Jonathan Day

Steve, some fruit mixtures seem to improve in flavour by being held overnight after spinning -- the taste changes as if the fruit had been "cooked" a bit. For example: I regularly do pineapple sorbets, using puréed raw pineapple, plus ordinary sugar and glucose to 18 degrees Baumé and sometimes a bit of lemon juice. It is delicious, and with that dense a syrup it comes out rich and smooth, almost like an ice cream. Served with paper-thin slices of pineapple, sugared and dried in a very low oven, it is magic. But the flavour is sometimes just a bit more balanced the next day. Is this the effect of cell walls being broken down by the freezing?

Chefette, you disagreed with the first quote above. And you were right, in part, because I implied that there was one "basic need" i.e. hunger. But if I build on your lovely and evocative third quote, and change mine from "one of our most basic human needs" to "our basic human needs", then I think we may be on the same page. Our hungers are for more than nutrition. Not everyone can always enjoy luxe, calme et volupté but these are in some ways as important as food and water. My children's eyes still light up when they come to a table set with beautiful linens, china and candles; they will almost always taste everything when it is presented in a setting like this, even if they subsequently reject a lot of it. They love to be in the kitchen when I am cooking, and even to help out, and to my shame I too often chase them out. These are needs for the soul as well as the body. But they are no less basic. I think this is what Isak Dinesen was getting at in "Babette's Feast". Satisfying these needs (physical and spiritual) is "making well what needs making". In this sense, as Chefette says, the cook can be a true artist.

Marketers do a lot of work on so-called "saliency", i.e. features of a product that make it stand out or that are unusually important to the consumer. In foods, I believe a lot of these have to do with attempts to signal origin (e.g. free-range eggs, vine tomatoes, etc.). Some species of vine tomatoes are doubly deceptive, because they have a stronger than normal aroma (some of which seems to come from the attached stem) in the market but a weaker aroma and taste when the stems are removed. So there are two salient signals, visual and aromatic (or is it olfactory) that lead the consumer to conclude, incorrectly, that the product is of more "natural" origin and will therefore taste better than a non-vine tomato.

Some of the more interesting work in economics has been done on problems of information asymmetries between buyers and sellers. The 2001 Nobel prize went to George Akerlof (Berkeley), Mike Spence (Stanford) and Joe Stiglitz (Columbia) for work in this area. Assume, like good economists, that the seller (e.g. of a used car) and buyer are both opportunistic, out to pick one another's pockets if they can get away with it. Interestingly, the economic terms of art here are culinary: the seller knows whether the car is a lemon or a cream-puff but the buyer cannot, no matter how clever or confident she is. Without going into the maths, the outcome in a situation where buyers cannot distinguish lemons, average quality cars or cream-puffs is that the average price offered for used cars will fall, and owners of good used cars will not sell. This is a so-called adverse selection problem. Similar examples are everywhere, e.g. in insurance. People get around these problems through all sorts of means, including signalling: for example, the seller who knows she is offering a cream-puff could signal this private information by raising the price and offering a warranty. People invest large sums in degrees (e.g. Harvard MBA) not just to acquire technical knowledge but to send a signal that they survived a rigorous selection process and that the individual possesses talent, motivation, etc.. Brands are also powerful signals; a well known brand indicates that the seller has invested large sums in its reputation, and that it may be unwilling to deliberately offer an inferior product if this risks damage to the brand. All this is of course highly simplified, both from the economic models and even more so from the real world, where signals arrive with a lot of noise and there are gradations of goods other than "lemon" and "cream-puff". Nonetheless I see similar examples in restaurants. Poîlane bread is wonderful, but some restaurants could offer fine products of their own. But the Poîlane brand tells me, as a "buyer" who doesn't have an advance opportunity to test the bread before taking it, that it will be good. In London, many restaurants identify on menus that their cheeses have come either from Neal's Yard or La Fromagerie. This is a signalling device. In these cases, the cheesemongers are also acting as "screeners", making their money by bridging the asymmetric information between buyer and seller.

We had a very different experience at the Hostellerie Jérome, last October. As Steve says, the town itself is beautiful. The restaurant's interior itself is refined but countrified, less fussy than, say, Chibois in Grasse, where we had eaten two days before. I was wearing wool trousers (not jeans) and a fairly casual jacket ("unstructured", I think it's called), but no tie. My wife wore a good dress and some jewelry. I did not inspect every table, but we may have been the most elaborately attired customers in the room. The table immediately next to us had four young people, several of them in jeans (neat and clean, but jeans) who were having a good time tasting different wines and debating the menu with the waiters. Another table had a couple -- he in leather jacket (Italian, not Harley-Davidson), she wearing jeans. All of these people looked good and enhanced the ambiance of the place but they weren't wearing fancy clothes. No ties except on the waiters, who, as Steve notes, wore white jackets. At the end of the room nearest the windows, there was a man with wild hair and a long beard, fuzzy jumper, jeans and leather boots (no, it was not Richard Branson), tasting wine after wine, dish after dish, and constantly jotting in a notebook. His companion was a woman who looked like a supermodel, simply but beautifully dressed. She nibbled a salad and sipped mineral water, occasionally tasting a dish he had offered her. By the end of the evening, he had pushed his chair far back from the table and was leaning and gesticulating as he talked with his companion and the waiters. We were too far away to pick up the conversation. But this customer attracted a lot of attention from the waitstaff, who kept bringing him dishes and wines -- this to the point that we had some trouble getting the final bill when we had finished. I don't remember the cooking at Jérome as being particularly fussy. I was offered, off-menu I think, a veal kidney, roasted in its own fat and served with, if I recall correctly, girolles and hazelnuts (noisettes). It was presented smoking hot, still encased in its fat, and then taken away and carved and served with every trace of fat removed, in a very simple sauce: delicious. All in all the place seemed relaxed, perhaps because it was a somewhat quiet weekday evening.

Yes, but wouldn't it be fun if there were a restaurant called "The French Laundromat"? It could serve ultra-haute cuisine in those vending machines with little windows, like the old Horn and Hardarts.

Steve, I've used the Sevarome flavours but not their stabilisers. You've opened up a new area for experimenting. Thanks.

Steve, I have wanted a Pacojet at home for some time. Unfortunately I discovered it after spending something like £400 on a Musso "Lussino" sorbetière. It works beautifully, but you do have to deal with syrups and stabilisers. I should have added that, apart from salmonella worries, egg whites do affect the taste of a final product. I haven't seen a Pacojet for less than £2000/€2500, which feels a bit too much to spend just now. Where did you see the less expensive model? And which home freezers get cold enough to freeze the solutions solid in the Pacojet beakers? Wouldn't you need to install a professional (4 star) freezer?

I had hoped that our focus would be more on the nature of food than the nature of art -- as Ian says, the characteristics of food and cooking that lend themselves to art. To change media for a moment: do certain types of paint (oil, watercolours, acrylic, etc.) offer the artist more flexibility and subtlety than others? Switching back to cooking: is pastry, as I asked in an earlier post, superior to savoury cooking as a vehicle for artistic expression? Yet it seems that we cannot avoid the question of "what is art?". So here is a personal point of view. Art is "the making well of whatever needs making", and it applies equally to bouillabaisses, operas and buildings, as long as all are made with care and attention. It is for human use, not for an aesthetic thrill or a sentimental experience. In this sense, cooking has the potential to reach the highest levels of artistic relevance, despite its temporary qualities, precisely because it is so closely linked to one of our most basic needs. The customer (who is also a kind of artist) should in some sense know what he or she needs, in the same way that a good cook knows the exact ingredient needed to complete a particular dish. What gets in the way of this artistic communication, in restaurants? Style for the sake of style, elaboration for its own sake, innovations that don't teach us more about the foods themselves but are simply innovations. The Indian art historian and writer, A.K. Coomaraswamy, wrote "The artist is not a special kind of man, but every man a special kind of artist." (See several of the essays in his Christian and Oriental Philosophy of Art, Dover 1956).

Chefette is right on several counts. The Telfer quote was hard to interpret, because it was a quote inside a quote. Korsmeyer, in particular, wants to see taste take a bigger place within aesthetic philosophy. I had hoped to avoid the old discussion "is food art, or not?" -- at least in this simple form, because of problems of definition. Again, chefette identified the question I was hoping we might focus on: Exactly so. What I continue to wonder about (and here it would be great to hear from artists from many disciplines) is whether cookery offers the artist wide enough scope (or complexity) for expression. Last summer, for example, I made a particularly great soupe au pistou: the vegetables and herbs all came from our garden, and the flavours and textures balanced better than I had hoped. "Wonderful," said everyone at the table, and "More, please." Then it was gone. Gratifying, but very transient, and not leaving much scope for further analysis. Given that the pastry cook's creations are in some sense more plastic and more durable than the ordinary cook's, does pastry offer more complexity or scope? What about the winemaker's art?

It may indeed. I noticed it the other day. Would you have time to write a quick review?

Cabrales, that would be a terrific contribution. Thank you. And I hope you will take just as much time as you need to read, reflect and share your thinking.

There are two interesting themes here: Food writing as serious literature and Restaurant reviewing as serious literature. I suspect that these are more related than they may seem. On the first, there is relatively little food writing that most readers would view as important in its own right, i.e. simply as writing. Hence the constant mention of MFK Fisher and Elizabeth David and one or two others....but the list is not a long one. Conversely, food and eating don't appear all that often in mainstream literature. I'm re-reading James's The Europeans. Clothing, language, mannerisms, sensibilities all make the Europeans in the novel different to their American hosts. But food and wine are never mentioned, even though most people who cross the Atlantic find these the most salient differences between the US and Europe. I wonder if this is because eating and drinking were seen as somehow too tied up with bodily functions, in the same way that mainstream literature doesn't say much about bathroom habits. On the second, what criteria do most newspaper editors apply in deciding who should review restaurants? My guess is that the restaurant 'beat' is not considered a choice or high profile assignment.

Topic proposed by Robert Brown The most influential restaurant ratings, the Guide Michelin stars, have existed since 1933. Self-contained, stand-alone, dedicated and regularly appearing restaurant reviews are, in the USA, only about 50 years old, even though restaurants as we would think of them today first appeared over 200 years ago. That, in and of itself, hints at the fact that restaurant reviews could be contrivances, created to help fill editorial holes, attract advertising, and target a certain kind of reader. Unlike reviewers of stationary targets such as books, paintings, and buildings, or those of so-called high performing arts such as music, theatre, and opera, the restaurant critic must deal with a cultural manifestation that is, by its very nature, the proverbial greased pig of the critical world. What makes reviewing a restaurant frustrating, if not fruitless, is that it is a moving target subject to the vagaries of a restaurant being a business as much as means of creative expression; of being subject to large fluctuations and degrees of talent, training, and execution; and the preferences, prejudices, and priorities of the reviewer himself or herself. Everything considered, then, do you believe that restaurants are intrinsically well suited to being reviewed or criticized? That such reviews have been only since, or because of, the post World-War II prosperity of the Western world, mean that they are, like reviews of automobiles, sit-coms, or bottled waters, not much more than a manifestation of rampant consumerism? It could also be interesting to devote some of the discussion to whether restaurant reviews can be viewed as fine journalism to the point that restaurant criticism written by one person can, or could ever, rise to the durability and quality of, say, James Agee or Pauline Kael in film criticism, or Grantland Rice or Red Smith in sports writing.

Ian's post opens up a rich set of possibilities for discussion on this thread. As he says, there is one very practical application of the "theory" or common vocabulary that seems so lacking in this field: restaurant reviewing and food writing. The tedious clichés that reviewers rely on have been pilloried elsewhere on eGullet. What I find more troublesome is that there is little likelihood that a reader even of the most carefully crafted review will mentally "experience" the dish in the way the reviewer sought to evoke. An example: in the France thread I commented on a delicious dish of tripe I had eaten at La Cave, a delightful place in Cannes. The tripe had a lightness and brightness about it that is often missing in such a dish -- in part, I think, because the sauce was a bit thinner than usual, and in part because the cook had gone for a higher acid balance than I had expected. But how best to convey that in words? We'll soon have more on restaurant reviewing on this forum.

Let me add a follow-up question. In today's world, what non-cooking skills are most important if a chef is to be successful -- i.e. to make a lasting contribution to the state of cuisine, to join a list which most would agree is headed by people like Escoffier, Adrian Ferra, Guy Savoy and Alain Ducasse? Assume, for the moment, that our chef-to-be is a brilliant cook and knows that she is -- a sort of modern-day Babette, capable of concocting the most magical of feasts and of doing so under pressure, service after service. What other skills does she need? Two recent examples may be useful. First, a radio interview I recently heard (this will soon be reported on in more detail in this forum) with Ducasse. He was surprisingly articulate, and he spoke of the development of his staff in a way that sounded like a leader of a top professional services firm. This guy may be a great cook, but he is also a business executive. Second, I had a short and lustful glance at the new book and CD-ROM detailing the most recent years of innovation at El Bulli. Both the book and CD-ROM are beautifully designed, and Ferra has analysed the flow of his own work, over the last few years, with thoughtful structure and detail. Adrian Ferra may be a great cook, but he is also a historian of art and ideas. What other skills (whether conveyed in a university or not) are essential for our hypothetical chef's success?

This evening while wandering around the Web I came across a book called Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession by Amy Trubek. Trubek is an instructor at the New England Culinary Institute. She holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania, received an 'Advanced Degree' from the Cordon Bleu cookery school in London and worked as a chef at a restaurant called Chelsea's, in Vero Beach, Florida. She was recently elected 'Food and Society Policy Fellow' by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and Thomas Jefferson Agricultural Institute (click here) for more information. The publishers' blurb says that the book "explores the fascinating story of how the traditions of France came to dominate the culinary world." This alone suggests that the book's arguments and information are likely to be relevant to discussions on these boards. Wilfrid has very briefly mentioned this book in two threads (run a general search under "Trubek" for details) but thus far we haven't had a review of Trubek's book on eGullet. So the purpose of this post is to ask whether he or any other member might care to read the book and share a summary or comments. To order from amazon.com, click here.

The discussion thus far demonstrates the limitations of asking 'is cooking a form of art?', a question that has appeared on eGullet in the past. Instead of that rather vague question, we’ve had a number of more interesting and nuanced ideas: Chefette’s notion of "dining as art" -- here I am reminded of the 'salons', where the media available to the artist-host combined food, table setting, selection of guests and conversation. Chefette, is this what you were getting at? Or were you thinking of dining as some of eGullet's more passionate seekers of fine cuisine practice it: researching the chefs ahead of time, thinking hard about the dining room and the table one will have, wearing appropriate clothing, photographing the dishes and the room? The cultural contexts that make cooking-as-communication possible. Suvir's post provided a lovely example of this. On reflection, I suspect that these shared cultural contexts are more common than we may think. A hierarchy of the senses as opposed to the arts. Here, I would think one question might be which senses admitted greater aesthetic range or variation. For many people, for example, the sense of smell seems rather digital -- there are "good smells" and "bad smells". Another one would be the extent to which smell or taste allow for detached observation, in the way that most visual art and music does. I still remember one of my children taking his first spoonful of pureed green beans. He was hungry that day, and he looked at the spoon with enthusiasm and opened his mouth in eager anticipation. Then the beans went in, and his face screwed into a mask of upset and rage. 6 years later, he is still unable to take tastes he doesn't care for with any kind of equanimity. And I know a lot of adults in the same condition: if they don't like a smell or taste, there is no discussing it. Does this have to do with smell and taste being "wired" at a low level in the brain -- in the limbic system? Or with their relationships to survival? I would offer one more issue that seems relevant. This is the extent to which we can reliably describe experiences of the different senses. This depends both on the writer's capabilities and on the willingness of the underlying culture to accept communication about a sensual experience. Here is Adam Gopnik writing about Blue Hill and chef Dan Barber: I suspect that there is more that has been written about the aria and the orgasm than about the oyster. Is that a limitation of the subjects or the writers?

Some would say that the university-educated cook is, all other things equal, worse off because he or she (1) starts cooking later than the apprentice who started at, say, 14, and therefore fails to acquire the culinary "vocabulary" (here referring not to cooking language but to exposure to foods under a huge range of circumstances) and basic manual skill that a younger starter would. (2) tends to adopt a privileged, snobbish attitude and therefore never really learned to get along in the environment of a production kitchen (your point about not starting off as a commis) (3) cooks too much from the head, overintellectualising everything. I think Bourdain makes the second claim about formally educated cooks, even though he himself graduated both from one of the top universities and the CIA. Do you know Ferran Adria's educational background?

Ben, my guess is that for most savoury sorbets professional pastry chefs increasingly use a "Paco Jet", a gadget that takes a block of solid-frozen stuff and blasts it into tiny crystals, i.e. sorbet. You can "pacotize" (that's the word they use) almost anything with one of these machines. Unfortunately they cost a small fortune, take up a lot of space, and make a lot of noise. Your sorbet maker (and mine) probably won't do a great job with solutions that freeze at 0 degrees C; the spinning blade will simply stop as the solution freezes into solid ice. We need something to lower the freezing temperature of the solution. Sugar does this, and so do egg whites. And so does salt. Of course salt produces its own flavour problems. And you have to hope that your egg whites don't harbour salmonella. I've done cucumber sorbets and tomato sorbets, using both salt and egg whites. I've also done rosemary and thyme sorbets, but these were more sweet -- I infused the herbs in the sugar solution. Weirdest one I've made thus far was a mashed potato ice cream, served in a small quenelle in a salad of wild mushrooms. Tasted this, first time, at Chibois's place in Grasse.

The River Café Italian Kitchen cookbook has a chocolate sorbet made with syrup, cocoa and whatever alcohol you like to flavour the final mixture with. I have used Cointreau, kirschwasser, rum, as well as some homemade Slovakian firewater (made with plums, from the nose of it) brought over by one of our au pairs. It has all been good (though each has been very different). The density of the syrup is important because it alters the freezing temperature of the product and hence your ability to continue churning the mixture before it freezes, and hence the size of the crystals in the final sorbet. Instead of dropping eggs into your syrup to test this, you can get a saccharometer, what the French call a pèse-sirop -- essentially a glass egg: hollow glass tube, closed at both ends, weighted, with a scale inside. With this, you can measure your syrup in degrees Baumé, and decide whether to make an 18-to-20 degree rich sorbet, which will have a texture almost like fine ice cream, or a less rich one, e.g. 14 degrees, which will have a grainier, more granita-like texture. The gadget costs no more than a few pounds (I think I paid £4) , though you may need to go to a professional supply house since home kitchenware stores, for some reason, don't tend to stock these. Note that the richer you make your syrup, the sweeter the mixture becomes, and the more you may need to compensate with lemon juice or other acid. You can get more texture with less sweetness by adding glucose syrup (available at bakers' supplies) to the sugar mixture. Also note that alcohols change the freezing properties of sorbet and ice cream solutions. If you don't want to buy a saccharometer, Harold McGee (in The Curious Cook) has analysed all of this to a fare-thee-well. He gives a table, showing, for each type of fruit, the amount of sugar you need to add to get a sorbet of a given texture, and the amount of lemon juice needed to balance the sweetness. The amounts vary a lot, because different fruits contain different amounts of natural sugar. I still think that the saccharometer (and tasting spoons) do the job faster and easier!

Steve, isn't live musical performance (e.g. opera) in some ways even less permanent than cooking / dining? What would you put at the top of your hierarchy? What would you put at the bottom?

Maggie, I agree with this. At the same time, I am struck that the language of cooking (and dining, to chefette's point) can be less than subtle, except in certain cultural contexts where there are shared ideas about what flavours communicate what. An example of this would be Heian Japan, where there was a broadly shared "language of colour" around clothing and decor, linked to the seasons -- and extending somewhat to food, though it turns out that Heian authors were reluctant to write about something so close to bodily functions. For more on this, see the work of Liza Dalby: Kimono (Yale University Press), an academic work that describes, in some detail, the "semiotics" of the Japanese kimono, and her recent novel, The Tale of Murasaki which uses colour, clothing, food and decor to describe emotions and narrative elements. It sounds as though Suvir's background created a similar shared context around Indian foods and flavours. One more thought: as I wrote this I was struck how often we use flavour metaphors to describe emotions: sweetness, bitterness, sourness, warmth, cold. Perhaps the meanings of at least the basic flavours are common across cultures. Are there cultures, for example, that don't use sweet things to celebrate happy times and experiences? Liza has a nice website, which includes a section on food: click here for the food section, here for the general overview.

Building on Jinmyo's point, I wonder whether the positive and negative effects of the food boom have played out differently depending on where you start from. I would guess that many long-time Francophiles would argue that the effects in France have been more negative than positive: "dumbing down" of the consuming public through the availability of ersatz frozen "haute cuisine" in the supermarkets, growth of fast food, etc. In London, for the most part, the general improvement over the last couple of decades decade has been marked, both on the restaurant and home cooking fronts. It's true that there is more hype around celebrity chefs, and the brilliant career of Mr Oliver has been commented on at length on the UK board. But the improved availability of things like olive oil, fine cheeses, herbs and decent bread makes up for a lot of silly hype. Likewise, the range of restaurant options is far better than it once was. Does this suggest a sort of general "regression toward a global mean"?

Commiserations, Cabrales. Many years ago I found myself in a US city (Phoenix? Las Vegas? LA? I don't remember), dining at a "French" restaurant with a group. I had just started to get really serious about French food and cooking, pastry especially, and had recently made my first génoise. It failed miserably, because I beat the final mixture rather than gently folding it, and it baked into an impenetrable disc which our Airedale played with for several days before burying it. Nonetheless I had been bitten by the French food bug in a serious way. This was years before a first visit to France, let alone a move across the pond. After a generally forgettable meal, the dessert course arrived. The oily waiter announced, in terribly Frannsh tones, that they had a lovely apple tart on offer. "Is this a Tarte Tatin?" I asked. "Oh yes, sir," said the waiter, "that is the veritable Tarte Tatin." Of course it was nothing of the kind -- just a mediocre tarte aux pommes with a soggy crust. I can still remember the sense of disappointment and anger that the waiter had bothered to lie about this. It's one thing to bilk a rube at a faux-French restaurant in a strip mall, at the last minute; something else entirely to promise a dish, ordered days before, and then deliver something else entirely. Incidentally, a very good coq au vin is not that hard to make. Chicken blood is tricky to come by unless you select the bird live and butcher it yourself (I have done this more with ducks and pheasants than chickens) but the rest of the ingredients are easily available, and the technique is fairly forgiving. Perhaps this is something to aspire to in your home cooking journey.