John Whiting

Balex, you are taking this into an area which is much closer to my own evaluative criteria: a recognition of excellence that comes from doing something traditional and doing it very well, so as to inspire others, not to empty imitation, but to aiming at a similarly high standard.

They didn't suck in France, even when she was jointly writing her first book. In her "little house near Grasse" she lamented, You couldn't make it up.

I didn't mention Alice Waters. She is totally within the spirit of French cuisine, in which high-quality ingredients are of primary importance. Julia Child, on the other hand, in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, announces that Later, in From Julia Child's Kitchen, she's still hanging out in the supermarket: She goes on to express surprise that they turned out to be tough.But here's the prize-winner: Imagine the artificiality and boiled-down concentrated sugar! After that, a dose of Karo Syrup would taste like Angostura Bitters.

That's three out of four . . .

It's illuminating that there have been only three replies, two of which have advised you to get out of town.

Practically anything, no matter how well prepared or served, cooked in exactly the same way for all eternity.

Are all of us sure that's what we're talking about in this thread? I'm not sure about that. It would be interesting to talk about "evolution" in the context of great Chinese or Indian chefs, for example. Is change expected or desired in those contexts? In what ways? Quite so. "Fusion" is a word popularly used to describe cross-cultural influences that have taken place within living memory; i.e. we ignore the profound changes that resulted from, for instance, the spice trade and the European discovery of the Americas. Such interminglings are now taking place so rapidly that it's foolishly chauvinist to ignore them.

The goalposts seem to have shifted. We started out talking about inventiveness in the kitchen. If we've moved on to PR, then we must add Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith, Martha Stewart, Emeril . . . One measure of creativity is the lasting influence of a professional on other professionals. After the second world war, when the time was ripe to rediscover good food, it was an aristocratic English journalist who introduced the English-speaking world to the pleasures of simple southern European cuisine. Even in America, it was not the flamboyant Julia Child who had the most profound and lasting influence, but Elizabeth David, whose French provincial recipes were avidly devoured by Alice Waters and her successors, and whose monumental treatise on bread making taught Stephen Sullivan of Berkeley’s pioneering Acme Bakery, by his own admission, virtually everything he knew. Ms. David began as a journalist but used her success as a means of turning herself into a serious scholar.

Thank you! Q: What is a metaphor? A: To keep cows in. If we're talking about the greatest of the great, one should bear in mind that Julia Child's principal accomplishment was, as she says herself, to produce a close approximation of French bougeois cuisine using ingredients available from a US Army PX. And, of course, she was the first of the great celebrity chef TV performers. But unique contributions to culinary art?

Until now . . .

The cutting edge of scientific gastronomy has barely begun to slice away our culinary norms. It's no longer quixotic science fiction to consider the possibility of accessing the nervous system so as to produce multi-sensory complexes of tastes -- let alone sights, smells and sounds -- that will make Adria's creations look naive. Just plug into the medula oblongata and turn on the juice. Never mind the arguments as to whether such manipulations should be allowed. History demonstrates that if a thing can be done, it will be done. And it is likely to include thought control as well as sensory control -- the experiments actually being carried out surface from time and time and then resubmerge. But never mind -- in 2044 you'll be able to order one hell of a meal!

Built-in obsolescence.

I wonder how many modestly successful bistro-type restaurants there may be in NYC that survive by serving undramatic but competantly prepared cuisine of whatever genre to a core of loyal supporters. They're not "newsworthy", so you wouldn't read about them in the NYT (although John Hess, when he was restaurant reviewer, made an effort to search them out).

It's worth remembering that most cooks in history cooked for people who lived within walking distance. EDIT: We have hard-wired into our brains an expectation of the familiar.

Food writing's guilty secret is its intellectual poverty. John Thorne

Stop and allow that to reverberate for a while . . .

Sorry to hear this. They were very good a couple of years ago.

Michel Gaudin, carrefour d'Arly, 04 50 21 02 18, has a long history behind him. For some years he and his wife owned l'Auberge de Atre Fleuri in St. Pierre de Chartreuse (immortalized by Roy Andreis de Groot), then went on to one or two Michelin starred places, and finally settled in this lower key establishment in Megeve. It's been several years since I ate there, but the food was good -- no longer ambitious, but very competant. (I don't mean that as a put-down.)

Unless, of course, it's pain levain (like Poilane's) which is good for at least a week. The bagette must be eaten on the same day because it is a compromise recipe invented in the 1920s as a response to labor legislation that protected bakers from having to go to work before a certain hour in the morning. Everyone knows that, the longer it takes bread to rise, and the less artificially added yeast, the better it will be. Consumers in France are gradually rediscovering this. The bagette is a halfway house between Wonderbread/Mother's Pride and natural rising.

You're talking about a very thin layer of cream floating on a vast sea of cuisine. There are those for whom it is an interesting question, but for the preponderance of cooks throughout history it is one which has no meaning. Most of them have been no more concerned with originality than, say, a folk singer or a journeyman potter. Aside from sustainance, their purpose was to give a certain predictable pleasure. Modern chefs have of course every right to create whatever novel experiences their customers are prepared to pay for, but they have no right to label as "failure" those chefs who cooked a perfect cassoulet in the same manner for thirty years. What a diner finds "boring" depends entirely on expectation.

Could you provide a link, please?

I'm delighted to see that a number of eGullet's correspondents appreciate what our team was able to do in its brief verbal/visual presentation. It reminds me so vividly of a perceptive documentary on a great Canadian pianist -- 32 Short Films about Glenn Gould -- that I find it hard to imagine that the resemblance was not deliberate. The presentation is fragmentary and yet it comes together into a coherent whole, just as an episodic career may exhibit an unplanned but ultimately coherent unity. Some one -- was it Jonathan over lunch? -- referred to Adria's art as Zen-like. It was this quality that reminded me so vividly of John Cage. The simple, direct statement, at first mystifying but, if one is patient, containing its own inherent explanation. The very quality that intrigued Cage so much in Balinese culture: "We don't have any art, but we try to do everything as well as we can."

I like the music of civilized conversation, which could be construed as an extended performance of 4'33". EDIT: There is nothing so oppressively present as that which is neither here nor there.

Having worked with avant-garde musicians for almost forty years, I flatter myself that my bullshit detector is fairly sensitive. Reading this verbal/visual report, it did not give off any warning signals. In fact, I was convinced that it told me more about Adria than I had learned from any other single source. I was strongly reminded of John Cage, whom I knew and worked with on several occasions over the years. What they have in common, I sense, is that if neither of them had ever become famous, the nature of their work would have been no different. Worldly success, whether fame or fortune, was neither their motive nor their measure. Their value to the rest of us is not to provide a norm for our daily listening or eating, but to create an experience which can transform our sensory perceptions, so that we hear or taste in a more intense and attentive way. An Adria meal, I would imagine, could be like an extended performance of Cage's 4'33", leaving behind a heightened awareness of one's sensory environment.

Nichola Fletcher and her husband John run one of Scotland's (and Britain's) great deer farms, north of Edinburgh. They also have an apple orchard. In a recent closed Guild of Food Writers Sparklist discussion of this thread she contributed a very relevant posting. I quote it here with her permission. (She and her husband have separately written brilliantly about the raising and the cooking of venison. Do check out their website.)