Tag Archives: Jean-Francois Revel

More on Cuisine and Social Hierarchies

19 Tuesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Food History, Philosophy of Food and Wine

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barbacoa

Barbacoa

Last week I was musing about the claim, often made by social scientists, that tastes are a reflection of social class or moral conviction rather than an independent aesthetic response. If taste is nothing but a reflection of social class, then an interest in fine cuisine is nothing but an upper class conceit.

However, if food historian Jean-Francois Revel is correct there is more continuity between haute cuisine and traditional popular cuisine than the taste-as-upper-class-conceit thesis will allow.

In Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food, Revel writes:

The history of gastronomy is nothing more nor less than a succession of exchanges, conflicts,quarrels, and reconciliations between everyday cuisine and the high art of cuisine. Art is a personal creation, but this creation is impossible without a base in traditional craftsmanship.

Revel goes on to write:

There would be something immoral about treating the subject of cuisine as if money were all it takes to consume good food—it is among the poor peoples of the world that this author…has on occasion eaten exquisite dishes: the barbacoa of the Indians of Mexico, a young goat cooked slowly beneath warm earth, or mole poblano in the same country, or, yet again, caponata in Sicily.

The cuisine of the less-well-off is linked to the soil and climate of a particular region and is based on skills and flavor combinations that have stood the test of time. Chefs of fine cuisine must innovate and go beyond traditions, but those who ignore traditions entirely engage in “pointless complication” and seldom create anything “really exquisite”, according to Revel.

So if Revel is correct there is typically a great deal of continuity between fine cuisine and ordinary cuisine and that entails that the taste associated with fine cuisine is not merely a reflection of class distinctions.

Innovative chefs routinely claim that a solid grounding in classical techniques is essential to their art. I suspect Revel is right about this.

Does Regional Cuisine Matter Anymore?

29 Thursday Mar 2012

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

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B1-JULIA_WE_B_^_WEDIQ

The art of cooking used to be firmly rooted in local traditions.

In Culture and Cuisine: A Journey Through the History of Food, Jean-Francois Revel writes:

Cuisine stems from two sources: a popular one and an erudite one…In the course of history there has been a peasant (or seafarer’s) cuisine and a court cuisine; a plebeian cuisine and a family cuisine prepared by the mother (or the humble family cook); and a cuisine of professionals that only chefs fanatically devoted to their art have the time and the knowledge to practice.

According to Revel, great food arises from a contest between regional cuisine using locally grown ingredients, “based on age-old skills, transmitted unconsciously by way of imitation and habit”, and professionals who are self-consciously seeking innovation and creativity for its own sake.

Since the 18th Century,and the emergence of a well-off middle class with access to media, these two cuisines have been mediated by a “bourgeois cuisine” which “retains the heartiness and savor of peasant cuisine” while introducing some of the subtleties and innovation of hautecuisine. (This mediation accelerated in the 20th Century with media figures such as Julia Child.)

Both were necessary. Without professional innovation, food traditions would stagnate and endlessly repeat mistakes. But without everyday cuisine, professional cooking risks creations that are “pointlessly complicated” and “at once extravagant and dull”, enlivened only by the importing of incongruous ingredients that eventually create a uniform international style.

Revel’s attempt to make sense of culinary history was written in 1982—before the Internet, the Food Channel, the growing role of science in the kitchen, and 30 years of increased population movements around the globe accelerated the fragmentation of traditions.

I doubt that his account of how great cuisine is created still holds.

Today there is a continuous circulation of culinary ideas which pays little attention to geographical borders. Every meal is a mash-up. Chefs are in the driver’s seat deciding what should be prepared and using new forms of media and their celebrity to instantaneously transmit it across the globe where it can be copied and circulated again and again, with simplified versions filtering into “bourgeois” cuisine until it all becomes quickly obsolete and replaced with the new sensation.

Although a sense of history is often used to promote these new creations, history  is itself constantly reinvented and re-contextualized so it functions only as a nostalgic symbol not as a standard. Thus “novelty” is never  quite novelty. Since everything is always new, the new doesn’t mark a new direction but only a difference to be noted and then discarded to make room for the new difference to take its place. There is lots of movement but no direction.

My worry is that without tradition we cannot understand what is an advance and what is a regression. Traditions provide a context that enables interpretation. They provide meaning and direction to innovations that give rise to the judgment “X tastes better than Y”. There is something that a particular dish is supposed to taste like that can be shown to be inferior when supplanted by innovation rather than simply different.

Tradition is the handmaiden, not the enemy, of novelty. This is what makes Redzepi’s work at Nomi so fascinating. He focus intensely on Danish cooking and that focus enables him to find new things for Danish cooking to be.

Why Food and Wine Writing Must Fail

22 Thursday Mar 2012

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978-0-226-04275-6-frontcover

What did the wines that stimulated conversation in Plato’s Symposium taste like?

Or the clam chowder in Moby Dick, the “brown and yellow meats” served to Mr. Banks in To the Lighthouse? Or consider this repast from Joyce’s Ulysses:

“Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods’ roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.”

Lovely.

But we shall never understand the peculiar attractions of this food because sensibility is a matter of habit and habits are seldom articulated clearly. They are so familiar that we don’t bother to reflect on them or explain them. But even if Bloom had engaged in “mindful eating”, I doubt that Joyce, despite his prodigious talents, had the vocabulary to capture in words the virtues of grilled mutton with the tang of faintly scented urine. We are just not very good at talking about taste. The history of sensibility cannot be written.

Of course, we have recipes (or sketches of recipes) from the past and can reconstruct meals from historical accounts, as some chefs are attempting to do. But recreating a recipe is not the same as recreating a sensibility—the felt response to the product of the recipe. The ancient Greeks were known to cut their wine with a bit of sea water. We can, if we want, easily duplicate this drink, but we probably cannot discover what they found attractive about it. Whatever peculiar bit of mental processing created a preference for this is forever lost. (And perhaps well lost)

Thus, we must rely on—imagination, which we rely on in all things related to taste. Reading a cookbook or a wine review is all about imagination. Paradoxically, our inability to precisely articulate the nature of taste and the need for imagination to fully experience it means that all writing about food and wine must be evocative and hyperbolic because it must compensate for the thinness and unreliability of our taste memories and concepts.

Sometimes this tendency jumps the shark.

Napoleon of Sourdough Brioche, Artisan Cheddar and minced, aged Hereford, garnished with a Preserve of Cucumber and Dill, and finished with Heirloom Tomato Coulis.

Basically a cheese burger with fancy plating.

Philosopher and food historian Jean-Francois Revel savages this sort of writing:

Indeed, the function of this toplofty jargon is to disconcert and thereby create the illusion of originality, a more facile solution than the honest execution of tried and tested recipes

According to Revel, it fails as a source of memory.

But the difficulty when one  explores the past (and even the present) lies in appreciating the difference between silent cuisine and cuisine that talks too much, between cuisine that exists on the plate and the one that exists only in gastronomical chronicles. Or else, to state the matter in a different way, the difficulty lies in discovering, behind the verbal facade of fancy cuisines, the popular, anonymous, peasant or “bourgeois” cuisine, made up of tricks and little secrets that only evolve very slowly, in silence, and that no individual in particular has invented.

Revel thinks the traditions of family cooking are necessary (although not sufficient) for culinary innovation. It is where much of the real work is done, not in the palaces of fine cuisine. But Revel’s very useful history, Culture and Cuisine, was written in 1979, well before the Internet, the Food Channel, celebrity chefs made available their expertise thus influencing “bourgeois” cuisine.

I wonder if family cooking still plays the essential role Revel assigns it.