The Evolution Debate

[SobaAddict70]

Some chefs will never need to worry about being left behind because they're such giant figures in the restaurant industry that the shadows they cast will still be present long after they themselves have left the culinary stage. I am thinking principally of notables such as Alice Waters, Madeline Kamman and of course, the one and only Julia.

Mario Batali is not yet there but is well along the way to approaching that stage. Give him another ten to fifteen years, I'd say.

I don't think the question of whether it's better to be familiar/unfamiliar is necessarily limited to chefs in places such as New York, San Francisco and London. It's a question, I think, that applies to all chefs, regardless of whether they're cooking in family run bistros in Oskalooskee, Wisconsin, or in the wilds of Manhattan.

Soba

[balex]

A brilliantly executed old-style recipe can be great, but ultimately the chef isn't creating anything. It's like someone today writing a brilliantly-executed composition "in the style of Mozart."

If I make a perfect pizza -- I am creating -- I am creating a pizza.

I can't say it any clearer than that.

[John Whiting]

May I suggest that we don't need analogies to music here? Indeed, I think they are somewhat unhelpful. It seems to me that we can more easily settle this by looking at cuisine on its own terms.

Thank you! Q: What is a metaphor? A: To keep cows in.

. . . and of course, the one and only Julia.

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?

Edited April 12, 2004 by John Whiting (log)

[SobaAddict70]

And, of course, she was the first of the great celebrity chef TV performers.  But unique contributions to culinary art?

Why, to inspire millions and millions of people to learn more about cooking and cuisine, of course.

Without Julia, there wouldn't have been an eGullet. Hyperbole to be sure, but well deserved in any event.

In Julia's time, "familiar and popular" was the opposite of what she set out to do and did. Cooking was, at least for most of the population, "unfamiliar and avant-garde", in a sense.

Modern chefs owe many debts to many pillars of the culinary world -- Escoffier, for instance. I daresay that Julia is another. She may not be the principal pillar in your book, but she is in others. About a few hundred thousand others.

Soba

[Fat Guy]

To use the example of Escoffier, assuming he still lived and ran restaurants today at age 160, does anybody think he'd still be serving the dishes from Le Guide Culinaire? Peach Melba? Of course not. During his lifetime, he continued to write and to expand his horizons, he always displayed an interest in new technologies (he was a pioneer of canning and preservation), and he was acutely aware of the need for progress. One hopes he would have, by now, written 10 more canonical texts, each more authoritative than the last, that his most recent works, from the 1990s, would have been about fusion cooking and Spanish cuisine, and that right now he'd be working on sous vide, turbo-chef, flash-bake, induction, and profi-whip techniques.

[John Whiting]

Why, to inspire millions and millions of people to learn more about cooking and cuisine, of course.

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.

Edited April 13, 2004 by John Whiting (log)

[Pan]

I think it's important to note that we're talking about Western cooking and a largely Western restaurant culture.

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?

[John Whiting]

I think it's important to note that we're talking about Western cooking and a largely Western restaurant culture.

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.

[slkinsey]

A brilliantly executed old-style recipe can be great, but ultimately the chef isn't creating anything.  It's like someone today writing a brilliantly-executed composition "in the style of Mozart."

If I make a perfect pizza -- I am creating -- I am creating a pizza.

I can't say it any clearer than that.

This is semantics, and I have to think you're bring a little disingenuous in not getting my point. You may have "created" a pizza in the physical sense, but not in the conceptual sense.

So, if you make a perfect pizza you are perhaps "creating" in the sense that you're making something, but I think it's quite clear that I have not used that sense of the word in this discussion. Rather, I have used the latter sense, of conceptual creation. If you make a perfect pizza margherita, you are not conceiving anything, you are not inventing anything, you are not putting your own imprint on anything and doing something that is uniquely your own. Rather, you are simply following a recipe or idea that someone else conceived/invented/etc. and skillfully reproducing it. Now, this may mean that you're an ace pizzaiolo, but you're not going to be remembered as "one for the ages" because you didn't really contribute anything significant in the world of pizza. You can't be compared to the guy who invented the pizza margherita, even if your execution is better than his, because he conceived something and you only copied something.

Conceiving is significant -- copying is not. Setting trends is significant -- following them is not. I don't think you will find that the chefs who are considered to be at the top of the game (or, indeed, most anyone at the top of most any business) are copiers and followers.

[MichaelB]

Just last fall, I was smack in the middle of this debate between two prominent chefs -- one French, one American. I remember the positions of each but not the specific arguments. Maybe if the discussion had occurred earlier than 2:30 am and after fewer than however many cases of wine had been consumed, I might remember exactly why each felt as he does.

[SobaAddict70]

Why, to inspire millions and millions of people to learn more about cooking and cuisine, of course.

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.

Not necessarily. Inventiveness in the kitchen is still the focus of the thread, but credit must be given to Julia and Alice for the inspiration they gave to those who followed them which made it possible for some people to become known.

Indeed, the style of cuisine propagated by Alice Waters lends itself to the thread very well: cooking seasonally with locally grown ingredients is a wonderful starting point, but is this necessarily the only end that a chef can aspire to, or is it possible to evolve beyond that?

Soba

[adoxograph]

I feel the need to chime in here out of a sense of scientific obligation drummed in to me by my coworkers. We cannot talk about "evolution" in terms of an individual person. Evolution, by definition, is something that happens over generations. We can discuss the evolution of cuisine (why we don't eat what the cavemen do) or we can discuss the development of a chef. I think the discussion is getting a little muddied between these points.

Evolution is going to happen with or without individual impetus. An individual may be revolutionary in his cuisine, but unless that creates a lasting change in the nature of cuisine over time, it's not evolutionary. So, until we can turn around in 50 years and see foams as part of the general diet, something that we all do, I'm not willing to call that an evolution.

As for development of individual chefs, I do think that for the revolutionaries, change is necessary for progress. I'm not going to limit that to our highest chefs, although they would have the greatest opportunity to be experimental. However, outside influence (like technology) can offer opportunities for revolutionary change to even the short order cook.

In short, change is going to happen intentionally or otherwise (why else would Chef Bourdain need help finding old-school French cuisine?). The best chefs, I believe, may not always be the revolutionary ones, but instead those that can find a balance between new ideas and the comfortable old.

[slkinsey]

I'm not sure it makes sense to split semantic hairs about the meaning of "evolution" in this discussion. I think we all share an understanding that, in this context, it has the meaning "a process of change and growth in a chef's cuisine." This seems to me well within the generally-accepted meanings for the word. The biological sciences meaning or evolution is only one among many.

[John Whiting]

. . . credit must be given to Julia and Alice for the inspiration they gave to those who followed them which made it possible for some people to become known.

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

. . . the book could well be titled French Cooking from the American Supermarket, for the excellence of French cooking, and of good cooking in general, is due more to cooking techniques than to anything else.

Later, in From Julia Child's Kitchen, she's still hanging out in the supermarket:

The other day my supermarket had some gorgeous 2-inch squares of well-trimmed, nicely marbled meat all beautifully packaged in see-through containers. A big red extra label . . . announced loudly: Barbecue. Brochettes . . .

She goes on to express surprise that they turned out to be tough.

But here's the prize-winner:

. . . gather a modest variety of canned fruits, boil them a few minutes in their own syrup with strips of lemon peel and a stick of cinnamon; then while their syrup is boiling down to a glaze, you arrange the fruits beautifully in a serving dish, interspersing them, perhaps, with thinly sliced bananas and a sprinkling of sliced almonds . . . When you spoon the glaze over the fruits, you have a lovely looking dessert that, also, has a certain sophistication of taste.

Imagine the artificiality and boiled-down concentrated sugar! After that, a dose of Karo Syrup would taste like Angostura Bitters. Edited April 13, 2004 by John Whiting (log)

[Fat Guy]

We don't have to agree on whether or not Julia Child is a giant, and for what reasons, to agree on the following: Julia Child lacks the kind of relevance among Gen-Xers that she had among Baby Boomers. And I think, had she evolved more, she would have had more relevance. Instead, as Mamster's Daily Gullet interview with Julia Child reveals, she is stuck in an antiquated mindset: she developed her style at a time when ingredients sucked, and has allowed that to limit her ability to adjust to modern haute cuisine sensibilities about ingredients. The entire French chef community moved beyond that old mindset and into Nouvelle Cuisine and beyond, leaving Julia Child as the standard bearer for a certain place and time. As that time becomes more a part of history than everyday life, Julia Child's influence is bound to continue declining. I wish she had gone the route of evolution.

[John Whiting]

. . . she developed her style at a time when ingredients sucked . . .

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

. . . if I could just get the chicken breasts the way I could get them in the U.S.

You couldn't make it up.

[balex]

You seem to be focusing very much on fame and recognition here: I don't think even in this narrow sense that creativity is so important. It is very clear when you move away from Western High Art metaphors, to considering it as a craft (which it is), and in other countries. For example, in Japan, as you may be aware, some people are designated living national treasures; some of them are very famous, yet are not truly 'creative' in the sense you mean. I think one or two are noodle makers -- a friend of mine was in Japan researching a book on Japanese food and met some of these people.

Closer to home, there are famous bakers, and ice cream makers (like Pasquale Alongi at San Crispino). So you can become famous without "conceptual creation" just by a real commitment to (and talent for) refinement and excellence. I think what these people have is an individual style, or set of values that inform their work. That doesn't have to be original. Fergus Henderson is a good example. Very distinctive style, no true originality. And that is not a criticism, it is a compliment. And in Paris some chefs and restaurants are rightly celebrated for adhering to, and refining a very traditional cuisine.

Edited April 13, 2004 by balex (log)

[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.