Cookery is not chemistry. It is an art. It requires instinct and taste rather than exact measurements.—Marcel Boulestin
CUISINE IS TO INGREDIENTS what language is to words.
Ingredients and words can each have an independent existence, randomly scattered throughout the universe, but when they are brought together with conscious purpose the effect is exponen-tially greater. Think of ‘I’, and ‘am’, and the infinitely more powerful ‘I am’; or egg yolk, and oil, and the miraculous mayonnaise. With the contribution of culture—in other words, human intervention—these separate entities are combined and transformed into expressions of far greater complexity and eloquence.
A Frenchman encountered in a Parisian wine bar, L’Ecluse, once explained to me, ‘Mais le poisson grillé, ça, ce n’est pas la cuisine. La cuisine, ça se prépare.’ (‘Grilled fish is not cuisine. Cuisine is something that requires preparation.’) And this preparation, he implied, included thinking about the initial ingredients and the final dish, and the means of getting from the former to the latter. This is the vital cultural component, reflected also in the overheard remark of a woman to her friend, as foil-wrapped packages of barramundi were placed on the hotplate for a do-it-yourself dinner at a Kakadu resort, ‘That’s not cooking. That’s throw-it-on-and-let-it-do-itself.’
Perhaps this fundamental analogy is what inspired structuralists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Mary Douglas to argue that cuisine is a language—and insofar as it is a means of communication, a conveyor of symbolic meaning, cuisine is without doubt a language, though surely that is a secondary function, not its raison d’être. How many cooks talk through their food, and consumers understand?
Much debate on the nature of cuisine centres on whether it is art or craft. According to many definitions, both are skills but art seems to be differentiated on the basis of the aesthetic qualities of the finished product. Craft can produce things of beauty, too, though crafts are not required to have aesthetic qualities and are not necessarily judged by such criteria. In one of programs of the Thames Television series ‘Take Six Cooks’, the chef Raymond Blanc made an impassioned plea for the recognition of cuisine as art. ‘Why shouldn’t a chef, at the peak of his career, be considered an artist, like any creative craftsman?’
The cry is as old as cuisine itself. In the early years of the fifteenth century Maistre Chiquart, chief cook to the court of Savoy, claimed an artistic side to cuisine; similarly Carême, the most celebrated French chef of the early nineteenth century, argued valiantly for the inclusion of patisserie, as a branch of sculpture, among the fine arts. Brillat-Savarin wrote, ‘Cooking is the oldest of the arts.’ Yet the controversy continually resurfaces. Raymond Blanc’s question was, in a sense, rhetorical—but the mere fact of its asking implies that typically, cuisine is not considered an art, nor its practitioners artists.
Like any art, cuisine involves a considered choice—among ingredients, methods of preparation and cooking and manners of presentation, with a certain end in view and with due respect for the ultimate fate of the final product, which is to be eaten. All artists go through this process. A sculptor will choose the material, the tools, to realise a certain vision. Whether the end result is art or just a funny lump of rock will depend on the craftmanship or mastery of skills, together with the imaginative vision of its creator and the aesthetic impact, which itself depends on the values of the society. The culinary work of art must additionally engage and excite the sense of taste. Technical perfection might produce admiration, but without the imagination and inspiration, it cannot be called art.
If I hadn’t already been convinced of this, I would have been persuaded by a salad that combined grilled prawns dressed with ‘pesto oil’ (essentially, a blend of pureed basil and olive oil) with a stack of roasted red peppers and thin slices of ‘honey glazed eggplant’, the whole scattered with lightly toasted pinenuts for good measure. There was a minor quibble that neither the eggplant, nor the peppers, nor the basil were exactly seasonal at the end of winter—though this was Australia, with such varied climatic zones and such rapid transport that seasonality can become meaningless. The prawns were as moist and tasty as you might have expected for that kind of prawn, the peppers nicely roasted, and the presentation attractive, but there was no vision, no unifying principle, neither theoretical nor gustatory. There was no way of understanding this dish in a historical or cultural context, nor were there intellectual or sensory clues in the association of ingredients. It was an amalgam of diverse elements that emphatically did not come together as a whole, a supreme example of unnecessary accessorising. The scattering of pinenuts was gratuitous, as were the odd leaves of rocket sandwiched between the eggplant and red pepper segments. The effect was like that of a room painted with walls of red, yellow, orange and violet.
Technical skills can be acquired, but the artistic vision comes from the soul, from the individual’s imagination. Artist-cooks, Raymond Blanc’s creative craftsmen, need a degree of liberty and freedom from the restraints imposed by budgets or bosses, together with the understanding and encouragement of patrons. For these reasons they are more likely to be found in the realm of haute cuisine than in the humble hamburger joint. According to author Jean-François Revel, invention, renewal and experimentation are the hallmarks of an ‘erudite’ cuisine, the province of professional chefs with the knowledge, time and resources to create and innovate. In Revel’s terminology, erudite cuisine represents one extreme of the culinary system. At the other is popular cuisine, stable, intimately linked to the land and its resources.
It has sometimes been argued that cuisine advances through technological innovations—though when you think about it seriously, it’s hard to name any culinary innovations and advances that have been introduced by technology. Not since Prometheus stole the fire for us—and that did spark a gastronomic revolution—has there been any invention to divert the course of culinary evolution. In recent years, technology has produced the Mixmaster and the Magimix, both of which offer economies of time and labour but haven’t really initiated any evolutionary leap forward. They might have democratised the gâteau, the mousseline and the julienne—levelled the playing field, in the current jargon—but this hardly equates to progress. The introduction of sous-vide cooking, in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, merely promises benefits for supermarkets and caterers. Even the advent of refrigeration, about a hundred years ago, did very little for the state of the culinary art. Jellies suddenly suffered a vogue at the start of the twentieth century, but jellies had been around for seven centuries or more.
What technology has achieved is to liberate cuisine so that the art of the cook today is seen less in mastery of technique than in control over ingredients. Which helps explain why so much attention is now given to the choice of raw materials, their source and authenticity, and to the combination of flavours. If achieving the perfect texture of a prawn quenelle requires no more skill than measuring ingredients and counting the seconds in the food processor, then the arena for originality becomes mastery of flavour and flavour individuality.
The transformation of the chef from artisan to artist is often credited to the magic wand of the French Revolution, which transformed Paris into a city of restaurants (though restaurants actually began to proliferate before the Revolution). Restaurants were democratic eating places that welcomed anyone with an adequate purse, and they offered the chef simultaneously independence, artistic licence and a vastly increased audience. This implies that artist status is dependent on public recognition. The same might be true of an author. A work, whether a book, a painting or a new dish, is created and subsequently consumed in an act as private and individual as the creation. Public recognition comes when the work is talked about, reviewed, discussed in the press—which requires, and presupposes, educated consumers. But chefs need immediate recognition; their creations cannot be hoarded in dusty drawers in the hope of discovery by great-grandchildren. Contemporary appreciation and approval, however, usually mean conformity with ruling fashions, which in turn impose their own restraints. Fame more enduring might be achieved through publishing books of recipes, or of memoirs, though this means calling on the literary system for support, and taking the risk that reproduction of the recipes by less talented hands might result in something less than art.
Most works of art can be conserved and reproduced, secure in the knowledge that the original still exists. Not so with cuisine, ephemeral in essence, though as with performance art its creation can be recorded on camera so that the step-by-step production and final product can be fixed forever on film. But visual media, however well they work for theatre or dance, cannot capture the flavour, the aroma, the texture which are as much a part of the culinary art as its façade. This is what thwarts those cooks who would be—indeed, who are—artists, for so long as the accepted criteria for a work of art cannot cope with a product that is neither permanent nor able to be captured in some form or other, then cuisine seems destined to remain an also-ran in the artistic stakes.
To argue that cuisine ought be recognised as an art is not to deny that it is also a craft. There is a repetitive aspect to craft, reproducing the same thing, or variations on the same thing, over and over, and all cooks and chefs and artists are craftsmen in some degree—consider Picasso’s prodigious output of ceramics during his stay at Vallauris. Raymond Blanc’s plea was for the recognition of the chef as creative craftsman. Because cuisine is simultaneously art and craft, involving vision and skill, it is as much a cultural activity as writing or sculpting. Like these, cuisine is both practice and product, the process of creation and the creations themselves—the art of cuisine and cuisine as art.