1913

Is there-- or has there ever been-- a Marcel Duchamp of the kitchen?

Most of the cooking I know remains resolutely neoclassical. My own cooking barely crosses the threshold of figural realism: most of the time I struggle to make food simply taste like what it actually is. (Indeed, the challenge is to prevent, say, broccoli rabe from devolving into spinach, and spinach from devolving into shredded newspaper). But there are other kinds of cooking out there. Commercial cooking has all the integrity of a suburban bazaar: there may be everything under the sun for sale, but for the most part it's the same old shit. Chicken Caesar Salad. Wasabi mashed potatoes.

Experimental cuisine, from what little I know of it, seems to fall into two general categories.

The first is a mode of avant-garde cooking whose essential gambit is to alter food's basic form. Foams, chemically- forged tubes and unguents, aspics-- a new vocabulary of unexpected shapes, temperatures, and textures. Dishes come in forms never before witnessed: transparent meats; noodles made from fresh pea shoots; savory vegetables frozen into sorbets.

It's something, at least. It's certainly recherché. But I wonder about the extent to which the flavors remain devoted to a more or less classical sense of order. Things certainly look astounding: it's Cézanne; it's Braque, it's Picasso. But they still taste pretty.

The other mode is to invoke the foreign, the "acquired taste." Introduce the street cooking of Bejing, or the traditional diet of the Brazilian rainforest, and you've got a whole new palette of flavors that might challenge or even shock. This is precisely what the former category tends to leave under-explored.

The result is an experimentation on the very level of prettiness. The flavor of dried shrimp, or of fish sauce, ginko, abalone, lotus root: these are dark, peculiar tastes that might disturb the sensibilities of the classically Westernized palette. The acrid wince of rot, for instance, might be expected in a Roquefort or Camembert. But in a preserved fish? In pickled mustard greens?

There's an intrinsic limitation, however, to this mode of exploration. Each of these flavors derives from a specific geographic source. They're all native to a place far enough away for their unfamiliarity to register as a breach in expectation.

To put it otherwise: it's a kind of exoticism, or even primitivism.

In terms of culinary experimentation, we're still playing around like it's 1912. Our experiments generally either take place on the level of pure form, or else they derive their challenge to our notions of taste and pleasure from "foreign" places.

Is there an alternative? How about this: to what extent might it be worthwhile to consider the possibility of experimenting with the limits of taste itself? Not by rooting around for strange, odd, and funky flavors from other cultures. But by exploring possibilities already lurking within the sphere of culinary production we currently inhabit. What are our taboos? What are our limits?

I tip my hat to the Vosges chocolate company for becoming the first commercial venture I know of to experiment with flavor in such a way (Their site: http://www.vosgeschocolate.com). As a gastronomic chocolatier, this company doesn't tread lightly in its pursuit of intense but succulent flavors. Of course, a number of their "gourmet bars" fall into the orientalist/primitivist category: spice-trade derived combinations of spices, nuts, berries, etc.

But they've been traversing an even narrower path as well: not only do a number of their products feature salted chocolate (hardly a surprise in Mexican cooking, where sweet fruits, salt, and chili are a natural combination), but two more pronouncedly unusual combinations appear in their catalogue as well. The first: white chocolate with kalamata olives. Seriously! And the second, perhaps even more intriguingly: milk chocolate with bacon.

Milk chocolate with bacon! Sacrilege! Why, it's more shocking than having my chocolate bar fall into your peanut butter!

I remain mildly suspicious of whether such combinations merely sound startling in name whereas, in their actual flavor, they're reasonably tame. We've seems plenty of sweet/salty combinations before. Peanut M&Ms. Sugar-coated bacon. Sweet n' sour chicken.

But it's an intriguing start. And it suggests a direction worthy of further pursuit. Indeed, might it be possible to invent flavor combinations that really do challenge the very basis of our tastes? And wouldn't such challenges contribute to the very pleasure of eating itself-- or rather the excitement, the bliss, the jouissance of eating?

I'm eager for suggestions.

Here are a few, but they are only illustrations. I don't wish to think of them, even for a second, as attempts to find a static formula; I think this would spoil the idea. For the key seems, in my mind, to confront the expectations (to confront, I should emphasize; not to confound) implicit within any specific dining situation. Thus:

1) to experiment with the flavor of burnt things. Imagine an ice cream that tasted burnt. This, more than anything, could easily become an acquired taste.

2) Sulphur. We might tolerate it in an egg salad. What about in a pasta dish? We prize truffles for their earthiness-- an earthiness, moreover, that lingers almost oppressively on the tongue. To what extent might a sulphurous flavor take on similar properties?

3) Perhaps a misplaced fishiness. Everyone love salmon, it seems. But it's a surprisingly fatty, strongly flavored fish. Just as turkey, America's holiday meat, is remarkable in its gaminess. What would a chicken pot pie made with fish stock taste like? What kinds of challenges for the palette might fishy poultry induce? After all, oyster stuffing is a classic forcemeat for turkey. So we might not be all that far off.

Or are we? How far off might such a path take us?