Category Archives: Edible Art

Finally, a Win!

26 Thursday Jan 2017

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Bocuse d’Or the biennial culinary competition founded 30 yrs. ago by French chef Paul Bocuse is generally acknowledged to be the “olympics” of the world of cuisine. The United States generally finishes back in the pack although in 2015 we finished third.

Finally, yesterday, a team from the U.S. won the competition.

I promised Monsieur Paul 10 years ago that we’d make it to the top of the podium,” said the chef Thomas Keller, who is the president of Team U.S.A. “We made it in nine.”

The team’s head chef was Mathew Peters, 33, from Meadville, Pa., who was most recently the executive sous-chef of Mr. Keller’s New York restaurant, Per Se. His commis, or helper, was Harrison Turone, 21, from Omaha, who also worked at Per Se.

Both of the chefs took a year off to prepare for the contest, a fierce competition in which the American team is made up of younger chefs who can spare the time to train as well.

The task was to interpret Poulet de Bresse aux Écrevisses, essentially  braised chicken with crayfish sauce, and this year the teams were required to include a vegan dish.

The American version involved the chicken with morel mushroom sausage, braised wings, a wine glaze and sauce Américaine, a kind of lobster sauce. Alongside were a chicken liver quenelle with foie gras, corn custard, black-eyed peas and toasted pistachios, as well as lobster tail with Meyer lemon mousse. The garnishes included preparations using carrots, Vidalia onions, black truffles, carrots, peas and potatoes. They brought some of the ingredients from the United States.

For the vegan dish, the chefs prepared California asparagus with cremini mushrooms, potatoes, a custard made of green almonds, Meyer lemon confit, a Bordelaise sauce and a crumble using an almond and vegetable yeast preparation that mimicked Parmesan cheese.

The U.S has had a vibrant food culture for many years. This validates our progress. Congratulations to the team.

How long, if ever, will it take before French cooking is displaced as the standard of excellence?

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Is Haute Cuisine a False Prophet?

10 Wednesday Aug 2016

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innovative cuisineDaniel Duane’s story in the NY Times about haute cuisine in Silicon Valley identifies the central paradox of fine dining.

The fabulous, tech-driven wealth floating around the Bay Area drives chefs to produce increasingly elaborate, innovative food.

But this food is so expensive that most food lovers can’t afford it; and the people who can afford are more into IPO’s than heirloom tomatoes anyway.

Downmarket, where most food lovers reside,  the same expectation of innovative cooking doesn’t come with the same ability to charge exorbitant prices, and so mid-level restaurants struggle to survive and their poorly paid employees can’t afford to live within a reasonable commuting distance of their work.

As one restaurateur explained, “The food has never been better and the business climate has never been worse and so we are speeding toward a cliff.”

The community-forming dimension of the food revolution comes apart from the creative dimension and economics strangles art.

I’m not sure what the solution to this is. On the one hand, some of the expense of high end dining is stage setting and the trappings of luxury. As Duane writes:

Like any artisan whose trade depends upon expensive materials and endless work, every chef who plays that elite-level game must cultivate patrons. That means surrounding food with a choreographed theater of luxury in which every course requires a skilled server to set down fresh cutlery and then return with clean wine glasses. A midcareer professional sommelier then must fill those wine glasses and deliver a learned lecture about that next wine’s origin and flavor. Another person on a full-time salary with benefits must then set down art-piece ceramic plates that are perfectly selected to flatter the next two-mouthful course. Yet another midcareer professional must then explain the rare and expensive plants and proteins that have been combined through hours of time-consuming techniques to create the next exquisitely dense compression of value that each diner will devour in moments. Those empty plates and glasses must then be cleared to repeat this cycle again and again, hour after hour.

As enjoyable as all that fuss is, it is no doubt over-the-top and not really about flavor. Innovative food can be prepared without so much choreography but this is what their patrons demand.

On the other hand, innovative cuisine will always be expensive to produce. And because it must be consumed to be appreciated, unlike art, food cannot be preserved in venues for the ordinary public to enjoy.

But perhaps we’re thinking about edible art in the wrong way, in a way that is not really analogous to the art world. For all the rare, fantastically expensive art created by the masters that we find in art museums, there are countless modestly compensated artists, often nearly as skilled and creative as the masters, who toil in relative obscurity making art for their local community or their Internet community at some distance from the glitterati of the art world.

Genuine creativity and vision are not after all measured only by “wow factor”. Meaning often has a subtler appeal.

So perhaps Duane is right to point to Los Angeles as the new beacon of a genuine food culture:

Sang Yoon, the chef and owner of Lukshon in Culver City, sees it as a difference between hyper-glorification of the chef and the farm in Northern California and, in Los Angeles, celebration of middle-class immigrant culture. “Half the restaurants I go to, I don’t know who the chef is! It’s not so personality-driven,” he said. “In L.A., we can celebrate a cuisine and not rouge it up.

In contrast to the wealth driven luxury hounds of Silcon Valley, cooking for the middle class is more closely tied to culture, sustaining a cuisine that while innovative is less concerned with presentation. Perhaps we should look for creativity within the constraints of community not in tension with it.

Does Simplicity Have Aesthetic Value?

13 Wednesday Jul 2016

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

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malevich

Black Square by Malevich 1923

Does simplicity have aesthetic value? The dominant voices in the Western tradition of aesthetics praise complexity; finding unity in diversity is the hallmark of great art. Certainly in wine, complexity not simplicity is most admired. Legendary and high scoring wines all exhibit complex flavor profiles and extensive evolution on the palate. Simple wines might be enjoyable for dinner but seldom induce rapture.

But in food, simplicity seems to have its place. As the celebrated gastronome Curnonsky wrote, “Good cooking is when things taste of what they are”. Great chefs know when to simplify recipes to eliminate anything that might distract from an ingredient’s inherent flavor. Japanese aesthetics has long appreciated simplicity. And many minimalist works in painting, (Malevich or Rothko) or in music, ( Reich or Riley or the blues for that matter), rely on simplicity. Are these exceptions that prove the rule that complexity is fundamental to aesthetic value? Or is Western aesthetics missing something in its praise of the virtues of complexity?

It seems to me simplicity is often a tool through which an artist achieves unity and balance in a work. Thus simplicity has instrumental value. But is simplicity inherently aesthetically pleasing? Can it stand alone, not as instrument to achieve unity, but as something itself aesthetically pleasing?

I’m not sure. But if simplicity has inherent aesthetic value, it would disrupt current practices of wine tasting.

Stay tuned for more on this.

The Food Revolution Polish-Style

06 Wednesday Jul 2016

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

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PosterThe list of travel destinations in Europe is lengthy with locations such as Paris, Rome, and Athens  captivating generations of visitors. Wroclaw, Poland is probably not on everyone’s list of must-see places. It certainly wasn’t on mine when I received an invitation to attend a conference on food aesthetics at the University of Wroclaw.

Little did I know that Wroclaw (along with San Sebastian in Spain) had been designated European Capitals of Culture for 2016, so people are beginning to recognize its attractions and Wroclaw is in the middle of a robust campaign to become a tourist destination. It is a welcoming city with a vibrant culture that seamlessly melds old world charm with new world vigor. Highlights included  architecture that runs the gamut from gothic to art nouveau,wroclaw-architecture dragon boat races on the river, a midnight marathon race complete with oompah band to help cheer the runners on, fireworks that seem to go off randomly when someone has the notion, a market square (Rynek) jammed with restaurants, bars, and street vendors selling everything under the sun, with a salsa/Afro-Cuban band providing entertainment, an art museum housed in an air-raid shelter,art museum and gnomes that stare at you from every alleyway and street corner.gnome Joyful and quirky I think best describes Poland’s 4th largest city.

As tourism expands and the better known destinations become excessively crowded and expensive it’s worth looking at smaller cities that can offer authentic cultural experiences in a more relaxed atmosphere.

But of course the site of a conference on food aesthetics carries a special burden—access to good (and interesting) food. And on that score Wroclaw soars. The food revolution is alive and well here. Restaurants serving traditional pierogis and bigos share space with an eclectic mix of food from all over the world.  Breweries, wonderful bakeries, and trendy coffee and specialty food shops are plentiful. The fascination with flavor here appears to rival other food capitals of Europe in intensity if not in reputation.

Part of the conference was devoted to presentations of local food. As in many areas of the world, Polish foodies are actively trying to re-invigorate food traditions that were buried by the move to industrial agriculture in the 20th Century. As Anna Ruminska of Slow Food Dolny Slask explained, Poland has a rich tradition of foraging for wild, edible plants. But foraged food is looked down on as “poverty food” by mainstream culture, a relic of a sorrowful past. And so much of the energy of the food culture here is devoted to unearthing this endangered traditional knowledge and spreading it via workshops and seminars.  On Saturday night, Food Think Tank created an “installation” of edible wild foods, breads, and unusual local produce that served as an ample dinner for conference participants. Most of the products I had never heard of and had names I couldn’t pronounce, unique flavors that are testimony to the diversity of edible plant life specific to various regions of the world. installation

In Poland’s cold climate, fermentation has always been an important means of preserving food. Our final lunch together was a table full of foraged plants and fermented products (including local beer and fruit wines) put together by Anna Ruminska and our hosts at the University.

The conference attendees included philosophers and social scientists from several countries as well as artists from various regions in Poland who were using food as their artistic medium. It was a great opportunity to meet people who shared an interest in thinking about food as an art form. But if there was a theme that emerged from the many opportunities we had to taste the unique flavors of Lower Silesia it is that when we limit our consumption to what is sold at the grocery store our food lives are impoverished.

We are grateful to Professor Dorota Koczanowicz and her colleagues for hosting this wonderful, thought-provoking celebration of food and art.

San Sebastian: A Universe on the Bay of Biscay

27 Monday Jun 2016

Posted by in Contemporary Food Culture, Edible Art, Travel, Uncategorized

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San sebastianSan Sebastian is a small, picturesque city in Spain (pop. 186,000) situated on a bay that opens to the Atlantic Ocean within shouting distance of the French border. Despite its relatively small size it contains multitudes. San Sebastian is:

1. The center of Basque history and culture in Europe;

2. The home of pintxos, a type of tapas often served on a small skewer;

3. The primary location that cultivates and makes wine from the Hondarabbi grape;

4. A mini-Monte Carlo where Europe’s A-list celebs mix with a bohemian surfer culture;

5. And it features the 2nd most Michelin-starred restaurants (seven) per capita of any place in the world (trailing only Kyoto Japan).

Our two-day visit to this former fishing village felt like a whirlwind tour through millennia. Our first stop was Valle Salado (Salt Valley) a natural salt spring that was discovered 6500 years ago. The ancient people who lived here diverted the water from the spring into shallow pens. As the water evaporates high quality fleur de sel  is left behind. The salt content of the spring water is 30 times the salinity of ocean water.salt fields

This facility was abandoned 20 years ago when industrial salt production cornered the market. Today, a local non-profit has begun a restoration project and the salt fields are now both an archeological site (having recently achieved UNESCO site status) and a functioning artisanal salt producer with parts of the original facility now producing salt again. In fact several of the Michelin-starred restaurants in San Sebastian have their own salt pens here. The guided tour of the facility was a fascinating look back in time.

After Valle Salado we visited Txomin Etxaniz, a Txakoli winery nestled in the mountains overlooking the bay. Txakoli is a white wine made from the indigenous Hondarrabi Zuri and Hondarrabi Beltza grape varietals. I have occasionally come across these wines in the U.S. but they are almost always from Basque country, with some minor plantings in nearby Cantabria and Burgos. pouring txakoliIt is a simple, dry yet fruity white wine with distinct apple notes, marked high acidity, and some CO2 to give it spritz. The bubbles are enhanced when the wine is poured from a height of 3-4 feet above the glass as is typical in Basque country. It is wonderful with anchovies.

The vines are grown on steep hillsides in a very wet climate. Vintners do battle with the inevitable rot and mildew by trellising the vines with a system of tall poles that keep the grapes high above the ground. pergolaThe vines first grow straight up about seven feet in the air before being trained to follow a wire mesh between the rows creating a tunnel that funnels sea breezes through the grape bunches keeping moisture to a minimum. This is a variant of the Pergola system of trellising used in some regions of Northern Italy and Argentina.

San Sebastian is also famous for pintxos. Pintxos were originally tapas served on a small skewer or toothpick, but pintxos bars in San Sebastian now serve a full range of tapas taking advantage of their abundant seafood.village Our tour included a short ferry boat ride to the village of Cibure where we assembled at a charming rustic restaurant Ziaboga for our lesson in how to make pintxos from seafood freshly caught that morning. The chef and his staff guided us through the process of selecting and butchering fish and putting together the dishes to be served that day.

I spent the morning fileting tuna, slicing paper-thin servings of jamon and assembling one of their classic pintxos dishes, white anchovies gently cooked in warm garlic oil, and served on bread with a condiment made of alioli and tomato. meWe then were able to eat the fruits of our labor. My favorite was marinated shark, served on a slice of lime topped with a bit of wasabi.

This was an an abundant feast but I had to show some restraint because we were on our own for dinner and Lynn and I had reservations at Akelarre—a 3- star Michelin restaurant with stunning ocean views and serving tasting menus that update traditional Basque cooking. We chose the two menus dubbed “innovative” but each of the 8 courses  included a reference to traditional ingredients and preparations.

I didn’t take extensive notes on each dish—the conflict between being present and documentation is irresolvable for me—but here are a couple highlights.

aka 2The first dish was prawns flamed in a small, covered pot at the table that gave the seafood an exquisite, smoky flavor, especially when sucking on the head. The contrast of smoke and brine with the concentrated freshness of the beans gave this dish great intensity.

But for pure comforting enjoyment, aka 1squid cut to the size and shape of grains of rice, and briefly cooked “al dente” in a squid ink sauce ( and thus appearing as a “risotto”) topped with a flower of butter and parmesan cheese that melts into the dish, was the most satisfying.

Three-star Michelin restaurants are as much about presentation as flavor. aka 3This salad called “the leaves and foie under the rain” was the most impressive in appearance. That bottom leaf covering the plate is actually foie gras and the luscious dressing was an infusion of herbs with no oil or vinegar.

As I argued in American Foodie, if cuisine is to qualify as art it must be “about” something, making meaningful references to food traditions and the sensibility of a people while extending that sensibility in new directions.

Akelarre succeeds on that score. Chef Pedro Subijana’s cuisine is influenced by French, Italian and modernist cooking but avoids the trap of being merely “showy” or novel. His dishes have meaning because they express a sensibility rooted in local traditions while incorporating influences from afar when they make sense.

From ancient salt fields to modernist cuisine there is indeed a universe to explore in San Sebastian.

The Art of Food Comes to the Getty

09 Wednesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture, Edible Art

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salad garden performanceThe art of food, not paintings of food but the art of food preparation, is beginning to find its way into art museums.

If the Getty Center in Los Angeles is going to treat salad as art, then you can bet iceberg lettuce is not part of the equation. And indeed, from now through January 11, the Salad Garden performance art stage features artists making salads from more than 50 exquisite heirloom herbs, vegetables and edible flowers. Part of the spectacle is also the artists devouring their salads on site.

The work is the brainchild of photographer and writer Julia Sherman who recruited several several additional artists to participate in the fine art of salad making at the Getty.

“Every salad is a new take, especially when the prompt is to make something based off of what we’re growing here,” Sherman says. “We have some familiar plants, but a lot of these plants people have never had before. Even if artists come with a plan which we develop ahead of time, there’s a certain element of chance and improvisation that necessarily happens on site.”

But the idea of treating food preparation as an art is controversial. The comments section of NPR’s story about Sherman’s project featured the usual grumbling about something as lowly as food achieving the status of art:

More evidence, not that we needed it, that performance art is a joke.”

“Dear NPR, How about articles about…you know…ART!”

“Who pays these rich people to do such nonsense?”

“Julia Sherman may be a fair photographer, at least technically proficient, but to label this project “Art”, Performance or otherwise is quite a stretch.”

and so on…

So Jean Francois MIllet’s painting Woman Baking Bread is a work of art but a performance of a woman baking bread is not? Is the issue that performance art cannot be genuine art? millet oven cooking

I thought that controversy had been laid to rest decades ago.

It seems to me that Sherman’s salad making is a representation of people assembling materials for living. Why is that not a fit subject of artistic representation? Fans of Bruegel or Van Gogh would be surprised to hear it.

Resistance to food preparation being an art really seems to border on the irrational.

Why are philistines reading NPR’s art coverage?

Shameless Self-Promotion

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by in Art and Food, Contemporary Food Culture, Edible Art

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american FoodieMy book on the philosophy of food is now in production. Cool cover, eh?

Entitled American Foodie: Taste, Art, and the Cultural Revolution, it is all about how a love of food will set us free. I attempt to explain the emergence of food and drink as a dominant cultural force in the U.S. and assess its prospects for producing cultural change.

The publisher Rowman Littlefield has scheduled the release for January.

Why (Western) Philosophers are Late to the Dinner Party

29 Wednesday Apr 2015

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philosophers at the tableMost philosophers who write on the arts take a dim view of food and wine as genuine fine arts. Aside from Carolyn Korsmeyer, who is open to the view and has done great work in the philosophy of food and, well, me, I can’ t think of anyone else who pushes this line of thought. The reason may lie deep in our intellectual history.

Plato, who gets Western philosophy off the ground wanted little to do with food.

…the gods made what is called the lower belly, to be a receptacle for the superfluous meat and drink and formed the convolution of the bowels, so that the food might be prevented from passing quickly through and compelling the body to require more food, thus producing insatiable gluttony and making the whole race an enemy to philosophy and culture, and rebellious against the divinest element within us.

There is no doubt about where he stands. Plato, of course, was also a dualist believing that the mind was not only distinct from the body but vastly superior to it. The body and the senses were a hindrance to the attainment of genuine knowledge and the quicker we were rid of that lumbering bag of bones the better.

Other traditions take a different view. The Chinese since ancient times have considered cookery to be an art. And their seminal philosopher Confucius thought of proper cooking and eating as part of one’s spiritual development:

“[The gentleman] … did not eat his fill of polished rice, nor did he eat his fill of finely minced meat…. He did not eat food that had gone off color or food that had a bad smell. He did not eat food that was not properly prepared…. He did not eat food that had not been properly cut up, nor did he eat unless the proper sauce was available” (form The Analects, bk. 10,no. 8, p. 103).

Good eating nourishes both the body and the mind. But of course Confucius was no dualist. The tradition of Confucianism views the universe as an integrated unit, with its parts unified and interconnected, including the mind and body. It is probably no accident that he viewed cooking and eating more favorably.

Contemporary philosophers have abandoned dualism of the Platonic sort, but have not discarded Plato’s negative attitude toward food.

Could it be they are still closet dualists?

Edible Art: Cauliflower Fricassee w/Raita and Pea Shoots

04 Sunday Jan 2015

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cauliflower-raita

Much of modern art takes an ordinary object as its subject matter and transforms it into something extraordinary by placing the object in an unusual context. The edible arts are no exception. Although the tools of modern science give chefs the ability to fundamentally modify the form of ingredients, you don’t need a chemistry degree to create stunning effects. By playing with the function of an ingredient and giving it a new role and unexpected partners, chefs can transform how that ingredient is perceived.

This dish by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky from their book Elements of Taste is a good illustration of this principle.

Cauliflower is almost always served as a side dish or a minor component in a larger dish. It seldom stands alone as a featured flavor platform. Mild and vaguely nutty when raw, when cooked it begins to smell like, well, funky feet, and without some serious dressing up with salt and butter or cheese, it just becomes insipid the more it is cooked. Only when roasted, does cauliflower begin to taste like food. But almost everything tastes better when roasted and a plate of roasted cauliflower by itself still adds up to a boring meal. But that “funky feet” flavor can be a welcoming host when the proper guests are invited to contribute. In this exotic main dish, cauliflower stars as a gloomy contrast to overly exuberant fruit. The fruit shows a different side as well. The taste of fresh fruit is equally dependent on acidity and sweetness. Yet, in cooking, we typically think of a fruity dish as highlighting sweetness, with sourness employed to achieve balance. This dish reverses that equation-the sourness of lemon plays a starring role but is kept in check by explosive contrasting flavors.

Tasting notes: The foreground flavor is bracingly sour fruit, flavorful yet astringent, that permeates the broth and persists throughout the taste experience. Curry provides a persistent background note while the thin slices of, with cumin and coriander kept whole to provide little explosions of flavor, keep the sourness from overwhelming. This flavor profile along with the cooling raita  contribute to the exotic, vaguely Indian feel of this dish.

Cauliflower is serving as a flavor platform and aspires to dominance without ever quite achieving it given the strong flavors of its partneers. The usual malodorous “funky” flavor of cauliflower becomes, in this dish, a mild dusky presence, like a gloomy twilight, that contrasts with the bright astringency of the sour fruit and sharp attack of the slices of ginger. The cauliflower tempers the bright, assertive flavors preventing their high spirits from manipulating the mood of the dish, while the exotic spice mix masks the “funkiness” of the cauliflower allowing its dark, gloomy note to persist. While eating through the dish, the curry and yoghurt melt into the broth, gradually transforming the dish from an exotic exploration of sour fruit to something tamer and more comforting-until the slices of ginger punctuate, leaping to the foreground to pull us back toward exotica.  As this battle between fruit and foreboding fades, the picante dimension of the ginger and pepper remains, perking up the palate in anticipation of another bite.

Recipe is below or can be found elsewhere online here:

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