Food is our common ground, a universal experience.
—JAMES BEARD
Creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives… Most of the things that are interesting, important, and human are the results of creativity.
—MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI,
positive psychologist and bestselling author of Creativity and Flow
The only thing as fundamental as food to our lives—our pleasure as well as our survival—is creativity. We must eat to live, but our ingenuity in generating solutions is arguably the single most important ability human beings possess.
This is true not only personally but professionally. Creativity was cited by 60 percent of CEOs polled as the single most important leadership quality for success in business, ahead of even integrity (52 percent) and global thinking (35 percent), according to a study cited in Fast Company. Only one in four people believes they are living up to their creative potential, according to a 2012 Adobe study.
Beyond being a tool for survival and a source of meaning, the act of creation is a source of meaning that can bring us our greatest joys.
During graduate school, my then-boyfriend, Andrew, was working in the restaurant business—which I made the focus of my independent studies. I was fascinated by restaurants, and especially by professional chefs, whom I saw as unique hybrids of artists, entrepreneurs, and activists. By the late 1980s, I came to recognize the emerging cultural importance of chefs as among the most influential creative professionals of our time. This inspired me to radically change my life path to study chefs and their work in depth. My obsession was so all-encompassing, I even married one.
As I interacted with the world’s leading chefs, I saw brilliance. I tasted genius. I sensed mystery. Among the most remarkable gifts of great chefs, I discovered, is exceptional sensory acuity—extraordinary senses of taste and smell, to be sure, but also finely honed senses of touch, sight, and hearing. New Orleans chef Susan Spicer shared:
I’ve really developed my eyes so that I can look at something three feet away and say “that needs rinsing off” or “that doesn’t look fresh to me.” I know when someone puts something in a sauté pan and it doesn’t make a noise that the pan wasn’t hot enough. I listen when someone is chopping an onion and it’s going “crunch”—I know without looking that that person needs to sharpen their knife. I listen when I’m making a sauce in a blender, and I know if the sauce has broken by the sound.
But in addition to developing these powers of sensory perception, there seemed to be something more going on—something Andrew and I were at a bit of a loss to describe in our first book. We wrote in Becoming a Chef (1995):
An experienced chef’s greatness is often evidenced by his or her development of a “sixth sense” when it comes to cooking, and many of the chefs we interviewed alluded to this ability in some regard. Over time, they have developed the ability to cook at a more intuitive level, for lack of a better description.
We referred to leading chefs’ “extrasensory perception,” which allowed them to “taste” with their other senses.
Even at that time, it was clear that there were forces at work beyond our full comprehension that resulted in leading chefs’ extraordinary talents in the kitchen. Their experiences had honed not only their five outer senses. I came to believe the very best to be masters of their inner senses—their ability to see without actually seeing, to smell without actually smelling, to taste without actually tasting, and to bring an extraordinary breadth, depth, precision, immediacy, and intensity of perception to their cooking that I hadn’t known was possible.
Besides the five senses and the central sense, Aristotle recognizes other faculties [including imagination] that later came to be grouped together as “inner senses.”
—from the book Ancient Philosophy, edited by Brian Duignan
Philosophers, starting with Aristotle, have enumerated and characterized the inner senses differently. However, centuries later, the concept of “inner senses” serves as a metaphor for the interior capabilities that allow us to perceive that which is too subtle to be grasped by the outer senses. Simply put, they suggest direction for our creative attention, energy, and will.
Sense data alone do not produce insight or understanding of any kind. Ideas produce insight and understanding, and the world of ideas lies within us.…
Inner individual authentic perception… is the only source of real knowledge.
—E.F. SCHUMACHER,
A Guide for the Perplexed
Chefs may be the most perceptive professionals I have encountered. They can learn to harness their inner senses to fuel extraordinary creativity in the kitchen. This book shares the secrets of tapping those “inner senses”—as well as marshalling the power of finely honed “outer senses.” This one-two punch can unlock your abilities as a cook to perform kitchen alchemy—turning common ingredients into something precious. Even now, knowing many chefs’ secrets, it still strikes me as magical.
Andrew’s photographs of chefs and their kitchens, creations, and inspirations are a necessary and most welcome collaboration for this book. Given that the genesis of creativity is preverbal—emerging as emotions, feelings, images, intuitions—sometimes concepts are more readily captured in pictures than in words, and I am awed by his gift for doing so.
This book is meant for you to dip into when seeking wisdom, ideas, and inspiration in the kitchen. It’s presented in four primary sections. The first three address a triad of aspects of creativity: First comes Mastery, or the acquisition of knowledge and experience; followed by Alchemy, or the understanding of flavor synergy; which leads us to Creativity, which brings everything together. The A-to-Z section of the book can be flipped through whenever you’re seeking ideas on a particular aspect of a dish or dessert or drink—or something to spur your next culinary creation.
I hope that this book will provide you with techniques, tools, and resources that you can put to work immediately at your own stove, not to mention wisdom from some of the world’s best chefs and other experts that can help you be more creative in the kitchen—and beyond.
Learning to think creatively in one discipline opens the door to understanding creative thinking in all disciplines.
—ROBERT AND MICHÈLE ROOT-BERNSTEIN, Sparks of Genius