BEFORE WE TAKE A CLOSER LOOK at the fears and uncertainties that the adoption of a radically new approach to cooking is bound to arouse, let me continue to try to make the strongest possible case on behalf of note-by-note cooking, which in any case is rapidly being brought into existence in many parts of the world. Shapes, consistencies, tastes, odors, trigeminal sensations, and colors can now be created independently of one another, or very nearly so. The main problem facing us at this point is that there are too many possibilities!
The chef is seated before his piano. What kind of culinary music will he decide to play? For a traditional cook, the answer is quite simple and every bit as boring. In France in the springtime, cooks living in the countryside—in the Jura, for example—who go into the forest to pick the first morels will prepare them in a cream and yellow wine sauce to accompany a roasted chicken; cooks living in cities, in the Jura and elsewhere, who buy the season’s first asparagus in their local market will serve them with a sauce chosen from the classical repertoire, which in many cases is restricted by rather peculiar conventions. Cooks in Brittany will likewise work with whatever is in season: scallops, perhaps, or turtle or oysters. And so it will be in every other part of the country.
The seasons, the land, regional tradition—thus the three pillars of traditional cooking, each one perfectly legitimate in its way. In combination, however, they amount to a sort of unspoken agreement that no one will have to think very hard about what to cook. Still today the most inventive chefs, even the least hidebound among them, go on being parties to it whenever they content themselves with devising more or less minor variations on a set of age-old themes. Note-by-note cooking threatens to topple this whole system. No compound known to chemistry is uniquely associated with a particular place. No compound has a particular season. As for conventions, there aren’t any yet. Everything remains to be invented.
Note-by-note cooking allows us to artificially recreate traditional dishes, to make artificial wines (which should not be called “wines,” as we have already seen), artificial cheeses (some have already been made), and artificial fruits (raspberries, for example). None of this is at all difficult from the technical point of view. But is there really any point to it? The fact remains that a copy is not exactly the same as the original, and there is a risk that it will be criticized (wrongly, in my view) for just this reason. Inevitably, the old and the new will be compared.
Let’s approach the question from another angle, resorting once again to an analogy with music. Just as electronic synthesizers can be programmed to play “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” with specific and novel timbres that nevertheless are neither strident nor loud, so one might create a comfortable, familiar, unchallenging version of note-by-note cuisine. Or one might create a new world of provocative, even abrasive flavors. There is also an analogy with painting. Painters, using modern pigments, can perfectly well make traditional figurative works, but they can also make works so strange that viewers who have not made the effort to learn a new pictorial language cannot help but angrily denounce them. “That’s not art!” they cry.
Earlier, in
chapter 2, we saw how useful tables can be in stimulating the imagination. Here is another one (
table 6.1), for chefs brave enough to position themselves in the emerging market for culinary art. Cooks are condemned to be either artisans or artists; if they are artists, they can practice their art only if they have an audience—a public.
|
OLD FORM |
NEW FORM |
|
Old Substance |
In music, a composition such as “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” may be likened to a natural substance. The flute gives it an ancient, traditional form. In other words, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star,” played on the flute, is old music played in an old way.
In painting, figurative representation, in which the things we see in the world around us (trees, persons, and so on) are realistically rendered, may likewise be thought of as depicting old substances. By applying the same pigments that the painters of the Renaissance used (just as the flute can be used to make music still today), we can give traditional scenes an equally traditional form. Think of the marvelous Isenheim Altar in the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar.
And in cooking? A dish of choucroute, made with cabbage, sausages, and potatoes, is an old substance in an old form. With note-by-note cooking, it is possible to give choucroute a perfectly traditional interpretation, however uninteresting it may be to do this. |
Let us take an old substance and give it a new form. It is the most daring of the four possibilities summarized here. “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” can be played on a synthesizer. If the synthesizer is used to produce flute sounds, the work’s new appearance will be imperceptible, or perceptible only by highly trained listeners. By contrast, if a synthesizer is used to produce new sounds, unknown to classical music, “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” will be perceived in a new way, and the hold of the old form over us will be weakened.
Similarly, in painting, no traditional painter would have drawn three angels as Salvador Dalí did. With Dalí, there was an old substance (the angels) and a new form. So, too, though in a rather different spirit, the use of acrylic paint by Andy Warhol and others gave traditional scenes a new look.
In cooking, a choucroute composed note by note would fall under this category so long as its appearance is novel. Molecular cooks have already been doing this sort of “deconstruction” for a number of years now. It has now become possible to play the same game at a higher, more challenging level. |
New Substance |
Here a new substance is cast in an old form. In music, I think particularly of the work of Iannis Xenakis, who combined human voices and traditional instrumentation to create utterly novel compositions. Later in this chapter, I will briefly consider what inspired him to do this.
In painting, many modern artists have created new substances with traditional pigments—Zao Wou-ki and Pierre Soulages, for example.
In cooking, it is likewise a matter of using traditional ingredients to obtain new effects. Pierre Gagnaire, for example, is able to do quite extraordinary things with quite ordinary ingredients: Camembert with raspberry sauce, tuna and veal tartars, a baba with button mushrooms (rather than rum), scallops with licorice sauce, and so on. |
Giving a new substance a new form is the most daring of the four possibilities summarized here. At the beginning of the twentieth century, with the advent of electroacoustical instruments, musicians such as Pierre Schaeffer, Edgard Varèse, and Karlheinz Stockhausen were able to make novel sounds, which could be used to compose music in both classical and modern styles. The new melodies and tones introduced in some of their works sounded like screeching cats to lovers of traditional music. But apart from the novelty of the form, the substance of these works is so unfamiliar that our minds have not yet grown fully accustomed to them even today.
In painting, too, artists such as Yayoi Kusama make works that are unprecedented with regard to both form and substance.
In cooking, I invite those who accept the challenge of note-by-note cooking to throw themselves into it. We can be certain that their efforts will be praised by the moderns among us and reviled by the ancients, just as the innovations of the first generation of molecular cooks were. Let us encourage the most forward looking of the new pioneers: they and their followers will be the ones left standing at the end of the day. |
This table will naturally provoke all kinds of reactions, but everyone will agree that the question at issue here is a very difficult one. I shall begin by quoting from an unpublished lecture given by Iannis Xenakis in 1983 to the Atomic Energy Commission (as it was then known) in Paris, “Current Problems of Musical Composition” (followed by dinner at La Tour d’Argent—proof, one is tempted to say, that the prospect of fine food is an indispensible condition of originality):
In 1953, I proposed a new conception of music. It rests on the mass effect of individual sound events, an effect that prevents individual events from being followed separately. As in the song of cicadas in summer, the noise of crashing waves or of a hail storm, the slogans shouted during demonstrations by tens of thousands of men and women, especially during bloody clashes with the authorities. Thus, instead of constructing on the basis of melodic lines or series of notes, on the basis of distinct sequences of sound events, it means creating architectures with masses of events and modulating these masses as a sculptor would, only using tonal material. To do this, I needed to use a probability calculus. Hence stochastic—probabilistic—music.
An orchestra composed of a hundred musicians has offered until now, and always will offer in the future, remarkable opportunities for exploration. If each musician can play, on average, five notes per second, that comes to five hundred sound events per second in all, well beyond our mental ability to tell them apart. It is here that our brain intervenes. In order to overcome a statistical impossibility, it invents concepts of average density, uniform distribution, degree of order, rate of transformation, degree of agitation, and so on. There is a parallel here with the kinetic theory of gases in the nineteenth century, which later became statistical mechanics. I have composed works such as Metastasis and Pithoprakta in which Poisson and Gauss distributions—linear, uniform, and so on—are combined in an abstract black box that is the architecture of this new music.
Some people like Xenakis’s music, others find it unlistenable. Many people have trouble with modern art in general, not just modern music or painting. In cooking, it sometimes happens that we find combinations of perfectly traditional ingredients shocking because the combinations are unfamiliar to us. Culinary artists who grow weary of doing again and again what has already been done thousands of times before can take heart in knowing that works of all kinds, even ones that we find jarring at first, will be accepted in the end—on one condition, that they do not lose us completely. But the converse is also true: novelty is not in and of itself a guarantee of artistic worth. In literature, formal innovation is not solely responsible for the effects achieved by the greatest modern authors; indeed, taken too far, formalism is a recipe for tedium. The reason mere novelty is not enough by itself is that there must be an inner resonance, a deeply felt emotion, that unites the reader with the spirit and purpose of the work.
In music, there is melody and rhythm; in painting, shape and color. In either case there is structure and contrast: structure, because an unordered series of sounds or images strikes us as incoherent; contrast, because juxtaposition and opposition are what we perceive when we see or listen to a work of art. Likewise, in cooking, contrast is essential because our sensory system is constructed to detect it; structure is essential as well because contrast cannot exist without it. These two fundamental concepts may be analyzed under the categories of shape, consistency, taste, odor, trigeminal sensation, and color, as we have already done.
Finally, the note-by-note cook will have to ask himself if it is worth going to the trouble of making new dishes that are rather timid and restrained out of a desire not to offend more traditionally minded food lovers, or whether he is prepared to do what is necessary to shock settled sensibilities by creating dishes that are daring in both their spirit and their form. Connoisseurs of powerful sensations will not complain if he chooses the latter course.
The question of what we should put on our empty plate has not yet really been answered. Intelligent and resourceful cooks will respond in a practical fashion, by taking as their point of departure basic, elementary things—which is to say whatever compounds they can lay their hands on. Just as a fine turbot may inspire traditional and modern cooks alike to produce original works of art, some compounds naturally suggest new paths to explore. Limonene, with its fresh lemony scent; cinnamaldehyde (cinnamic aldehyde), which is hard to tell apart from cinnamon; octenol, with its odor of mushrooms and forest undergrowth—these and all the other compounds we have looked at are so many invitations to culinary creativity.
A few years ago, collaborating on a menu for a dinner of molecular cooking, the pastry chef Nicolas Bernardé and I had the idea of trying to work from a pure feeling. After all, the work of a truly talented chef is animated by personal emotion—not culinary emotion, mind you (for that would almost unavoidably lead him to reproduce something very classic), but instead a feeling such as the one he experienced as a child, for example, going out to pick mushrooms for the first time with his grandfather. At the edge of the forest, the boy comes upon a magical scene: the tree trunks bathed in dark shadow, the lush green of the moss, the rays of light filtering through the branches. It was just this emotion that Bernardé wished to convey, as it happens, and during the meal that followed I saw men and women with tears of joy in their eyes: so well had the chef succeeded in sharing this emotion, it brought back to each one of them his or her own childhood memories of the countryside.
Once the guiding idea has been decided upon, the dish must be thought out in every detail before it can be brought into being. The dish will need to embody a whole set of specific organoleptic characteristics (consistency, odors, tastes, and so on). In theory, the preceding chapters will have told us everything we need to know in order to convert inspiration into reality. As a practical matter, however, a great deal of experiment and further reflection will be needed.
Though the mode of culinary deconstruction promoted by molecular cooking may be justified in various ways, it seems to me to have no value whatever by comparison with the crucial imperative of construction. Note-by-note cooking is meant not least of all to remind us that reproducing familiar dishes is lazy and unworthy of the serious cook. At bottom, I believe, cooking must concern itself with constructing new dishes, not only from the point of view of shape and consistency, but also of taste and smell and all the other sensations that contribute to the experience of eating. Is there really any difference between construction in this sense and Carême’s conception of architecture? Not at all—and yet the idea of culinary constructivism is not something that would have occurred to anyone two hundred years ago. One way of appreciating its originality is to think of flavor as a sensation that is indissociable from the phenomenon of duration. A comparison with language may be illuminating. To adopt the linguist’s terms, one may say that the act of eating is organized along a syntagmatic axis and a paradigmatic axis: at any given moment we experience a variety of sensations, each of which changes in the course of mastication, even afterward in some cases. A skillful note-by-note chef will have organized all these sensations in advance, constructing them in the first instance and then over all those instants that follow—which is to say over time.
The enlightened cook will begin by reasoning from simple physiochemical facts. From the fact, for example, that salt reinforces the sensation of sweetness and weakens the sensation of bitterness, or that strawberry and orange-blossom water jointly produce a flavor of wild strawberry. Imagining how different ingredients will combine with one another is a matter of knowing beforehand which ones are robust enough to withstand the effect of the others, how the individual tastes will blend together, how a change in our perception of one or more parts will influence our perception of the whole.
Next, the cook must come to terms with the phenomenon of duration, the ebb and flow of sensations over time. Depending on the physical composition of a dish—the ingredients themselves, the presence of fatty substances, the colloidal structure (foam, emulsion, gel, suspension), and so on—various flavors appear and disappear at various moments in the course of tasting. For example, the longer a mayonnaise (the prototype emulsion for our purposes) is beaten, the more the odorant components will stand out, whereas in a mayonnaise that has been beaten for a shorter time the sapid components will be more prominent. Or again: fatty substances coat the mouth and lengthen the time during which odorant compounds are perceived. And again: different molecular combinations modify the relative intensity or assertiveness of different flavors. Cooks already have an intuitive sense of what this new kind of constructivism entails. When they decorate a sauce with a sprig of chervil, for example, they introduce an element that needs to be chewed, lengthening the period of time over which the flavor of the sauce is perceived. There is much, much more to be said in this connection, but rather than repeat myself here, I must thank my readers for their patience in waiting until my next book,
Explorons la cuisine, appears in English.
For the moment, it is enough that we frankly acknowledge how very difficult the culinary art is. Cooking at a high level, whether in traditional or note-by-note fashion, demands a great deal of technique and an even greater amount of feeling. Technique can be learned. But what about feeling?
Last, but hardly least, there is the question of what we are to call note-by-note dishes once we have created them. In April 2009, Pierre Gagnaire named the first dish in the history of note-by-note cooking “Note-by-Note No. 1.” One could carry on in this vein (No. 2, No. 3, No. 4, and so on), of course, but that would seem rather cold and impersonal, don’t you agree? For the names we give to dishes are very much a part of why we like them. Think of a choucroute royale, whose name aptly gives the impression of something more lavishly appointed and more copious than a simple choucroute. Let’s make a brief detour through the past, then, in the hope of gleaning a few ideas from those who came before us.
BEFORE CARÊME
In the beginning, when human beings had only recently parted ways with their primate ancestors, when language was still rudimentary, they ate without giving names to what they ate. In this respect, at least, they were no different than animals. Humans eventually acquired the faculty of speech and with it the habit of distinguishing between different foods, initially by means of a simple phrase that identified the food itself and its method of preparation. We do the like of this still today when we speak of roasted chicken, grilled steak, fried potatoes, sliced tomatoes, hard-boiled eggs, and so on. The famous cookbook by Guillaume Tirel (ca. 1310–1395, better known as Taillevent),
Le Viandier, which first appeared in print in the late fifteenth century, carried on an already ancient tradition: boiled beef (“bouture de grosse char”), boiled venison (“chevreau sauvaige”), boiled wild boar (“sanglier frais”), baked chicken with cumin sauce (“comminée de poulaille”), and so on.
Once the ingredients had grown beyond a certain number, or when a particular cooking procedure came to be considered of greater interest than the food itself, new names were introduced: pot-au-feu, vinaigrette, white sauce, stew of small birds, and so on. Thus one finds preparations named after their most salient ingredient (a vinaigrette, for example, is notable especially for the vinegar it contains) as well as mention of the cooking equipment used to make certain dishes (a pot-au-feu is made in a pot over a fire); in some cases, the distinctive property of a preparation is emphasized (a white sauce, after all, must be white).
Soon thereafter the names of dishes came to denote their place of origin: Taillevent’s Viandier speaks, for example, of a sauce from Poitou (“saulce poitevine”). Le Ménagier de Paris, a book by an anonymous author published just before Taillevent’s death, speaks not only of savory pastries from Italy (“tourtes pisaines” and “tourtes lombardes”) but also of a Savoy broth (“brouet de Savoie”) and a German broth with eggs poached in oil (“brouet d’Alemaigne d’oeufs pochés en huile”). But these names are still less common than references to the manner in which a dish is prepared or served: capon pie (“pastés de chapons”), twice-cooked pike and eels (“bécuit de brochets et d’anguilles”), whitebait with cold sage sauce (“ables et froide sauge”), venison with wheat boiled in milk with sugar and spices (“venoison à la froumentée”), roast Provencal figs covered with bay leaves (“grosses figues de Prouvence rosties et fueilles de lorier par-dessus”), cooked apples (“pommes cuites”), and so on.
The tendency to identify dishes with the meats, fish, and vegetables of which they were chiefly composed was reinforced by the appearance of the French translation of a book by the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Bartolomeo Sacchi (who wrote about cooking under the pseudonym “il Platina”),
Le Platine en françois (1505). The section titles of Sacchi’s book correspond to more or less general categories: “Venison,” “Cabbages,” “Brown Meagre” (“corbeau de mer,” a kind of fish), “Gourds,” and so on. One does, of course, encounter dishes such as cabbage à la romaine, squash à la cathalane, and cold eggs à la florentine, but these culinary genealogies were no less anecdotal than they had been a century or two earlier. Names now began to be attached to specific preparations, particularly in the case of soups: one, made from elder flowers and known as zanzarella (“potaige des fleurs du seuz appele zanzarelle blanche”); another, a Lenten broth called leucophage (“potaige en jeusne appele leucophage”); or again, a soup with pasta made from wheat and cut into the thin pieces from which it took its name (“potaige frumentin ou menudets”).
A century and a half later François Pierre de la Varenne’s book Le Cuisinier françois (1651) makes it clear that naming conventions were now more firmly anchored in technique, which itself had been refined. La Varenne uses terms such as estuvé, court-bouillon, ragoust, fricasée, baignets, bisque—all of them familiar still today despite minor changes in spelling. But some are new. He speaks of pike, for example, that has been cooked for only a very short time in order to bring out the blue hues of its skin (“brochet au bleu”). And when he mentions a dish such as champignons à la crème, the name no longer tells us everything we need to know. It is not a matter simply of cooking mushrooms in cream: the name, though it seems to describe the ingredients, as in older cookbooks, is actually a very brief summary of a rather elaborate recipe. Above all, one is struck by the multiplication of phrases indicating a style of preparation associated with a particular person, place, or nation: “Pièce de bœuf à l’Angloise” (or “à la Chalonnaise”); “Potage à la princesse” (or “à la reyne”); “Oeufs à la portugaise” (or “à la Varenne”); “Pasté à la Cardinale” (or “à l’anglaise”), and so on.
In
L’Art de bien traiter (1674) by L. S. R. (an anonymous cook whose initials may stand for “le sieur Robert”), two types of name are frequently met with. In addition to fricasées of pig’s feet and marinated chickens served with a sauce, one finds suckling pig in the style of Père Douillet and stuffed legs of mutton à la royale. L. S. R. criticizes La Varenne for the needless complication of his recipes, calling them “inutile” and “dégoutant” (the latter term still bearing its original connotation of excess rather than the modern sense of something that is sickening or loathsome)—though his own cooking is rather complicated, enough so at least that it has now become quite impossible to discover how to make a dish from its name alone. One now begins to see much longer names, such as “Échinée aux pois et petits oisons à la daube mangés chauds, et fricandeaux de veau frits en beignets ou en ragoût ou piqués rôtis.” In this dish, for example, one begins by blanching the meat, which is then pounded and cooked in a pot with a great many ingredients, including lard, salt and spices, fines herbes, broth, onions studded with cloves, streaked bacon, lemon, white wine, and artichoke bottoms.
Let’s take another great leap forward. Almost two centuries later, in 1847, the final volume of Marie-Antoine Carême’s monumental L’Art de la cuisine française au XIXe siècle was posthumously published. With Carême, a distinction is made for the first time between basic preparations (bouillon, mirepoix, meat and fish fillings for various kinds of dumplings) and the recipes themselves. Newly baptized dishes predominate: “Potage de santé à la française” (or “à la régence,” “au chasseur,” etc.), “Garni de poulet à la reine” (or “à la paysanne,” “à la Crécy,” “à la Buffon,” “à la Girodet,” “à la Monglas,” “à la princesse,” “à la Rossini,” etc.). It hardly comes as a surprise that a queen or a princess who particularly liked a certain dish was able to arrange for it to be named after her. One’s attention is drawn instead to a pattern of growing complexity in the culinary arts, which now distinguish between local, regional, and national styles of cooking while at the same time indicating levels of social stratification. Moreover, advances in communication gave much wider currency to names than in the past, and this at a time when popular interest in cooking was growing very rapidly (to judge from the increasing demand for cookbooks). Carême’s student Urbain Dubois ably upheld and extended the tradition established by his teacher: “Purée de topinambours Palestine,” “Purée de choux-fleurs Dubarry,” “Purée de concombres Mathilde,” “Purée d’asperges comtesse,” “Purée de haricots frais Musard,” “Purée de pomme de terre Jackson,” “Gros merlan à l’intendant,” “Moyens merlans à la diplomate,” “Rougets à la Colbert,” and so on.
ESCOFFIER AND AFTER
By the beginning of the twentieth century, marked in the world of cooking by the appearance of Georges-Auguste Escoffier’s
Le Guide culinaire in 1903, names had not gotten any shorter: “Coquille de queues d’écrivisses Cardinal,” “Filet de veau Agnès Sorel,” “Poularde pochée à l’Anglaise,” “Suprême de volaille Valençay,” “Côtelettes de pigeonneaux en chaud-froid.” By this point, however, so miserably did the name of a dish fail to describe its component parts that cooks now began to feel a need for a guide to
Le Guide, something that would help them recall the various ingredients used to make the thousands of dishes that the master had codified. Some twenty-five years later this aide-mémoire conveniently materialized in the form of a book by Escoffier’s associates Thomas Gringoire and Louis Saulnier,
Le Répertoire de la cuisine (1929).
The weakness for pompous and often precious names was further aggravated by the alliance of cooking with an overtly literary sensibility. In Éloges de la cuisine française (1933), which I mentioned earlier, Édouard Nignon carried the practice of using self-congratulatory epithets to describe dishes to new lengths (everything is “mignon,” “superbe,” “succulent,” “frais,” “tendre”), while never succumbing to the temptation of choosing a simple name when a more complicated one could be devised: “Tartelettes de mauviette à l’infante,” “Porcelets à la brioche à la française,” “Paupline de jambon Valonde,” “Grenadins de gélinottes à la Bariatinski,” “Escalope de langouste régence,” “Crème à la freux aux amandes fraîches,” “Grenadins de barbues à la Chartres,” “Caprices de dame fleurise,” “Pascaline de fois gras à la Rohan,” and so on. Still, it must be conceded that Nignon’s cooking was remarkably good, and in any case well deserving of the praise it heaped upon itself.
Skipping over a few more decades, we come to Paul Bocuse and
La cuisine du marché (1976). Here at last we find a more sober and restrained style, with “Abricots Colbert,” “Agneaux de pré-salé,” “Aloyaux rôtis,” “Beignets d’anchois,” “Choux verts,” “Coqs au fleurie,” “Crêpes à l’eau de fleur d’oranger,” and so on. While Bocuse’s cookbook does not have the same ambition as either of the two treatises I have just mentioned, by Nignon and Escoffier, its recipes are nonetheless worked out with considerable sophistication and attention to detail. Making a cucumber salad, for example, is not simply a matter of slicing the cucumber and adding a vinaigrette sauce to it, as nearly every novice would do. No, the cucumber must be peeled and cut lengthwise in two; then, once it has been seeded, you have to cut each half into very thin slices, arrange them on a plate, and sprinkle them with salt, then mix them together in a bowl and let them macerate for an hour until all the excess water has been drawn out, then carefully strain and season with pepper, oil, vinegar, and chopped chervil.
It is only fitting that I leave the last word to Pierre Gagnaire. On a 1977 menu, one finds a dish called “Pochette du saint-pierre et des poivrons.” The name does not tell you that in addition to the John Dory and bell peppers there are also onions, cucumbers, lemon, and white wine. A few years later the number of ingredients mentioned begins to rise. In 1983, for example, one finds a “Gelée d’huîtres et foie gras de canard au jus de betterave, tartine de seigle au beaufort”; in 1988, a “Cuillère de gelée de boeuf à l’huître, sablé aux courgettes, served with a Moussette de lapereau au genièvre,” is followed by “Noix de Saint-Jacques rôties au poivre de Sichuan, navets confits au foie gras et dominos de poires au beurre frais,” garnished by a “Cuillère de gelée de boeuf à l’huître.” As the preparation becomes more involved, the name grows longer as well. From 1990: “Socca de morue au vieux parmesan, chair de tourteau, feuilles de choux de Bruxelles et noix de Saint-Jacques à la croque-ausel,” napped with a “Jus d’oursin au vin jaune du Jura.” The names are not always so long, however. From 1991: “Turbot au café, petits oignons à la cardamome,” with a “Jus de tomate à l’aurore, tomate fripée.” But sometimes they are even longer—and more emphatic. Come 2005, one finds this bell ringer: “Le Noire: Crémeux de riz NOIR vénéré au poivre NOIR de Sarawak; radis NOIRS aux quetsches,” accompanied by a “Belle noix de ris de veau braisée dans un jus d’olives NOIRES de Nyons aux trompettes” and a “Gelée de navet demi-deuil et vent des sables aux pitchounes.”
Let’s be honest, it hardly matters what these dishes are called—in French or in English. I have left their names untranslated because they are not meant to be attempted by home cooks, who would have to start work a week in advance, if not several weeks—even assuming they could obtain all of the ingredients called for, some of them exceedingly rare and expensive.
Note-by-note cooks are perfectly free, if they like, to recapitulate the history of cooking in selecting names for their creations. One might begin very simply, perhaps by naming dishes after their chief structural characteristic: “Brittle Polyphenol Gel,” “Beet-Powder Foam,” and so on. One could also give them names associated with historical periods or literary figures: “Citric Acid Conglomèles à la Renaissance,” for example, or “Fibrés à la Balzac.” Some may wish to emphasize that the new movement carries on an older tradition of cooking: “Soufflé of Whole Syrah Triglycerides and Polyphenols”; “Whisked Emulsion of Glucose, Glycine, Proline, and Hydroxyproline.” Others may prefer to call attention to their inventions by keeping things simple.
Myself, I expect to see anything and everything. When it comes to names, we have already seen it all in cooking—and there is no reason to think that the future will be any different. The artist is a singular person, who by his very nature cannot help but try to set himself apart. Here are some of the wondrously strange names that have already been given to the earliest note-by-note dishes.
DISHES BY PIERRE GAGNAIRENote-by-Note No. 1 (April 24, 2009)
Apple Pearls, Opaline, and Lemon Granita (April 2009)
A Savory Pastry (May 2009)
Mace-Seasoned Artichoke Velouté, Raw Provençal Artichoke Bouquet, and Yellow-Wine Aspic Squares (2006)
Polyphenol Caramel Disks (2009)
ÉCOLE LE CORDON BLEU DINNER (PARIS, OCTOBER 16, 2010)
Royale of Undergrowth, Truffled Blancmange, and Slightly Foamy Bouillon
Iodized Octopus and John Dory Flesh, Spaghetti Foam, and Transparence with Cepe Mushrooms
Twice-Cooked Young Pigeon with Stewed Thigh Meat, Winter Squash (Potimarron) Fondant, Polyphenol Gel, Virtual Asparagus
Fresh Goat Cheese Chantilly
Napoleon Marshmallows, two textures
POTEL & CHABOT DINNER (PARIS, JANUARY 26, 2011)
Oyster Tapioca Amylopectin Foam Bavarois, Lemon Tapioca
Sea Water Jelly, Cream of Oyster Soup, Wind Crystals
Lobster Soufflé, Wöhler Sauce, Raspberry Agar Jelly
Beef and Carrot “Fibré,” Cappelini, Turned Carrots
Beef Cheek with Brown Gravy
Cassis Powder Eruption, Cassis Boule
ÉCOLE LE CORDON BLEU DINNER (PARIS, OCTOBER 15, 2011)
Note-by-Yolk (in the style of an oeuf en meurette)
Tricolored Surf-and-Turf Napoleon with Kientzheim and Shellfish Sauce Duo
Note-by-Note Version of a Pot-au-feu
Mozzarella Reconstructed, with olive oil and lamb’s lettuce (mâche)
Cordon Bleu Dessert
And the future has only just begun!
Bocuse, Paul. La cuisine du marché: En hommage à Alfred Guérot. Paris: Flammarion, 1976. Available in English as Paul Bocuse’s French Cooking, translated by Colette Rossant (New York: Pantheon, 1977).
Carême, Marie-Antoine. L’Art de la cuisine française au dix-neuvième siècle: Traité élémentaire et pratique. 5 vols. Paris: J. Renouard et Cie., 1833–47; reprint, Paris: de Kerangué & Pollés Libraires-Éditeurs, 1981.
Escoffier, Georges-Auguste. Le Guide culinaire. 4th ed. Paris: Flammarion, 1921. Many times reprinted by the same publisher; the English translation by H. L. Cracknell and R. J. Kaufmann (New York: Mayflower Books, 1979) has likewise been regularly reissued, most recently by Wiley.
Gringoire, Thomas, and Louis Saulnier. Le Répertoire de la cuisine. Paris: Dupont et Malgat, 1929. This book remains in print still today with Flammarion, though again it seems never to have been translated into English.
Le Ménagier de Paris. Translated into modern French from the 1393 edition by Georgina E. Brereton and Janet M. Ferrier. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Available in English as The Good Wife’s Guide: A Medieval Household Book, translated by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009).
Nignon, Édouard.
Éloges de la cuisine française. Paris: H. Piazza, 1933. Reprinted most recently by Flammarion in 2009. No English translation exists.
L. S. R. L’Art de bien traiter. Reprinted from the 1674 edition together with Pierre de Lune, Le Cuisinier (1656), and Audiger, La Maison réglée (1692), in Gilles Laurendon and Laurence Laurendon, eds., L’art de la cuisine française au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 1995). As in the case of Carême’s work, no English translation has yet been made.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965.
Sacchi, Bartolomeo (Battista Platina). Le Platine en françois: D’après l’édition de 1505. Edited by Silvano Serventi and Jean-Louis Flandrin. Houilles, France: Manucius, 2003.
This, Hervé. Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. See especially the discussion of culinary constructivism in the last chapter, 109–121.
This, Hervé, and Pierre Gagnaire. Cooking: A Quintessential Art. Translated by M. B. DeBevoise. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. See especially the chapter “The Present and Future of Cooking,” 259–326.
Tirel (Taillevent), Guillaume.
Le Viandier d’après l’édition de 1486. Edited by Mary Hyman and Philip Hyman. Houilles, France: Manucius, 2003. See the English translation by James Prescott,
Le Viandier de Taillevent, 2nd ed. (Eugene, Ore.: Alfarhaugr Publishing Society, 1989), also available in an online version at
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/prescotj/data/viandier/viandier1.html.
Varenne, François Pierre de la. Le Cuisinier françois. A facsimile of the 1651 edition with a preface by Mary Hyman and Philip Hyman. Houilles, France: Manucius, 2003. A modern English translation with commentary by Terence Scully has recently appeared as part of an omnibus volume, La Varenne’s Cookery: The French Cook; The French Pastry Chef; The French Confectioner (Totnes, U.K.: Prospect Books, 2006).
