WHOSE TASTE MEMORY, DEAR CHEFS?

Photos by author from 2009 dinner at Saam inside The Bazaar, Los Angeles.

Top: Jose Andres's reinterpretation of a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich.

Center: Andres's homage to Chef Adria, the "Olives Ferran Adria."

Bottom: Andres's reinterpretation of a Buffalo Wing (boneless).

In The New Yorker's latest food issue (23 November 2009), Chef Heston Blumenthal contributed a piece about a taste memory from his childhood experiences of a certain duck a l'orange. He remembers having it when his parents, on rare occasions, took the family out to eat at a "pub-restaurant with flock wallpaper, mock-Regency furniture, and a menu full of exotic-sounding international classics...." Though by his own standards now, he admits, he would not consider the dish much good, he savored the memory of this duck because it was tied to strong feelings about the specialness of the family outings, and the theatricality of the food's presentation, at an impressionable age. He went on to address the phenomenon of taste memory more generally, stating, "I am convinced that the foods we find most delicious are the ones that trigger memories and associations."

Chef Blumenthal's musings about taste memories--those remembrances of things past triggered by particular foods like the Proustian madeleine--have plenty of company among the chefs associated with the cutting edge of so-called molecular cuisine. Ferran Adria, Jose Andres, Grant Achatz, Homaro Cantu, Wylie Dufresne, and Will Goldfarb have, to varying degrees, described certain of their dishes as designed, albeit through surprising new forms, to evoke deep-seated memories. Adria, Blumenthal, and Achatz have been the most explicit and in-depth in their discussions of their food in terms of conjuring aromas and flavors tied to significant memories and emotions.

These chefs are right on the mark in understanding that food is a powerful memory trigger. But, if a chef considers memory their culinary tool, they must be pressed further to examine what they're doing. On whose memories is one playing? One's own? The diners'? In interviews or in essays in their cookbooks, some chefs tend to conflate the two, eliding explanations of their own inspirations for particular dishes and suggestions that they are evoking similar memories in their diners. To what extent do chefs expect memories drawn from their own pasts to be shared by their diners?

I am becoming convinced, as I read The Fat Duck Cookbook, that much of Chef Blumenthal's inspiration from the dime-store candies of his British childhood might be lost on this American diner. And I would like to ask him: would it matter? How important, really, is the conjuring of that taste memory in the diner to his culinary artistry? If chefs are indeed serious about using memory as their tool, then greater consideration of the cultural backgrounds of their diners would be in order. But would such consideration even be feasible, or desirable, after all? Must cuisine be turned into an inexact branch of social science?

If, on the other hand, it is not important for chefs to evoke particular memories in their diners, then perhaps the discourse on taste memory should be clarified. The talk of taste memory functions best as an autobiographical account of the chef's own creative inspiration, but is, frankly, hit-or-miss as culinary communication with diners. For every diner brought to tears by the aroma of charred chestnuts, there are hundreds enjoying the same dish for other reasons.

Chefs, what are your intentions concerning taste memory? Unless we diners share your cultural experiences--your regions' native olives, your grandmothers' pot roast, that gussied-up duck a l'orange--we can't eat your pasts.

Copyright Alison Pearlman 2009. All rights reserved.

"BAD" CITIZEN

Photo above: from ideasinfood.typepad.com on 1 November 2009. Photo below: a detail of Elizabeth Falkner's entry in the Food Network Challenge, "Haunted Gingerbread Houses," aired 31 October 2009, from yidio.com/show/food-network-challenge.

Every year, the holiday season is stuffed with "Food Network Challenge" TV shows featuring pastry- and sugar-sculpture battles. Right on cue, the Network launched this Halloween what will inevitably be a cascade of confectionary monument competitions revolving around holiday themes. Because these shows mostly annoy me, I find them aesthetically clarifying. They remind me where I stand in judgments of the good and bad in art.

Consistently, the pastry and sugar monuments are judged, and therefore produced, according to criteria that, when worshipped for their own sake, I believe are alien to good art: difficulty of technique and adherence to rules that have no artistic relevance outside of the artificial world of the contest. While difficulty of technique can make me swoon, it does so only when the craftsmanship has a worthy end. I would go further. To move me, the worthy end has to seem greater than the difficulty of technique used to get there. Good art, I believe, involves economy of means relative to ends. Some ends require labor-intensive and precise, hard-to-master, technique. Some do not.

But Food TV's confectionary sculpture competitions distort the purpose of artistic means. The criteria of difficulty and observance of arbitrary rules hold the one other criterion in these competitions, the one legitimate one--interpretation of theme--hostage. In a different scenario, calls to interpret a theme might encourage imaginative solutions. But, in these contests, they are a beacon to technical virtuoso for its own sake and clever fulfillments of game artifice. Often, the contests require height minimums and specify, among other things, how many parts can be made before the day of the contest. Such rules exist not because they make any aesthetic or conceptual sense, but because they help television drama. They create suspense when contestants have to carry barely finished, structurally questionable monuments to the display tables--gasp!--without shattering shards of sugar.

The contest criteria favor a narrow spectrum of labor-intensive naturalism, rather than aesthetically economical yet conceptually sound works. Examples of the former usually win.

Enter Elizabeth Falkner, the renowned pastry chef and founder of Citizen Cake in San Francisco. I am convinced that she came to the Halloween Food Network Challenge featuring "Haunted Gingerbread Houses" with entirely different goals from those of the other equally renowned contestants. Without her explicitly saying so, it became clear from her gingerbread anti-monument that her challenge was not to the other contestants but to the Food Network Challenge itself, to its artistically fallacious criteria.

Her creation (a detail of which is pictured above) was, in every sense, punk. It wasn't just punky in style, though it was. It did what punk perennially does. It challenged the contest's fetish for technique for its own sake. It offered something that looked sloppy and awkward by the others' standards--but for valid conceptual reasons. Her haunted gingerbread house really was the scariest--and not in the faux Halloweeny sense. Creating a series of barricaded spaces that resembled homeless shelters required the viewer to get up close to the spaces. Metaphorically, they had to cross a "scary" class barrier that I have never seen addressed in the bourgeois context of Food Network shows. You had to get up close also to reap the rewards of color and interest inside the various crevices. This structure reversed and therefore challenged the contest sculptures' norms of point of view and viewer-to-work relationships. To glimpse inside the crevices were cornucopically colorful "stalactites" and "stalagmites" and other intriguing post-apocalyptic goodies. Falkner's work displayed conceptually purposeful use of aesthetics. Her piece showed wit and innovation.

From start to finish, the judges didn't know what to do with it. They kept circling her work station and making snide comments. They were only occasionally honest about their confusion. Where was the skill displayed in her punky pastry smears, her gang-graffiti-esque signs, her irregular stalactites? Falkner must have known the judges couldn't evaluate her work using their criteria. Surely, she was making a statement about the creative limitations of their pastry game.

What is fascinating is that it never occurred to the judges--or couldn't have, given the pressures of television shows--that she was challenging them. But how could a pastry chef as accomplished as she not have been purposefully stomping on the grounds of their judgment? The consistency with which she deployed techniques that had conceptual rigor--and aesthetic economy--but would not be considered technically difficult was a dead giveaway!

Perhaps for many people watching this episode, it was just a blip on the TV screen, a slight disturbance to the otherwise undisturbed Food Network Challenge criteria, which march on in sweet oblivion. For me, Falkner's intervention represents the kind of epic moment that often gets swept aside in order to continue business as usual. Whatever cognitive dissonance it offered to the judges and viewers was quickly denied in the distraction of celebrating the marvel of realism that actually won first prize.

Students of the historical avant-garde in art, however, are familiar with such interventions, and know that, if more artists begin to disturb the same rules, the whole irrelevant gingerbread establishment might finally come crumbling down. And that is why people like Elizabeth Falkner may be said to do "bad" work in the very best way.

Copyright 2009 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

BURGER BROW

Photos: Chef Hubert Keller's Burger Bar, Mandalay Bay Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas. By author, August 2009.

In our era of gourmet-burgermania--when almost every restaurant boasts a specialty hamburger with high-grade ingredients, stylish presentations, or ultra-fresh in-house meat grinding--what is the difference between one such "upscale" hamburger served at a casual-dining restaurant and one at a fine-dining establishment?

Price, you think? Think again. The sixty-dollar burger pictured above is on the menu of Hubert Keller's sports-bar-like Burger Bar in Vegas, which--with the omnipresence of TV monitors, rolling luggage, and openness to the casino hallway--has all the rarified atmosphere of an airport pit stop.

The ingredients, you say? Not necessarily. Both Umami Burger (in Los Angeles) and Burger Bar, typical of today's casual places with a high-style burger option, feature burgers with truffles. Burger Bar's sixty-dollar special then adds foie gras to that. And, as you can see from the photos showing this burger's accompaniments--the sauce perigourdine, salt, and pepper in a side tray--care in presentation isn't a key distinction, either.

Perhaps context is the definitive difference. Would the sixty-dollar burger at Burger Bar be a class-elevating experience, for example, while the same burger at Michael Mina's XIV in Los Angeles, in the fine-dining category, would be a "comforting" one? Possibly. That is, if the customer believes strongly in the highbrow/lowbrow distinction between the likes of Burger Bar and XIV. Such a person, however, would be clinging to a fading past.

While high/low distinctions between casual and fine dining do still exist, in recent decades the lines between them have gotten a lot blurrier. Fine-dining restaurants incorporate increasingly casual architectural elements, service, and menu items and casual restaurants take menu cues from the fine-dining world.

The hamburger is one of those items closest to the brow-blurring line. To some extent, this is the hamburger's fault. An iconic yet versatile food, it can be dressed up, with truffles, or down, with lettuce and tomato, for the occasion, and still retain all of its force as a pop-cultural symbol. As long as the burger is anchored to the symbolic machinery of nostalgia and physically acts as a blank canvas for class signifiers, it can thrive where brow lines are most blurry.

At the point of breakdown between highbrow and lowbrow, "burger brow" may be likened to a contemporary condition that cultural critic John Seabrook has called "nobrow." In the world of nobrow, vertical distinctions of high versus low are superseded by status markers based on what's hot, what's buzzing. Media-driven topicality, novelty, fashion--these drive the status of things more than class-based distinctions. In his book Nobrow (2001), Seabrook mostly addressed music and clothing, but his idea could just as easily be applied to food.

In this light, what gives a burger its brow status is not so much whether or not it is adorned with truffles and foie gras and the like or made with Kobe beef, but rather the novelty and mixed-brow chic of such ingredients on a burger in a sports bar ventured by Hubert Keller, a Michelin-starred fine-dining chef. In burger-brow terms, that sizzles.

Copyright 2009. Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

"COMFORT FOOD" CONFRONTED (FINALLY)

Photo: Mac and cheese at Otom restaurant, Chicago. By author, December 2008.

What, exactly, is comfort food? We hear the term "comfort food" bandied about with increasing frequency. There are now restaurants, such as Citizen Smith and Boho in Los Angeles, defining their food genre as "comfort food" or "modern comfort food," and Food Network cooking-show hosts have been liberally using the term to describe an expanding roster of recipes. I think it's time to ask what people really mean by it and why it has lately gained such currency.

Can we say which are and which aren't the comfort foods? The most obvious and ubiquitous examples out there--such as mac and cheese, chicken pot pie, meatloaf, hamburgers, fried chicken, pizza--do tend to have a family resemblance. They became standards of fast-casual chains or sold as icons of the family dinner table via mass-media advertising in the decades immediately following World War II. The list of these foods collapses home and fast-food-chain cooking just as their advertising did, by eliding the contradictory notions of modern convenience and traditional hearth. Home-cooked pop-cultural standards were laden with labor savers--instant mashed potatoes, ready-made mixes, and the like--by the growing chemical-industrial food complex. The fast-food chains enlisted advertising to sell the notion of home or family with their side of fries.

Isn't it ironic that the term "comfort food," meant to evoke the aura of home and hearth, the culinary equivalent of mother's bosom, has been conjured by its opposite? Our use of "comfort food" to designate postwar food Americana also suggests that what comforts us about these foods is their pop-cultural familiarity, not really their source of production.

As the term "comfort food" extended beyond this inner core of postwar standards to embrace the more and more ethnic and regional dishes--from Japanese ramens to Moroccan tagines--to enter the pop-cultural vernacular, what does and doesn't count as a comfort food has become difficult to say. Yet, I suggest, the term stays in circulation because its association with familiarity, familiality, and abundance is useful. It has increased circulation because that has become increasingly useful.

But why? What distinction is the term maintaining, and what rising tide is it invoked to defend against? If "comfort food" is on the rise, mustn't some sort of discomfort food be encroaching?

If we think about the pace at which a widening population of diners has been exposed to new trends and experimentalism generally in our chef-admiring era, perhaps we can understand the rise of comfort food as a reactionary response to those demands. The discomfort food is, like the historical avant-garde, challenging. It requires us to wake up and engage new ideas, to be conscious of what we're eating and about the definition of a meal. By contrast, comfort food, like much pop culture, is meant to go down easy. It demands nothing of us, aims only to please, and flatters mere recognition.

Copyright 2009 Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.

AN ART-RELATED COMMENT ON THE CRUEL-FOOD WARS

Top: "Foie Gras Black Croque-Monsieur, Ham, Cherry, Amaretto" at Ludo Bites @ Breadbar, 21 July 2009.

Chef: Ludovic Lefebvre.

DELICIOUS.

Bottom: Cover of The Foie Gras Wars: How a 5,000-Year-Old Delicacy Inspired the World's Fiercest Food Fight (2009).

Author: Mark Caro.

INTREPID AND BALANCED JOURNALISM. PROBING SOCIAL COMMENTARY ABOUT BOTH FAULTY SIDES OF "THE FOIE GRAS WARS."

Too often I have heard art invoked as a panacea for guilt about food. And too often I myself have wished it were so that, through artistic transmutation of actual animals into spectacular victuals, culture's inoculation against the pains of nature, we humans were paying respect to the creatures who died for our dinner. How many times has Anthony Bourdain mentioned such "respect" for the many pigs whose crackling glazed skins he has made his personal Eucharist? I would like to comfort myself with the idea that the animal, in spirit, is presiding over my table like a hovering food critic, and taking offense if it, in the afterlife, has not been cooked skillfully or plated artfully.

But I doubt it. The more I ponder the issues raised by books including Mark Caro's The Foie Gras Wars, sympathetic to aspects of both sides of the debate regarding whether or not animals should die for our pleasure, and the more I continue to eat meat and delicacies that some might consider politically incorrect, the more I realize that the debate itself encompasses two persistent sides of our human nature. We kill to live. This is an unchanging fact. We also have empathy. We are born torn.

We are also born artistic, with the interest, as bioevolutionist Ellen Dissanayake has long insisted, in "making [events and subjects] special" through aesthetic manipulation. Perhaps this third aspect of our nature has been trying to reconcile the other two?

If so, I'm afraid it has fallen under the spell of another deeply human trait: wishful thinking. Artistry in food has only reproduced the same conflict between cruelty and and empathy in its spectrum of aesthetic extremes. One one end, we have naturalism (think: California-cuisine school from Chez Panisse through Lucques). On the other, we have extremes of refinement and manipulation (think: the El Bulli school). The former reminds us of our food's natural origins. The latter de-familarizes us from them.

This is too simple, of course. Both extremes, to some degree, contain the other. But the point stands. Food artistry is not a legitimate way to excuse our guilt. It is, however, a way of extending our contradictory nature. We are condemned to live with our cruelty and our empathy, and to repeat it all, in new forms, through our compulsion for art.

Copyright 2009. Alison Pearlman. All rights reserved.