about food
Semester Recap
- Harnessing Fire - easier to digest food
- Agricultural Revolution
- Development of Civilization
- Rise of Culinary Traditions
- Response to Culinary Traditions
Revolution in Context
Tradition in Cooking: the way it's always been done (Italian food is a good example, even though everything we think Italian is from elsewhere)
thanks to globalization, this process is now accelerated
"Everything old was once new"
- Kiwi: 1962 in US
- Molten Chocolate Cake (chocolate cake with liquid center): independent in 1981 and 1987
Develops one dish at a time
Michael Pollan: Culinary elitist
- Omnivore's Dilemma
- In Defense of Food
- Food Rules
- "Only eat foods our great-grandmothers would recognize." → implies that any innovation is bad
Artistic Movements
Sometimes technological, sometimes not
"points of view", "impressionism"
Nouvelle Cuisine
New set of rules, same time period as Chef Boyardee, microwaves, etc.
First generation of celebrity chefs.
Plated Dishes
Food used to be plated (served and put on plates) at the table (service a la rousse)
In 1960s, Pierre and Jean Troigros pioneered plating (arranging food on the plate) in the kitchen
Chefs became more famous: chefs would put "signatures" on dish
Seeds of Modernism
Techniques, aesthetics, intellectual underpinnings
Ferran Adrià
Founded elBulli restaurant in Spain
- open for only 6 months of the year (8000 diners per year)
- 6 months for research and development in laboratory
- everything radically different every time
- serves only what chef is cooking
- closed forever on July 2011
- Widely considered to be the greatest chef in the world
Technoemotional cuisine
- Have diner elicit emotion
- attacked every rule: why have any rules at all?
Harold McGee
Started investigated science of cooking in 1984
Most of what people learn about food is not necessarily true
- The Mythbusters of gastronomy
Published kitchen cutaway book: On Food and Cooking
Late 1980s: Molecular Gastronomy
It is a sad reflection on our civilization that, while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés.Nicholas Kurti
Heston Blumenthal: the Fat Duck
Goal to unite science and tradition (and art)
Sensory science: Sounds of the Sea
Listen to sounds of the sea before eating the dish
Modernist Cuisine
- intellectually motivated
- Scientific techniques
- Self-consciously modern
- Challenges preconceptions