It’s the Ingredients, Stupid
In recent years, I’ve had the opportunity to judge a few Iron Chef–style competitions, and I’ve realized something about myself. I don’t like fancy food. When the entrée arrives in a gravity-defying tower that topples at the first tentative touch of my fork, you’ve lost me. When tweezers were employed in the assembling of the dish, I get the heebie-jeebies. When dinner is a guessing game to determine exactly what one is eating, the fun is gone. There are two distinct traditions running through gastronomy, and I am securely in one camp.
One tradition can be traced to Antonin Carême, France’s “King of Chefs and Chef of Kings.” Carême, the father of haute cuisine, cooked for royalty and the richest of the rich in early nineteenth-century France. He specialized in cakes modeled after pyramids or other ancient architectural feats, and unbelievably complex recipes that took days to prepare. A typical ingredients list: 20 vol-au-vent cases, the diameter of a glass, 20 cocks-combs, 20 cocks-stones (testes), 10 lambs sweetbreads (thymus and pancreatic glands, washed in water for five hours, until the liquid runs clear), 10 small truffles, pared, chopped, boiled in consommé, 20 tiny mushrooms, 20 lobster tails, 4 fine whole lambs’ brains, boiled and chopped, 1 French loaf, 2 spoonfuls chicken jelly, 2 spoonfuls veloute sauce, 1 tablespoon chopped parsley, 2 tablespoons chopped mushrooms, 4 egg yolks, 2 chickens, boned, 2 calves’ udders, 2 pints cream, sauce Allemande, salt, and nutmeg.
Today, the heirs to Carême’s throne are the molecular gastronomists with their dehydrated black-currant foam and liquid ginger spheres. This is dinner theater, chef as performer, whipping up paradoxical concoctions designed to awe. The focus is on the chef, and people will pay obscene amounts of money for the privilege of eating foods designed by the master (if rarely cooked by him).
I have no interest in this food. But when a beautifully fragrant pear or a bowl of Rhode Island razor clams is set before me, I get crazy happy. This is the ingredients-forward tradition of Alice Waters and Peter Hoffman and generations of good home cooks before them. The cook’s role is still vital, to be sure, but the goal is to let the nature of the beast (or beet) shine through. To me, that’s where the real enlightenment lies, and that’s the focus here.
Why are the onions in Vidalia County so sweet? Why are Ossabaw Island hams so rich? We are only beginning the process of learning what works best where. Might apples be better in the Yakima desert than in New England? Might wine be better in cool San Benito County than in hot Napa Valley? The frontier is wide open, and I look forward to exploring it and hearing the latest dispatches.
Certain motifs run through the terroir terrain. Mountains pop up again and again. Many foods, across all sorts of categories, seem to develop a particular intensity when raised in the rarified air of the highlands or otherwise stressed. Slowness is another recurring theme. It’s almost as if goodness can only accumulate so fast in a thing, no matter the production tricks. Which explains the steady tension between quality and quantity: artisans constantly battle the siren song of higher yield. On a lighter note, yeast plays a role in creating many foods and drinks. Gourmets are to yeast as remoras are to sharks: just happy to be along for the ride. Sex rears its head with regularity, because most of our calories come from “repurposing” other organisms’ reproductive energy. The realms of food and sex have been blurred on this planet for millions of years. Just ask a flower.
Ultimately, these threads point to some commonality between plants and animals we tend to think of as being utterly unalike. I used to get annoyed by wine writers who would describe a wine flavor as, say, “raspberry,” until I learned enough chemistry to realize that it really is the same compound. We tend to think of each type of fruit, vegetable, animal, or fungus as being completely unique, but DNA is DNA. Not matter how far removed we are from our common microbial ancestors, we all face similar challenges. We’re all working from the same pool of materials. Nature has only so many aroma molecules in her bag of tricks, only so many ways of combining carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen atoms, so if a cheese smells fishy, some dairy protein has been broken down into the same molecule that turns up in fish protein. Berries, apples, and maple leaves all independently discovered the same compound to turn themselves red. A wine can taste appley when it’s full of malic acid, the tart acid found in apples, and creamy when this acid transforms into lactic acid, the dominant acid in milk. The same essence is found in Yirgacheffe coffee, Darjeeling tea, and Chanel #5. It’s not a metaphor; it’s the deep structure of life.
Excerpted from American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of our Woods, Waters, and Fields, Bloomsbury USA, 2010. Reprinted by permission.
[1] In the name of sanity, I limit my range to North America, and use “American” to refer to the whole continent, not just red-white-and-blue Yankees. Admittedly, in my coffee chapter I creep down to Central America, but officially that isthmus gets lumped with North America anyway.
[2] Famously, France has no equivalent for our term “winemaker.” A vigneron is more a wine-grower; the wine is not made so much as coaxed into existence.
[3] And not just wine. As you’ll see in my chapter on maple syrup, for example, the lightest, most ethereal syrups—the ones with less flavor—were always the favorites of Vermont farm families.
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