Category Archives: Art and Food

When a Chef Becomes an Artist

15 Thursday Nov 2018

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imageJust as Van Gogh revealed the secrets of the landscapes near Arles in his paintings of Southern France, culinary artists reveal hidden dimensions of ingredients and dishes, dimensions that previous cooks overlooked that create a new way for that dish or ingredient to be. The idea is not merely to create a fantastic concoction or to add a new flavor note to a dish. It is to capture the essence of something that has hitherto gone unnoticed and to impress upon the diner that there is something here to be explored and understood. Unlike craftwork, art works reveal some new treasure that solicits our attention and demands the kind of studied focus we give to the visual arts or music. A chef who has mastered the craft of cooking will prepare food that squeezes every bit of flavor from her ingredients. The chef who is an artist will challenge a diner and provoke a revelation that will be arresting, illuminating—and ultimately pleasurable.

salmon-and-rhubarb-editWorks of culinary art, it should go without saying, must be pleasurable as well as revelatory. Pleasure is the seducer that makes knowing the secret worth our efforts. But the chef’s intense focus on giving pleasure is not peculiar to the edible arts. Music or painting that is flat and inexpressive will fail as art as surely as a watery, under-seasoned bisque. We would not be discussing Van Gogh today were it not for his voluptuous brush work and color palette.

Thus genuine culinary art creates something in addition to pleasure—a revelation that not only tastes good but is arresting and illuminating.

Even relatively simple dishes can be revelatory such as Rod Butters’ Grilled & Smoked Pacific Salmon with rhubarb broth, and rhubarb jam from Raudz in Kelowna BC that revealed rhubarb’s affinity for smoke, or Chef Massimiliano Alajmo’s Risotto with Saffron and Sorbet of licorice and rosemary from Le Calandre near Padua, Italy  that brought out the licorice note in the saffron.

saffron-risotto-with-licorice editFor more on the philosophy of food and wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

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A Bad Argument for Why Food Cannot Be Art

01 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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line cookThere are some serious although mistaken arguments for why some food preparations cannot be works of art. Then there are some really bad arguments for the same conclusion. Here is a really bad one by John Mariani which I rediscovered while going through some notes.

Thus, imagination and creativity go into cooking, often at a very high level, at which point it is called haute cuisine. But there is nothing that rises to the level of true art in a craft whose very existence depends on the constant replication of a dish, night after night, week after week. The replication of a series of stencils, even if originally designed by Raphael, does not constitute art, and I’m sure Andy Warhol was mumbling all the way to the bank when his work went from reproducing Brillo boxes to having assistants mimic his own work.

The claim that individual dishes are reproductions and thus cannot be original works is simple nonsense. Mariani apparently has never heard of a recipe. He is right about paintings.  Copies of paintings are indeed mere reproductions, not original works. A print of the Mona Lisa is not a work of art because painting is what we call in aesthetics  an autographic art—only the painter can directly cause the work to exist, and there can be only one legitimate instance of it.  Passing off a copy as an original is forgery.

But many arts are not autographic but are instead allographic. An allographic work has a master recording, score or some other form of notation from which individual works are derived. Thus, for allographic works, copies of an original are genuine instances of the original. My copy of Hamlet is a work of art even though it is a duplication of the original. The bookstore is not routinely guilty of selling forgeries. A streaming version of a Springsteen tune or live performances of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony are genuine instances of works of art despite the fact they are reproductions.

Cooking is similarly allographic. Individual dishes are instances of a recipe just as a performance of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony is an instance of its score. So the fact that line cooks churn out 25 copies of a dish in no way shows that cooking is not an art–unless Mariani is prepared to claim Beethoven and Shakespeare are mere craftsmen.

For more on the philosophy of food and wine visit my Monday Column archives on Three Quarks Daily

Wine Review: Ser Winery Graciano John Smith Vineyard San Benito County 2015

09 Tuesday Oct 2018

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ser gracianoNatural wine has a (for the most part undeserved) reputation for being funky or rough, but Ser Winery’s whole lineup is as polished  as a river stone. Nicole Walsh makes about 1000 cases of low intervention wines using fruit from vineyards in and around Santa Cruz and the Cienega Valley. (She also helped develop and continues to manage Randall Grahm’s Popelouchum Vineyard). Like most winemakers associated with the natural wine movement, she uses native yeasts, neutral oak and minimal sulfur to make wines that express the character of the varietal, vineyard and vintage. The result, in Ser’s case, is wines of sophistication and refinement.

Graciano is a relatively rare grape in California. It hails from Spain where it is used in Rioja as a blending partner for Tempranillo to add structure and aromatics. It was a real treat to find it as a varietal wine at Ser where it is blended with 3% Tempranillo.

It’s beautifully crafted with pretty aromas of blueberry, threaded with violets against background hints of candied fruit and earth. On the palate, juicy fruit is accented by a spiced, wood note gracefully balanced by a seam of vibrant acidity that persists from prelude to finish. Glossy and caressing with refined tannins, there is a leisurely upward motion as the wine glides toward its mouthwatering finish.

Concise, confident, yet tender with a languid ease like Norah Jones’ Don’t Know Why

Technical Notes: From mountain vineyards, mostly dry farmed, 5-6 day cold soak, 6 day maceration after fermentation, aged in neutral French oak puncheons for 18 months.

Score: 91

Price: $32 (Purchase Here)

Alc: 14%

Tension in the Art of Cooking

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Art and Food, General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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edible artThe art of cooking is peculiar. Cooking, because it supplies us with energy and  nutrition, must fit into the rhythms of daily life. It is constrained by practicalities of all sorts—money, time, personal preferences–that limit what can be done. Within those constraints of course there is ample opportunity for a cook to be creative by playing with ingredients, modifying recipes or trying new techniques all with the aim of making the food taste good.

But that’s not art; that’s life.

Art, by contrast, is the realm of consciously-developed form. Edible art, like any type of art, must have meaning, emotional resonance, and distinctive pattern. To make edible art it is not enough that the food taste good. The flavors must be organized into patterns that allow us to mentally grasp the work and understand it. Art isn’t the realm of pure freedom where creativity goes on a wild bender. Creativity is constrained by the demands or form just as for a novelist an elaborate, subtle plot limits the way characters can be developed.

So for the artistic chef, cooking is not just a matter of making food taste good but of giving the food significant form by displaying flavors in meaningful patterns that provoke a reaction. Art occupies the tensive border between ordinary life and something that transcends the ordinary, and if cooking is an art it too must embody that tension.

I think that is a challenge for cooks or chefs who are accustomed to providing only comfort.

Pépin on the Art of Food

04 Wednesday May 2016

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A few weeks ago when explaining why winemaking is sometimes more like an art than a craft, I made a distinction between objects that are created from a preconceived plan vs. those that take on a life of their own as they are being created. Unlike a craftsman who works from a preconceived plan, an artist typically has only a vague idea of what the final product will look or sound like and she is using skill to explore and discover how the work should develop. The end only emerges in the process and often surprises the artist.

Famed chef Jacques Pépin makes a similar point about cooking:

When writing a recipe, one records a moment in time which can never be duplicated exactly again. The paradox is that the recipe tells the reader, this must be done this way, when, in fact, to get the result you’re looking for, the recipe has to be modified each time.

The exact reproduction of a taste, which is what the making of a dish is, only works when the processes, timing, and ingredients are adjusted and changed to fit each particular situation.

Pépin is talking about the execution of a dish rather than its conception. But it is an interesting point  nevertheless—the chef has to be constantly adapting to circumstances and the proper execution of a dish is not about strict adherence to a recipe but making modifications on the fly much like a jazz musician improvising around a theme.

Shameless Self-Promotion

28 Monday Mar 2016

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micSeveral media appearances devoted to American Foodie have recently gone live:

The food culture website I8tonite has a front page feature article with photos, a recipe and interview questions.

News site examiner.com published a very nice review of the book last week.

The Pittsburgh-based food show “On the Menu” has posted the podcast of their interview with me. Here is the podcast of my portion of the show.

And Marilu Henner (yes that Marilu Henner from the TV show Taxi) interviewed me for her syndicated radio show. The podcast of my segment is below.

 

The Year of Weird Ingredients

16 Wednesday Mar 2016

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weird foodAnneli Rufus has decided this is the year of weird ingredients.

Based on what I’ve seen these last few weeks at the Fancy Food Show, Good Food Awards Mercantile and Food Fete in San Francisco, plus what this city’s trendy restaurants are serving, food-makers are battling it out to see who can use the most obscure, incongruous, virtuous, freaky and/or allegedly life-saving components. I’ve seen Oreo Cookie-flavored popcorn. Coffee-leaf tea. Sriracha-brined salmon. Calendula-flower kraut. Energy bars made from spent beer grain. Toasted, sugar-coated, chile-lime and chocolate-covered mealworms (“farmed and raised with a natural diet of bran and carrots,” reads the maker’s website). Not one but two brands of chips made from ground-up crickets. Ghost-pepper chocolate. Seawater beer.

Mmmm. Cricket chips. She then asks several pertinent questions:

Is hot-cocoa mix containing “wildcrafted shilajit” — aka mineral pitch, which I have also tried — a pinnacle? Or is it desperation, difference for the sake of difference in a jaded, I’ve-tried-everything-already world?

I vote for desperation.

Regarding the “grilled-bone gelée, Dungeness crabshell gelée or duck-liver toffee crowned with bubbly foam” served at top San Francisco restaurants, she asks:

Is the new übermensch he or she who can speak of such foods straight-faced afterwards without a trace of shock?

No. That is a bit of a come down for übermenschen I would think, who are after all charged with standing athwart history resisting the tide of nihilism. (Is Hillary Clinton an übermensch?)

And then we get to the real pressing question:

…are culinary arts at last on par with painting, theater and dance, attaining unprecedented subjectivity? If so, is mealworm candy the equivalent of butoh?

I think the answer is yes, finally. The U.S. took flavor for granted for so long. Now that we’ve discovered how fascinatingly rich the world of flavor is, we are like the proverbial kid in the candy store shoving anything into our mouths we can imagine.

But there is one difference between the art world and the food world. The art world has had several centuries to make decisions about what counts as a good painting or masterful work of literature. The art world may seem chaotic, and indeed artists wildly experiment with new forms that seem bizarre to the uninitiated. But art movements come and go, the bad stuff is eventually ignored, the old masterpieces continue to inspire us for good reason,  the works that survive eventually yield standards of judgment that we use to bring some order to the process of canon formation.

The food world has yet to develop those standards. But I suspect we will in time. In any case, the rampant experimentation is better than the conventional orthodoxies that used to characterize fine dining in the U.S.

That is a world well lost.

The Taste of Umami

07 Monday Mar 2016

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umami-ingredientsUmami is a mysterious taste. Discovered by a Japanese chemist in 1908, it took Western scientists decades to confirm it is indeed a basic taste. And although it has been enhancing our food experiences for centuries, focused attention is necessary in order to discover its distinctive character. I explore this fascinating flavor at Mindful Eating 2.