Mollycules and Gastropods

H. has been out of commission this weekend with a stomach flu, but the kitchen has been busy all the same. For some reason— perhaps as a means of passing the time until the second shoe inevitably drops— the level of activity in our kitchen has intensified. Does flu strike in pairs? In threes?

H. has more of less recovered, thank goodness; she was fit enough this evening for a dinner of beef shanks braised in white wine and celery. But even as the shanks bubbled happily away in their pot, I noticed that the big blue Hubbard squash we'd picked up at a recent fair was starting to develop soft spots. It, too, was showing signs of disease.

Sadly, Old Hubbard would not be recovering quite as quickly as her human counterpart(s); to my knowledge there's no remedy for vegetable illness other than a swift execution. I decided to act fast.

The squash is now simmering away in chicken stock, on its way to becoming tomorrow's soup. I have a peck of tomatoes awaiting a similar fate: when their moment approaches, they will become a short batch of marinara sauce, destined for the freezer.

Two long-stewing dishes in one night, with a third in the wings. Hardly a feat, yet it has brought about a certain philosophical calm. Or, more precisely, a deadpan reflection on the nature of transformation.

Onward, then, to transformation. A recent New Yorker article — whose title escapes me — assesses the career of Grant Achatz, a Chicago chef who was diagnosed with tongue cancer after living for nearly a year with painful lesions similar to the blackened sores on my now- butchered Hubbard squash. Achatz's diseased tongue is strongly metaphorical, connoting far more than simply the vegetables decaying in my home kitchen. What makes the Achatz story truly remarkable is that his illness has transformed the chef's cancerous tongue into a metaphor for his own food as well.

Achatz has undergone numerous courses of chemotherapy and radiation in order to save his tongue, which is, of course, one of his principal professional assets. The procedures seem to be working (although the story closes inconclusively, in classic New Yorker fashion, so we never know for certain). Achatz is a living pharmakon; his tongue is the focus of myriad scientific procedures. The point of the article seems clear: the barrage of chemicals and techniques to which the chef's body has been subjected is uncannily similar to the battery of chemicals and procedures to which Achatz subjects his food.

Achatz, you see, is a practitioner of molecular gastronomy.

Now, it strikes me that the way one reacts to— or even describes— the phenomenon of molecular gastronomy serves as an instant determinant: call it a fad, and you're already a grumpy traditionalist shaking your fist at those fussy, foam-blowing gastropods and longing for a simple snack of pig's trotters and snouts, just like grandma used to make. Or, at least, just like they make 'em at your favorite Parisian brasserie. You know, where they really know how to make onion soup.

Call it "the future of cooking," however, and you're already entrenched in the other camp, lecturing to the infidels about the fact that the culinary arts were once on par with the world of science. Remember the good old days? Lavoisier! Rumford! Recall Brillat-Savarin, who wrote in The Physiology of Taste that

"Gastronomy is a part of: Natural history, by its classification of alimentary substances; Physics, because of the examination of the composition and quality of these substances; Chemistry, by the various analyses and catalyses to which it subjects them; Cookery, because of the art of adapting dishes and making them pleasant to the taste; Business, by the seeking out of methods of buying as cheaply as possible what is needed, and of selling most advantageously what can be produced for sale; Finally, political economy, because of the sources of revenue which gastronomy creates and the means of exchange which it establishes between nations."

"It rules," he concludes, "over our whole life."

In the interest of teetering on the brink of a disease without succumbing to it, I will suggest simply this: molecular gastronomy is a manner of food-production that treats its food and seeks to cure it.

For indeed, it might seem unfair to all parties to deem it mere cooking. As a science of transformation, it surpasses in degree what happens to a tough shank of beef, say, when you stew it for several hours in a savory broth. But does it surpass this in kind? Flatly, no. The history of gastronomy dictates otherwise: the science of gelatin was no paltry affair, after all.

So it's cooking, and, in the right hands, it's good cooking, too. Just look at the kinds of mollycules they serve up at a restaurant like Alinea. Scroll through the pictures and tell me those little morsels don't look delicious. This isn't just a matter of using food as the brute matter upon which to excercise a series of techniques; here, each concept seems to derive expressly from the ingredients themselves.

I say this, of course, with utterly no authority— since restaurants such as Alinea tend to be prohibitively expensive, and there are scandalously few culinary equivalents of the public art museum. Let's not forget to read those last lines of Brillat-Savarin: gastronomy, molecular or otherwise, is never far from political economy.

Perhaps I'm coming down with something after all. For I've run my feverish course through the basic concepts of the molecular gastropods, and all this without ever having the pleasure of their mollycules running through me.

So does this mean that I'm a fan? No: it just means that I would suggest that we recall the tendency of arts and sciences alike to benefit mutually from a salutary catholicism of taste. To claim that mollycules are the future of all cooking is a bit like suggesting that Futurism represented the future of all art. This is more than just foolish; it's dangerous. There are plenty of ways to experiment, and technological advancement is but one of them.

To consider molecular gastronomy as little more than a fad, however, seems no less troublesome. Imagine standing irrevocably by the claim that eggs should never be beaten or separated. In the case of livestock, or of children: yes, certainly. But to deny the "molecular" properties of egg proteins, and thus prohibit that a soufflé never come to pass, or that a meringue never take shape? Futurism, for all its political rants and affiliations, still referred to a kind of painting; and molecular gastronomy, for all its alembics and gases and fairy-dust powders, is no less a kind of cooking.

So in short, my point is this: I've done a lot of cooking this weekend. It wouldn't kill me to try out one of these molecular-gastronomy restaurants, now, would it? Certainly not. Especially if you pay for it.