Surfin' the drift

On Honey, Bees and Alchemy

Another Sunday, another episode of A Cook's Tour. If you think my Sundays consist of waking up at 11 am, making a double macchiato and then settling in front of the TV to watch Anthony Bourdain then you are not far wrong. For now anyway.

This week the man was in my old neighbourhood in Chelsea visiting his old friend Gordon - what struck me about what he ate there was the unreformed Classical fussiness of the courses. Summer salad in the ham terrine and baby peas then pea puree in the ravioli of beef rib. A philosophy that has more empathy with Escoffier than Ferran Adrià and completely antithetical to what Heston Blumenthal is doing at the Fat Duck. Think the elder Bruegel or Bosch compared with say, Miro or Rothko.

Heston Blumenthal's cooking has been various described as mad kitchen chemistry or molecular gastronomy - which sounds like a bit of a mouthful until you realise that it is exactly that. The guiding principle is that you would get more flavour if you bit into a coffee bean and then drank a whole glass of hot water than you would if you crushed the bean and dissolved it in the same amount of hot water.

Reading a recent interview with Heston Blumenthal, I was shocked to find that he attributed most of his experimentation to one book - Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking. I have that book and it has been sitting on my shelves for almost fifteen years. It was a present from my friend Susan when she was clearing out her textbooks after she finished at the Culinary Institute of America and I dip into it from time to time when I need to research a small esoteric point. Heston Blumental has had that book for less time than that and he has three Michelin stars.

My shame knows no depths.

Before I proceed to slash my wrists, I have to point out that this tome is not a cookbook. It's a chemistry book for cooks written by a scientist who used to be at Caltech (which incidentally produces most of NASA's engineers and scientists). So it is rocket science. Pages devoted to the difference between myoglobin and metmyoglobin (known to the rest of us as why meat browns when it is aged) and the various temperatures at which fats burn.

The book begins with not the usual quotation from some classical text on food by Romans such as Lucullus or Cicero but with a picture - an English woodcut from the 17th Century showing bees and a beehive. An inscription in English "All plants yield honey as you see to the industrious Alchemical bee" and another in Latin "Sic nos non nobis mellificamus apes" or "thus, though not for ourselves, is honey made".

These remind me of Richard Dworkin's excellent book The Blind Watchmaker. The title to which comes the rhetorical question - can something as intricate as Nature happen by chance? can a blind man make a watch? Well, as far as your Sunday roast is concerned, I think I'll have to agree with Professor Dworkin. Your grilled entrecote d'beouf must have started out as a piece of meat on a stick hung too close to a fire in a cave some tens of thousands of years ago but that is not to say we cannot improve on Nature.

Cooking is alchemy - the transformation of basic ingredients to haute cuisine, from base egg and oil to golden mayonnaise. Or more miraculously, from ears, hooves and backsides to the golden arches of McDonalds. Not quite an elemental shift as the original Alchemists intended, a wholesale progession along the periodic table, but it sure tastes a lot better.

Back to the last inscription on the frontispiece of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking - omnia in libris. Or, all things in books.

See above, under Heston Blumenthal.

posted by porcorosso @ 11:20 PM