Humour and Molecular Gastronomy

[gfron1]

Last week I conducted a presentation on hypermodern dining to an adult education group (mostly retirees with expendable income). The focus was the history and evolution of MG techniques, and a slew of practical applications. HERE is the launch of my info gathering for the presentation.

In the presentation, I was asked a question by the audience (someone who had attended all of my dinners), "What is the role of joke or pun in MG cooking?" My immediate reaction was that I don't create food and joke or pun, but rather, use all of the tools at my side to activate the diner's experience. I wasn't satisfied with that answer, nor was the questioner.

The same person then followed up with me over the weekend to which I gave a response something along these lines - Like a painter who creates on canvas a picture, the goal is not for the painting to be viewed, but rather for the painting to be manifested. Likewise, when I create a dish, while I care that the diner enjoys the dish, I'm less concerned if they "get it," or if my little "joke" is understood. I'm not telling a joke. What I am doing is challenging the notions of flavor, texture, temperature, etc. I am pushing the comfort zones of the diner's senses. And as such, the diner's experience becomes ultimately irrelevant because my motivation or intention is the focus of my energies. I still was not satisfied with my answer.

Then I received an email from the same questioner:

I respect your answer that you do not intend to make a culinary pun as you shape or create a dish. Rather, you say, your and others' aim is that of any artist--to fashion the elements of the world (in your case, food) to engage the senses.  Any appeal to humor or to the mind is adventitious.

It's impossible to argue against intention, but I can quibble about the result. While a reaction of surprise or a laugh may or may not be welcomed by the molecular gastronomist; when such reactions occur, they become part of the art. Praxiteles to now, artists are stuck with it.

I misspoke when I used the terms pun, joke, and humor interchangeably.  Humor (and the jokes within that category) depend on elements of cruelty or limitations. Puns and wit come from confusions of meaning.  I suppose Jeff Foxworthy, Rita Radner, and Jack Benny would be the joke tellers and George Carlin, Calvin Trillin and Woodie Allen would be musing over meanings or the lack of them.

Take an example from your Tastings.  There are dozens, but the icy beet balls will do nicely. (You did have one real pun in the menu: the tuna that was prickly pear and not Charlie.)  If you had made the beet ice into brown boxes so that the diner would not have expected

anything but mystery, there would have been no wit. Instead, you made shiny, red, beet-sized balls look mysteriously like and unlike beets (another fruit, perhaps?).  And the taste was beet but the texture was sorbet and the ball was icy, not fibrous, most unbeetlike but very beety.  Had you had diners from Africa, the beet balls might have worked because fruits often are red and round or may have proved as unpunny as brown boxes. The effects of your art depends, like all art, on what's in our heads or experience.

Where would Michel Guerard have been without Auguste Escoffier?  Not very far, because the half of an arugala leaf touching a squiggle of vinaigrette and a dot of organic horseradish would have been nonsense without memories of boats of Holladaise and reductions with double butterfat cream. Nobody would dare giggle at Guerard's productions, silly as they were, because it was all a serious business, sinking the 3,000 calorie-gourmand juggernaut. While the actuality may have been missing, memory of those heavy Escoffier courses and the diners'

expectation linger and give substance, importance, clarity to la cuisine minceur.

So we know beets and caviar and apple juice, and discover, happily, that we were mistaken. Tricked, not by the cook magician, now you see it and now you don't, the David Copperfield among the pans. No, tricked by the George Carlin of the burners. You're so smart, name

what you've known since you were sensing and you name wrong.  Here's something new.

While the trick is incidental to the creator of the taste, it is crucial to the interpreter of the taste.  The puns and irony of technoemocional may not be the motor that drives the scientists in the kitchen but they are the lure that keeps the diner at the table.

I share this here because I'm still formulating a response. I have strong post modernist leanings which are clearly causing an obstruction in our conversation. That said, I don't feel any vagueness about my intention or motivation - I create meals that will delight the senses, specifically, challenging one's conceptions of flavor, texture, smell, temperature, etc., with the goal of engaging even more of the diner in the process of eating. That is why I set my fall menu to begin exactly at sundown. That is why made my tuna tempura out of prickly pear tunas. That is why my beet balls were sorbet and not vegetable. But my goal is not to trick nor tease. That may happen. It may not. But once it was eaten by the diner, did they enjoy it? Did it raise an eyebrow? Did it illicit a laugh of surprise? These are the things that drive me.

I'm curious what others think about when they serve MG styled meals.

(btw, I really enjoy having guests that can engage in this level of discourse with me about the food I serve them.)

Edited March 2, 2009 by gfron1 (log)

[Magictofu]

I see humour on many menus these days and it often helps making food more approchable, particularly food that is a bit unusual.

It just shows that there is a multi-dimensional aspect to food... it is not just about taste and texture, food can also be an intellectual or emotional experience. Great cooks certainly do play with all these dimensions.

It reminds me of a discussion I had a while ago with some friends about the role of humour and jokes in "avant-garde" music. The particular focus of that discussion was about a few pieces by John Zorn / Naked City, here's a few examples:

batman

[docsconz]

I think that humor or wit is an important element of technoemotional cuisine. It is prominent in the work of the Adrias, the Rocas, Wylie Dufresne, Homaro Cantu, Jose Andres and Heston Blumenthal amongst others.

Thanks for sharing that communication, Rob. That was an extremely well written and thought out piece.

[nibor]

Your other posts made it sound like you lived in the outback. With this guy?

[gfron1]

We do. We both live in a small town of 10K in southwest NM, and are 3 hours to any major city (Tucson & El Paso). I think there is humor in the fact that I do MG meals here.

[Tri2Cook]

I don't have anything to offer to help with your response but, for me, humor, jokes and surprises are my favorite uses for most of the usual suspects in the modern techniques playbook. I went through a "this stuff is cool, I have to use it everywhere" phase. I migrated to a "it's been done, I'll leave it alone" phase that I really wasn't happy with. Avoiding techniques isn't cool, it's just limiting oneself for no good reason. I'm now settled into a I'll-never-have-the-creative-mind-of-Grant-Achatz-or-technical-skills-of-Heston-Blumenthal-or-mind-blowing-originality-of-Ferran-Adria-so-I-might-as-well-just-have-fun-with-it phase. That's a comfy phase for me. I enjoy it. Laughs and "Oh, I get it!" from guests are welcome sounds that make me smile. Seeing peoples faces when they thought they knew what they just put in their mouth and suddenly discovered they were wrong is fun. It's my turn to laugh then. I like a dining room that sounds more like a comedy club crowd than a funeral parlor crowd.

[Mallet]

I think this is a case where the phrase "technoemotional" cooking comes through as a more apt descriptor than "molecular gastronomy". The use of technology as a means to elicit new and familiar emotions is arguably the goal of this style of cuisine.

Which emotions/sensations seek to be ellicited depends on the craftsman/artist, of course, and jokes may not be part of your current repertoire (at least not consciously). Like others who've already posted it's one of the aspects of hypermodern cooking I most enjoy the most because jokes often come from the unexpected, and the current array of modern techniques certainly provide that in spades.

Mostly, though, I restrict myself to terrible menu puns...

[gfron1]

It has taken me a while to respond to my friend, but I did so this morning. Something about his use of "pun" really bothered me. I very much disagree that I'm presenting jokes, and puns aren't too far off from jokes. So here at long last is my response, to which I assume he will present an even more pointed response

Alright, response v.3

I can accept the use of pun, but I don't think it is quite as honed of a term as whimsy.  Pun assumes a level of intention or concreteness that isn't present in my cooking.  Whimsy, on the other hand, connotes a temporality and fluttering of interpretation.  I think of a dandelion bloom floating through the air.  The white billow seems to move effortlessly, and when you go to grab it, it swirls around your hand only to head off in a different direction.  An inability to predict pattern or course is by design in my cooking (with some exceptions where I'm being much more direct - and not coincidentally, these are the dishes typically created near the end of my process when I am fatigued).

And so, whimsy is my word of choice, and that unpredictability and potential for uncertainty, is what, I believe, lures the diner back to the table.  Trickery creates a power dynamic that I do not wish for in the dining experience - and trickery comes from the use of pun - "Ha! I fooled ya!"

Put the whimsy sock on and see how it feels...

[gfron1]

and his response (geez...it takes me weeks to formulate a response, and him hours)

Each point in the creation and consumption of a dish may deserve its

own motivation.

I could accept whimsy as the motivating characteristic for you as you

think about and then make a confection, just as I could accept whimsy

for Lewis Carroll as he begins to tell of a little girl and a rabbit.

But whimsy is the most evanescent of reasons.  Almost whimsical, I

should say. Like a liqueur its punch is soon evaporated, leaving only

a trace or two of its inspiration.

You title your whimsy.  Do you call it, Mole Feathers, like some

perverse entry in a Chinese menu, having no connection to the diner's

experience? Nope. Here whimsy takes flight and like Carroll you move

into the realm of metaphor, paradox and pun. To return to my original

example, the beet that looks vaguely beetish but doesn't feel like a

beet while somehow being the heightened, concentrated essence of

beet.  The pun is the shape and color: you could have made a tiny,

brown box for the beet, but as the fellows with the pillowed place

mats would say, "It's the whole experience." The chef wants me to

anticipate something. The chef wants me to contribute to the

experience. It's participatory gastronomy. If it were pure whimsy, a

sort of extemporaneous randomness, I could have no such anticipation

and would refuse to participate.

At the titling and plating, whimsy becomes comic play--George Carlin

or Woodie Allen. When I see, smell, feel, and taste, my mind is

responding not to the whimsy but to the altered meanings, because the

pun was based on my anticipations. Laughter, surprise. Even shock. At

the end, as the taste melts from my tongue, the pun becomes whimsy

perhaps. A pun explained, after all, is an unsuccessful pun. I would

never read Through the Looking Glass to a kid and laboriously explain

the ins and outs of Red Queens and late Hares. So we would want the

experience to be recorded as something other and, as you suggest,

whimsy does nicely for the diner, too, as an aide memoire.

[docsconz]

Call it what you will, but a sense of humor (and yes, whimsy) is critical for technoemotional cuisine, at least for those most successful with it. Without one, it becomes too self-important and too pretentious.