If I’m honest then food and technology are the two things I like most. Art and literature appear some way down the list. Here, then, is a cookbook that shouts at me to come and read it.
Blumenthal sees science as essential to his method of developing new recipes and sees the kitchen as having more in common with a chemistry lab than an artist’s studio. It’s easy to misunderstand that and think that he could be producing flat, uninteresting, over-processed artificial food. Science in food has a pretty poor record, after all.
As in agriculture, it’s rare to hear of science being employed to increase quality at the expense of yield. Enormous uniform vegetables with no flavour and dosed-up animals being reared to killing weight as quickly as possible spring to mind much faster when we think of food scientists, but here is experiment and understanding of the science of perception leading to new experiences and intensity of taste.
‘Some people find the idea of using advanced technology in the kitchen offputting and somehow soulless, but for me the reverse is true. High-tech equipment allows me to pursue my instincts further and faster and better than would otherwise be possible. Far from supplanting the chef’s imagination, technology liberates it, opening up the molecular world that is the heart of cooking, as it is the heart of all matter.’
There’s a prejudice against science, and that leads to a lot of myth and superstition in our lives that we don’t acknowledge. Martin Jones’ Feast, which I read earlier this year, had a fascinating passage in it about how tribes of monkey will eat a certain subset of the edible foods in their area, shunning the others even when they’re going hungry. Other tribes in the same area will eat another subset, happily eating some things that their opposite numbers would be disgusted by.
We’re the same. There are groups of foods that go together according to our tribe’s rules, and we tend not to go outside that. We wrinkle our noses and look puzzled. Heston Blumenthal leaves that behind and looks at food as a mix of textures, smells, tastes and reactions.
The result is this collection of eight recipes for dishes we’ve all eaten before, re-analysed using a selection of laboratory equipment, re-examined from a historical perspective and re-engineered by Blumenthal’s team of experimental cooks.
The home cook is referred to throughout the text but this isn’t really a book that will be widely cooked from. Few of the methods take less than ten hours and all of them require special equipment. Nothing here can be knocked up when you get home from work or thrown together from whatever you’ve got in the fridge.
Here is not so much an ability to make some new dishes as a greater understanding of the materials and context of our food presented in an accessible format. The writing’s engaging and reflects an obviously deeply-felt enthusiasm for food and cooking. The characters encountered are deftly described (one eager young butcher, we’re told, ‘takes the stairs three at a time’) and the physical processes of the cooking are vividly recalled.
I wish I could tell you that not only are these dishes systematically developed but also delicious, but I have neither made them or eaten at the Fat Duck, Blumenthal’s restaurant. Oddly enough, no one wanted experimental chicken tikka masala for Christmas lunch. Give me a few months and I’ll see what I can come up with.
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