EBTL.050817

Reflexes and Reflexions

“To cook something to exactly the right degree is a delicate operation which requires great care, scientific interest, and art—that is to say, love.”

—Édouard de Pomiane1

While this goes against my actual cooking practice (non-scientific interest, careless measurement, reckless abandon), I like the idea of love as involving rigour—that it demands something of they who love, and of the beloved. That however much our romantic mythos emphasizes the falling in and the being swept away, there is something to love beyond or irreducible to emotion or affect. Pomiane performs an interesting inversion here—not merely that love is an essential ingredient in cooking, but that carefulness, scientific interest, and art are themselves components of love. Can’t trust love to the heart alone, I might be tempted to say.

I’ve been reading the Modern Library’s edition of Cooking with Pomiane, skimming the recipes while relishing Pomiane’s style and personality, but I am annoyed to discover how difficult it is to get clear information on the source of the text. In her introduction, Ruth Reichl refers to Cooking with Pomiane as the first of his books to be published, in the 1930s, but when one actually looks at his list of French publications, it is nowise clear of which of these books it is a translation. I would like to believe that it is Réflexes et réflexions devant la nappe (somewhat less sonorously in English, Reflexes and Reflections at Table), as that evokes the play of the involuntary and the intentionally introspective that runs through his work, although it may be Bien manger pour bien vivre (Better Eating for Better Living). It is my suspicion that Cooking with Pomiane is possibly an anthology. This, and the attendant difficulty of pinpointing when the text or texts were written, is unfortunate because many of Pomiane’s réflexions concern the past: the past of French cuisine, and his own. It is the way in which his recipes are larded and barded with memoir that makes the book so attractive:

These friands bring back all my childhood. Alas, the people I loved have vanished. Asphalt has covered the fields of the Butte Montmartre and the streams have disappeared beneath the pavements. (54)

But the book has come unmoored in time, and it is difficult to situate this nostalgia—is this the Pomiane of the 1960s or of the 1930s who is looking back so wistfully? Elsewhere, he writes:

What would our lives be like without tradition? What terrible fatigue would overwhelm humanity if it only had to concern itself with the future? Tradition represents a momentary pause in the course of toil—repose and backward glance toward the past—the comparison of today with yesterday. Tradition is the memory of happy moments which have vanished, and their ephemeral return to life. (8)

This is certainly a rosy view of tradition, as that which rests and revives rather than stifles and binds, but Pomiane is considered neither reactionary nor conservative. He has been hailed by many as a culinary Modern, even an iconoclast, and has been cited as an intellectual forefather of molecular gastronomy by no less than the coiner of the term, Hervé This. Pomiane was himself a scientist and physician and worked at the famed Pasteur Institute in Paris. I believe we can read in Pomiane the best of the spirit of molecular gastronomy (or the spirit of the best molecular gastronomy). The public face of molecular gastronomy is too often that of wild abstraction, deconstruction, or the technological colonization of the kitchen by a perhaps scientistic or mad-scientific rationality. But there is also a respect for tradition, and for the foods themselves, combined with an unwillingness to be bound by that tradition. One could say that molecular gastronomy is (the formal grounding of) the theory, which undertakes a demystification of the kitchen, while modern(ist) cooking is the practical remystification of the cuisine.

To make explicit the connection, it is important to bear in mind Hervé This’s point that molecular gastronomy is not a style of cooking, despite how the term is bandied about. Gastronomy is the study of food, cooking, and eating. It pertains to the production of a body of knowledge. Molecular gastronomy (or in its earlier, more accurate if more unwieldy formulation, “molecular and physical gastronomy”) is thus about developing an understanding of food and cooking based specifically in the hard sciences. Modern/modernist cooking is about taking this understanding as a starting point and using not only the theoretical apparatus of chemistry and physics, but also its material battery (such as the infamous centrifuge) to take the preparation of food in new directions.

This distinction is important, and I find it makes the term “molecular gastronomy” that much less annoying. So when Pomiane speaks of the art, science, and love involved in cooking food to exactly the right temperature, one can’t help but have the thermal immersion circulator spring to mind. The thermal immersion circulator, as the name implies, is a device that maintains a meticulously constant temperature by way of a circulating water bath; it is a common piece of laboratory furniture. In the 1970s, it found a culinary application, allowing chefs to cook things slowly and evenly to extremely accurate temperatures, while reducing moisture and flavour loss by vacuum sealing. If anything exemplifies molecular gastronomy’s reputation for cold abstraction, it is the Americanization of the French term sous vide as “cryovacking,” but it is this care/careful attention that may be claimed to bridge the gulf between rigour and romance. It is the technological answer to Pomiane’s heart’s desire, or so I think its exponents would aver, perhaps going so far as to say that the thermal immersion circulator is a kind of cyborg technology of love, the love that must necessarily animate good cooking (no one would say that, actually). The use of this technology raises the question of whether such instruments are better thought of as shortcuts (the machine watches the pot so you don’t have to) or as extensions of human capability—enabling a degree of care previously unavailable—or perhaps as a sort of technological precising definition of the act of love?

I had another worlds-collide moment when I read that while at the Pasteur Institute, Pomiane (or Édouard Pozerski, as he was known when not writing food lit) worked with Felix d’Herelle on his pioneering study of bacteriophage—a class of what were eventually decided to be viruses that feed specifically on bacteria and have been the source of much insight and confusion in the history of virology, and also an important early subject in the emergence of molecular biology as a scientific enterprise. Historically, molecular biology has been understood as developing out of the migration of physicists (and their wacky instruments) into life sciences research, specifically organic chemistry, and d’Herelle’s Phage Group played a big part in this.2 Just as molecular gastronomy reconfigures our culinary knowledge along chemical and physical lines, so too did molecular biology bring about a similar change in our understandings of life itself, by spinning out viral material into its component parts in the ultracentrifuge—another piece of laboratory equipment that has been borrowed by culinary modernists from physics, by way of organic chemistry, to now render possible all your favourite carotene foams and verbena caviar pearls. As such, Pomiane and This may be seen as figures in the same historical trajectory, bringing to bear chemical and physical ways of knowing first to the stuff, and now finally the staff, of life. How about that?