Modernist Cuisine: Defending the Spaceman
Nathan Myhrvold's magnum opus might be the most important culinary book ever. Why do so many people hate it?
By
Beneath most of these concerns seems to be a fear that Myhrvold has a nefarious and unstoppable agenda, one in which he plans to replace all conventional cookery with sci-fi, 100-percent Modernist Cuisine meals like the one I attended at the Kitchen. What seems poised to happen instead is much less threatening: the gradual introduction of certain techniques into the canon of culinary knowledge. That pinch of baking soda for a caramelized, Maillard-esque flavor without direct heat; dunking oysters in liquid nitrogen so they shuck more cleanly; an equilibrium-based brining method that makes it impossible to over-salt meat. At our dinner, Keller and Tom Douglas marveled as Myhrvold explained the "enzyme-peeled citrus" that garnished a dish of cocoa pasta with sea urchin: by bathing oranges in "peelzyme" (its real name), the pith and fibrous membranes dissolve, leaving segments of a perfection and beauty that, in a non-Modernist kitchen, would otherwise require hours of messy labor from an unfortunate prep cook.
It's telling, though, that despite his nutritional skepticism, that Seattle chef has still pre-ordered a copy of the book: "Of course I bought it!" The book won't officially be available until March 1, and the entire first print run has already sold out. (A second printing is underway, but be patient: "if you order your book tomorrow," Chris Young told me, "you probably won't get it until summer.") Keller and Ryan both have copies, and were at dinner in the lab in part because they're working with Myhrvold on ways to incorporate his techniques into the curriculum at the CIA.
Myhrvold was so confident of the eventual acceptance of Modernist Cuisine's philosophy that he included a little bit of a preemptive neener-neener in the book itself: the first volume contains a discussion of the decidedly non-culinary Impressionist movement of the late nineteenth century led by soon-to-be superstar Claude Monet. The Impressionists' paintings, when first publicly displayed, were considered so offensive that they were banned — but soon they were embraced. In the Impressionists, Myhrvold sees echoes of his own fight. "Much like Impressionism, the Modernist culinary movement was often misunderstood by the public in its early days," he and his team write. "And as happened with the masters of Impressionism, the creative geniuses of Modernist cooking eventually surmounted the initial confusion to achieve prominence and acclaim."
See photos from the Modernist Cuisine dinner in our photo gallery »
Laura
http://www.hippressurecooking.com
making pressure cooking hip, one recipe at a time!