Gastronomy in France in Flux?

[robert brown]

Bux, put Esilda to work.

[Steve Plotnicki]

"Is there a serious interest in this?"

Does a bear take a shit in the woods after a big dinner?

[Bux]

"Is there a serious interest in this?"

Does a bear take a shit in the woods after a big dinner?

Assuming he can get a reservation for dinner ...

[lxt]

What interests me is a reference to the word “intellectual.“ It seems that any time the less known, less habitual is to be experienced, any time we need to switch to the active mode instead of passively receiving an anticipated pleasure, we casually refer to the word intellectual. Adria’s cuisine – too intellectual. Schoenberg – too intellectual. I remember watching a 2-year-old child’s first experience with a potato chip. She sniffed the potato chip first, then she licked it, then she made a face the expression of which clearly stated definite suspicion, and of course the first bite resulted in a well-chewed and spit-out substance. I’d say that according to the current use of the word, the chip just seemed to be too “intellectual” for the little one.

The point is that we don’t really know how “intellectual” a mushy, starchy, bland potato tasted right after being introduced “in the post-1492 era.” Perhaps the fact that potato is not very demanding climate-wise and easy to grow promoted the product to the market. Therefore, the taste was acquired as a result of its mass introduction. I have no doubts that had children been exposed to Schoenberg since their early years, it wouldn’t just “smell like classical music” for some of us. The fact that our senses receive new experiences in food doesn’t necessarily present an “intellectual challenge” as much as require open-mindness with no previous sensory attachments (e.g., that foam can't be a potato) and simple, plain practice.

On the other hand, the fact that our senses are unfamiliar with a new dish doesn't automatically confirm its intellectual substance. Some new things are just bad, and we shouldn't be afraid to say so. You may dissect the food and apply your intellectual abilities to admire the complexity of the process and the thought involved in the creation of the dish, but this recognition has little effect on how our senses accept the outcome.

[Steve Klc]

What he said. Or she said.

Thank you so much lxt. Very well crafted.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Lxt - Thanks for that answer that has nothing to do with what we are talking about. If you read through this thread, it is not a diatribe about whether the avante garde ever has any merit. We all agree it does. Rather the question here is will paying customers, meaning people who go to eat for sensual pleasure today, not 300 years from now, have the same fervor for this style of cuisine as as they had for the "chefs of yore." Or will the techniques practiced by this school of chefs never properly integrate into because it is too "wrapped up" in technique, and it doesn't pay enough attention to the natural qualities of food which is what made the chefs of yore so popular to begin with?

[Bux]

Lxt - Thanks for that answer that has nothing to do with what we are talking about.

I thought it had quite a bit to do with the subject at hand, but I suspect you've made a convincing argument that we've gone around in circles long enough not listening to each other.

[Steve Plotnicki]

What word we use to describe whether Adria's cooking will have relevence of not is of no importance to the point. So it's the wrong word. The dispute about relevency remains. I'm surprised at Lxt. She usually does better than that .

[Fat Guy]

I actually understood the point of lxt's post but found the point of the Plotnicki response somewhat diffuse. Her argument seemed highly relevant, whereas the answer "the question here is will paying customers, meaning people who go to eat for sensual pleasure today, not 300 years from now, have the same fervor for this style of cuisine as as they had for the 'chefs of yore'" didn't seem to address it. I think I made a similar point to lxt's, in a condensed manner, when I said this was all about "familiarity," and it was similarly sidestepped.

[Steve Plotnicki]

Fat Guy - But we all acknowledged that point posts ago. Everybody is willing to concede that at some point in time, palates might be recalibrated to the point where one can enjoy a potato without the need for actually eating one. But your question was, "do these chefs run rings around the chefs of yore?" And our answer was that the chefs of yore actually served potatoes. And while the modern chefs have great technical wizardry, and possibly serve more interesting dishes then the chefs of yore, for people like me and Robert, the issue comes down to, who serves the best potatoes? Not who serves the best resemblence of potatoes. It's who serves the best potatoes? That we also used the phrase "intelectualized" to decribe the Adria potatoes is really irrelevent. Call it overly technical instead. The issue isn't semantics, it's whether the best potatoes can exist without the potatoes being there.

[Fat Guy]

But if it comes down to familiarity then all you're saying is that you're lazy. That's the sum total of your potato argument. Because Robuchon's mashed potatoes don't taste anything like a potato. They don't have the mouthfeel of a potato. They are as far removed from a potato as potato foam, perhaps farther because at least potato foam tastes like potatoes. The only thing you're hanging on to with mashed potatoes is that at least they're a starch. That's an incredibly thin reed.

Surely you realize there are dozens of foods you eat that bear so little resemblance to their underlying natural products that pretty much everybody would fail a blind taste test, things like tapioca and beer and sausages and pastrami and mustard and the various examples we've already gone over like bread and, yes, potato vodka. It's a totally artificial distinction to say that processes like fermentation and smoking and dry-curing and stone-grinding are kosher while using an iSi Profi-Whip to make foam is trayf.

What you've essentially done is made a decision to cast your lot with the chefs who were successful when you were in the prime of your culinary learning curve. Now that you're an old conservative white male fuddy-duddy you want to rest on your laurels and just enjoy all the stuff you took the time to decode when you were struggling to learn all this stuff. But to the next generation -- that's me and Steve Klc -- the stuff you're defending so ardently seems rather quaint. I'm sure Robuchon and Point and all those guys are and were geniuses at what they did, but I have little interest in eating their dishes except as historical reference points, and if I want whatever dish Robuchon used to make I can just call Ducasse and ask him to whip some up for me. Big deal.

Now you may be lucky and you may be guessing right: Cuisine may just happen to have had its one glorious and unrepeatable golden age right at the exact moment you were discovering haute cuisine. Maybe it's all downhill from there. But you've got to at least admit to the possiblity that cuisine is still progressing towards something better.

[robert brown]

Steve Shaw, here is another (and I believe more legitimate and encompassing) way to discuss at least one aspect of your argument. The French have a nifty word for which we native English speakers do not have an equivalent. It is called “restauration” The closest synonyms we have are “care and feeding”, “hospitality” and “the restaurant business”, but nothing succinct or as appropriate as the French language has to mean the process of taking care of a person visiting a restaurant and looking after him or her in terms of feeding and serving. Irrespective of the potato argument, but not of discussing cuisine then and now, as long as one bandies about the names of Adria, Robuchon, Ducasse, Bocuse, Troisgros and Point, those of us who cut our gastronomic teeth on the food of many or all of the above do not necessarily think the food was better, or that what Adria is doing represents the ruination of cuisine. We believe that whether or not the “chefs of yore” cooked better than Adria, Trotter, Keller, Barbo, or Blumenthal, they understood and executed “restauration” better, and that's what made restaurant-going better 15-35 years ago than now. I realize I have been hammering away at this general theme for a few months on other forums and with other threads, and that it may be tangential to the potato argument. However, another way to look at it that brings the two areas closer together are the notions of “restauration”, which now exists as much for chefs cooking as if for other chefs versus traditional“restauration” of the diner looking to be, in a manner of speaking, caressed. Perhaps citing a concrete example best illustrates what I am striving to put forth:

This past summer I was fortunate to visit a restaurant in France that was so “hot” that it was difficult for many people to book a table. It was a paragon of what I call the “new dining”. Its young chef’s cuisine was praised in many publications and guidebooks for its inventiveness and freshness. When I read the menu, I saw that all the food was already chosen for us by the restaurant, as was the wine, since our host thought it best to order the larger menu that included wine. To make a long evening short, my wife and I disliked the experience. The service was functional and without style; the dishes came so fast and there were so many (nine) that we now can only recall parts of two of them. The two wines the part owner chose for us were from a producer in the Minervois, which he poured out of our sight from magnums that looked (and tasted) as if one could buy them in a supermarket. You might say that the potentially interesting dinner we anticipated was spoiled by lack of “restauration”.

What we ate was a meal that made me feel as if I was paying for the privilege of dining in the restaurant, or kissing the chef’s feet, as opposed to paying so that someone would take good and concerned care of me. This is the problem with almost all of the avant-garde chefs. (Ironically, this does not include El Bulli, which operates at full tilt as if it were the old days with 32 people in the kitchen and, I believe, more than 40 in the diing room). I do not believe you can separate the modern (or ultra-modern) chefs and cuisine from the notion of “restauration”. In fact, I am willing to bet that what we are seeing in more restaurant kitchens these days is a cuisine that has evolved as much from the need (or greed) to serve increasingly smaller portions of “restauration” than from expanding the ambit of innovative cooking.

[marcus]

Although Steve Plotnicki and I largely intuit the same perspective, I would express my opinion somewhat differently. When I refer to over-intellectualization, I really mean exactly that. Our intellects are essential for solving logical problems and for doing science and philosophy. Our intellects are inherently incapable of fully analyzing emotional processes and the appreciation of food, music and art are inherently emotional processes. I believe that one could teach every child in the world Schoenberg's music for 300 years and they might learn to tolerate it, even appreciate it, but the vast majority would never ever learn to love it. It is an over intellectualized approach to music that lacked an appreciation for how the brain is programmed. I use this example because I view it as quite closely analogous to our food topic, and one in which the results are really visible rather than just speculative. A movies example might be Kieslowski's Decalogue, interesting but unlovable, versus say the works of Fellini.

Obviously intellect is required for most human activities so it is a question of balance, but if we lose sight of our inborn understanding for what constitutes food, and treat its creation as solely an intellectual exercise, although the results might be interesting, people will not love it, and its our love of eating food that really draws us to this site. Without our love of food, we would probably find many other topics far more interesting.

Having never eaten at El Bulli I am at a disadvantage in discussing it, but Adria's own comparison of his creative processes to deconstruction and the multitude of first hand descriptions posted here certainly lead me to believe that his approach is highly intellectualized and thus seems to risk leading cooking in a direction where it could betray its essence and lose its soul.

[Bux]

There will always be young turks and there will always be those who long for the good old days.

[lxt]

will the techniques practiced by this school of chefs never properly integrate into because it is too "wrapped up" in technique, and it doesn't pay enough attention to the natural qualities of food which is what made the chefs of yore so popular to begin with

Your main fallacy in viewing this and consequent questions lies in the fact that you are attempting to compare two genres of cuisines unrelated in their approach, technique and methodology. It is similar to comparing jazz with opera. I’d say according to your statement, jazz is “intellectualized” or rather “overly technical” and aside from semantics, of course, cannot exist….or vice versa for that matter. The point is that it is not about comparing best potatoes. It is about comparing a potato foam with potato which is simply irrelevant in evaluation as they represent two completely different substances.

However, the question as to whether Adria’s cuisine will properly integrate in the future is valid and was answered extensively in my previous post that highlighted two aspects: 1) consumer open-mindness without previous sensory attachments; and 2) possible favorable economic, market or other incentives that would provide enough grounds for chefs to continue the trend (just like the original introduction of the potato 300 years ago).

My reference to the use or rather misuse of the word “intellectual” aside from the reasons presented in the original post was also based on the observation that many wouldn’t submit to their sensory assessment and conveniently diverge to the subject of complexity of the preparation process. However, when I receive an input on someone’s dining experience in the form of “it was interesting” or “it was intellectual”, I am forced to pose a question, “So, was it good or bad?”

[Bux]

This focus on the potato and it's essence makes me ask about potage. What ever happened to potage? Do I just eat in the wrong restaurants? I never see it on bistro menus any more and when I order it in a cafe, it tastes as if came from a dry soup mix. If there's a single dish that seduced me as a lover of French cuisine, it was not Robuchon's puree, but the wonderful satisfaction of a good honest homemade potage in a cheap Parisian bistro on a cold fall evening. Compared with the dead end of Robuchon's effete puree, the vegetable potage with a potato base was the heart and soul of French cooking, but if I'm wrong and it's not a dead end, potato foam might well be the logical next step.

[Steve Klc]

Might it have been a trend after all, Bux? Viscerally, who really craves a liquid potato? Perhaps it's not a proper or rewarding form for a potato to take, an over-intellectualized unnatural form of the potato? Maybe making potage has come to be seen as a greedy act--a way for a chef to use up all the old mealy potatoes and shortchange his customers?

My serious answer, Bux, is 'I don't know'.

But, for those following along, hung up or otherwise, on this--a wonderful traditional pureed potage with potato, leek and cream--could be strained and loaded into an iSi Profi whipper. Because of the cream content it would "foam" up just fine and be a wonderful side dish, with all the flavor of the soup and just a different texture. You know how some traditional potato soups have sausage or ham flavoring the stock? Or kale in the case of the portuguese caldo verde?

Well, to help you follow through with this potato foam--here's how I, as an amateur cook, might utilize it in a modern version:

Cook kale separately. Dice ham into a brunoise and saute until very crisp.

Place a small mound of kale in the bottom of a bowl.

Sprinkle a few ham cubs over.

Drizzle some garlic-infused olive oil and sea salt over it.

Fill bowl with "potage" foam.

Shave some cheese on top of the foam, sprinkle more ham cubes and quickly gratinee before serving.

Enjoy.

Now, there is a difference between the potato, kale and ham "in" the traditional, familiar soup and how those ingredients are combined "in" my dish--the ham flavor isn't integrated, infused and extracted out in the long process of making the soup--but what does it matter that the preparation, form and integration of flavors between the two dishs are different? It does not, simply whether either dish is good matters.

Imagine how the wonderful possibilities must be endless for a real chef? Imagine some nightmarish possibilities as well--but again, so what? I've had nightmarish brownies and chocolate chip cookies.

Here's a basic Adria's recipe for a warm potato espuma:

600 g boiled potato, 300 ml full fat milk, 100 ml water in which potatoes were boiled, 50 g butter, salt, nutmeg. Combine, pass through a sieve. Season, load into an iSi Profi whip. This foam can be held warm in a bain-marie.

He describes as "light, airy, almost liquid."

Hmm, almost liquid...as in a potage?

What's so disconcerting about that? Why is foam some stumbling block of form, of texture, of unnaturalness, of over-intellectualization and liquid potato not?

[Steve Plotnicki]

"It is similar to comparing jazz with opera. I’d say according to your statement, jazz is “intellectualized” or rather “overly technical” and aside from semantics, of course, cannot exist….or vice versa for that matter. The point is that it is not about comparing best potatoes. It is about comparing a potato foam with potato which is simply irrelevant in evaluation as they represent two completely different substances."

Lxt - I think this is about as wrongheaded thinking as can be. And I think Fat Guy in essence says the same exact thing when he talks about starch and my being fixated to a potato in a certain form. That argument is the one that says that I/we won't accept potatoes in a new form and that I am saying that the public won't either. I have never said that. If you read what I said closely you will find that I have stated a number of times that it is entirely possible that in the future people will eat potatoes without the potatoes. However, I find that both of you miss the reason why jazz, opera, or mashed potatoes became popular and stayed popular.

Jazz works because it's a musical metaphor for the people who perform it. Somehow in some indescribable way, it encapsulated in music the struggle for freedom in their lives. And in some other indescribable way listeners recognized that upon listening to the music. And not only that, it was popular because the performers while struggling to gain freedom, and respect as human beings, wanted not freedom from, but freedom to participate in a democratic society. Rock & Roll was the same. It expressed something on a primal or visceral level to teenagers that had to do with the constraints society imposed on them in the 50's & 60's. It sounded like the freedom they wanted to gain from the silly things their parents believed in.

Now maybe I don't have my metaphors down perfectly but, what I'm trying to say is that the harmonic and rhythmic structure, as well as the lyrics, evoked natural emotions that were out of the listener's control. Those types of emotions cannot be artificially created by enculturation. An artist and his audience communicate without speaking to each other in a natural and spontaneous way. One could not have artificially constructed "jazz." It depended on real live circumstances. You needed slaves on boats who came to America and couldn't speak English so they had to improvise to end up with jazz. That can't be made in a laboratory. But not only was it important for jazz to be a natural occurence for the performers, it's popularity depended on the listeners ability to relate. They needed to feel some level of oppression in their own lives that made them feel akin to the musicians. Jazz needed to be both a mateaphor for the musicians, and the listeners. That's the silent bargain of art.

Hence that brings us to the mashed potatoes and what type of metaphor

they were when they came on the scene. Because they are a metaphor for our lives just like jazz is. And I've seen a number of descriptions of the Robuchon potatoes on this site. I've read John Whiting describe them as making the affluent diners at Robuchon feel "comfortable." And I've said that Robuchon by increasing the proportions to half potato half butter and cream was daring in his being willing to increase them until he actually got it right, i.e., hit a metaphor. So which is it, was Robuchon a genius or did he notice something about his customers? Don't answer. It's a rhetorical question because it doesn't matter.

So that brings us to Adria. And as much as Lxt and Fat Guy would like the question to be, Could we appreciate potato foam as much as the mashed potatoes if we were weaned on them? I find that not even relevent to the discussion at all. The question is when we eat potato foam, does it make the same type of primal or visceral statement to us that mashed potatoes made, i.e., is it a metaphor for our lives? And maybe it is a metaphor for certain people's lives. I'm sure there were people who took to Schoenberg like fish take to water. That isn't the issue. The issue is whether enough people will take to potato foam so that it will replace mashed potatoes as being the pantheon of haute cuisine. In otherwords, will the potato foam strike the same chord in people the mashed potatoes struck. And while Adria's cuisine has obviously struck many different chords, I can't find any evidence that it has struck that particluar chord. And I believe (and I think Marcus and Robert B. think this as well) that it is what that makes things great, and that is what makes things last. Great inventions are defined by the people who use them.

[Fat Guy]

So there's only one potato dish in the pantheon of haute cuisine greats, and that's Robuchon's pureed potatoes? I thought there were about thirty different potato dishes in that category. You don't see potato puree as the exclusive potato accompaniment to all haute cuisine dishes. It's one of many possibilities. Some emphasize crunch, others emphasize the potato's ability to carry herb and spice flavors, some are standalone non-accompaniment dishes such as soups, and others emphasize pairings such as potatoes with cheese. Foam emphasizes another aspect of the potato. It may or may not acquire the classic status of the many other potato dishes that are now considered classics, but then again it doesn't have to for Adria to be considered as important as Robuchon. What percentage of Robuchon's dishes and techniques have been imitated widely? I've got news for you: By that methodology, Adria left Robuchon in the dust years ago just based on his foams. And those are only a small part of what he does.

[Steve Plotnicki]

" So there's only one potato dish in the pantheon of haute cuisine greats, and that's Robuchon's pureed potatoes? I thought there were about thirty different potato dishes in that category"

Fat Guy - You have identified what I believe is the right issue but you are focusing on the what I believe is the wrong aspect of it. Of course there are 30 great potato dishes. Unfortunately Adria's foamed potatoes aren't considered to be one of them. That is by diners that is. Chefs might very well think they should be included and possibly be number one. But for diners, they probably don't even make the top 100. Now you can make every argument in the world why that is. People have been brought up to expect potatoes in a starchy context, the publicity for the style of cooking hasn't been as good as the French haute cuisine machine's publicity, the Costa Brava is less traveled and less well known then other regions and thereare no hotels there, etc. I say that none of those things are the reason why. I say it's simpler than that. I say the food doesn't strike the same natural chord as the 30 other potato dishes. And I'm not making a judgement about potato foam when I say that, I'm making an observation about what is reported about the meals there. But then I also go on to say that for Adria's (generic) technique to be of lasting importance, somebody is going to have to correct that. Technical and intelectual arguments, as compelling as they might be, will not overcome a diner's preference for something that moves him on an emotional level.

[Fat Guy]

Also I want to make clear that I'm letting you off easy on the Robuchon-slavery-counterculture analogy.

[robert brown]

If Adria is the Pied Piper of cuisine (and it is still too soon to know the answer), then it does not matter in the long run if he turned more chef's heads than Robuchon. I would like to know if Adria banged away at foams, etc. for ten years before all of a sudden the chefs started beating a path to his doors. In other words, as I have been saying and everyone has been ignoring, have there been macrocosmic changes in the world of restaurant cooking that suddenly made Adria such a focus of interest rather quickly and belatedly? To use the jazz analogy, is Adria similar to Archie Shepp and Albert Ayler ( "free jazz" artists of the 1970s) who had a wide following and then fell out of favor), eventually will the chefs of the 1950s-1980s be lionized and influential again just as the young Miles Davis and John Coltrane are today? I think that's sort of what the Adria sceptics believe (and this discussion may be the first ( at least on-going) discussion in that vein. I and perhaps a few others occupy a middle ground in which we express awe toward Adria but either question his longevity as an influential chef or somehow see his cooking as "not natural". To me he is still a chef's chef or a gastronomic tourist's chef even, who, like many other innovators, arose to fill an institutional vacuum. Right now I love his restaurant and what he does, but I cannot rule out that time will show that there will be only one of him just as there has only been one Thelonious Monk.

[Wilfrid]

Steve P., may I just say that your post on jazz and mashed potatoes was an absolute tour de force. I mean it. That is some imagination you have there.

And for once, I think I agree with you. The manner in which certain foods and dishes become "metaphors for people's lives" - I would say, what they signify for people - is something we perhaps haven't discussed enough. I could raise steak again, here, but I'll let you all get back to your foams.

[Fat Guy]

Imagination being the key term. I guess I did let him off too easy. For whom exactly are Robuchon's mashed potatos a metaphor, and for what? Do they represent the difficulty in acquiring the right size Yves St. Laurent dress on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, so people have to console themselves with mashed potatoes on Avenue Raymond Poincare?

[Bux]

Clever anyway, at least as a tactic, to reduce the discussion about the two chefs (which in itself is s reduction of the original topic) to Robuchon's potato puree, which may well sum up Robuchon's greatness and influence, and Adria's potato foam as the latter is but a minor example of a subset of Adria's ongoing talents and influences. Clever as well to return to jazz or anyother distraction away from food if the purpose is to win idle arguments and show off knowledge in a field whose lore is arcane to that of gastronomy. Once again we've drifted from a search for insight and I don't see the benefit of proving most of the points being raised, assuming they are points that should, or can, be proven.