Consider the Fork

by Bee Wilson

  The luxury and sheen of the modern showroom kitchen would have been a foreign land to our forebears a hundred years ago, when electric refrigerators were unknown and the gas stove an exciting novelty. How futuristic these rooms would surely seem to them: the panoply of “clever storage” devices, the hissing espresso machine, the cavernous refrigerator-freezer, the color-coordinated cabinets and mixers. How could you explain to an Edwardian newlywed just getting to grips with her mahogany cabinet refrigerator and her case of silver-plated knives that the day would come when people—men as well as women—would treat kitchen remodeling as a hobby, when perfectly good electric blenders would be thrown away because they didn’t quite match the slate blue of a new set of kitchen cabinets? How has it become normal that on moving to a new house, you would rip out the entire kitchen put in by the previous owners—perhaps only a few years earlier—and install your own from scratch, with all new fixtures and fittings: new range, new floor, new kitchen sink?

  If you look beyond the granite and the glass and the recessed LED lighting, however, there is surprising continuity between the technology of today’s kitchens and those of the past. In the 1890s, French chemist Marcelin Berthelot predicted that by the year 2000, cooking would be finished and human beings would subsist on pills. This meal-in-a-pill idea has been a perennial feature of our space-age fantasies. Yet despite all the encroachments of industrial food—despite Slim-Fast and “breakfast-in-a-bar”—the business of cooking persists. Even the food eaten on the early space missions did not generally come in pill form. The further they got from Earth, the more it seemed astronauts craved the tastes and textures of home. The meals may have been freeze-dried, but they were approximations of the stews and puddings of normal kitchens. According to Jane Levi, a historian of space food, one of the key discoveries of Project Gemini—the ten manned space flights that NASA conducted between 1965 and 1966—was that astronauts don’t like cold potatoes.

  However radical we may think we are in our everyday beliefs, when we step into a kitchen, most of us become (small “c”) conservatives. We chop food with knives, stir it with spoons, and cook it in pots. As we stand in our modern kitchens, we still use the colanders, the pestles, and the frying pans of the ancients. We do not start from first principles every time we want to produce a meal but draw on the tools and ingredients we have at hand, governed by the rules and taboos and memories we all carry in our heads about cuisine.

  Some people don’t like this. For French scientist Herve This, one of the inventors of the term “molecular gastronomy,” our cooking is guilty of “technical stagnation.” In 2009, This asked:

  Why do we still cook as we did in the Middle Ages, with whisks, fire, and saucepans? Why this outdated behavior; when, at the same time, humanity is sending probes to the outer limits of the solar system?

  So why are we so resistant to change in the way we cook? One reason is that experimenting with new foods has always been a dangerous business. In the wild, trying out some tempting new berries might lead to death. A lingering sense of this danger may make us risk-averse in the kitchen. But our attachment to certain ways of cooking goes beyond self-preservation. Many tools have endured because they work so well. Nothing does the job of a wooden spoon better than a wooden spoon. There’s also the fact that when we pick up a certain utensil to cook a certain dish in the traditional way— whether it’s a Valencian paella made in its wide shallow pan or a Victoria sponge made in old-fashioned sandwich cake pans—we are enacting a ritual that binds us to the place we live and to those in our family, both living and dead. Such things are not easily shrugged off. As we have seen, every time a new cooking technology has been introduced, however useful—from pottery to the microwave to the smokeless stoves of the developing world—it has been greeted in some quarters with hostility and protestations that the old ways were better and safer (and sometimes, in some ways, they were).

  Hervé This says that there are two types of technological change: local and global. The small local changes in kitchen machinery are the easiest to accept. The example This gives is an improvement to a balloon whisk that adds more wires to whip eggs more efficiently. New gadgets feel safest when they remind us of other objects that we already know. This explains why early refrigerators looked like heavy wooden Victorian kitchen cabinets and why lemon squeezers of the 1860s were often clamped on the table like hulking iron meat grinders. In the 1950s, countless utensils took the form of a continental Mouli food mill with a rotating handle: suddenly, there were rotary cheese graters and rotary herb mills and they were greeted with enthusiasm. Although—unlike the Mouli itself—neither is really a very good tool on its own terms: the herbs get mashed and the cheese grater always leaves a thin slice behind in the rotary drum. But at this time, a rotating mechanism felt natural and this was what mattered. Hands and brains were accustomed to the action of processing food through a drum with a circular motion.

  It is far harder to accept a technology that is entirely new. This is what This calls “global” change: the sort of shift that came about when our ancestors decided to start cooking things in pottery or when Count Rumford rejected the idea that an open hearth was a good way to heat food. Such changes disturb our natural conservatism.

  Take egg whites. Instead of just tinkering around the edges by adding more wires to a preexisting whisk, a global shift in technology would call into question why a whisk is used for beating egg whites at all. This is what Dr. This wants to know. “Why not use, instead, a compressor and a nozzle that can introduce air bubbles into the egg white?” Or why not come up with some entirely new device that no one has thought of yet? Why not use all your ingenuity and imagination?

  Well, why not? For most people, cooking is a laborious enough process without adding the creation of new tools to the mix. The past couple of years have seen a small renaissance in home cooking, partly a response to the austerity of the recession. But if you look at the past forty years, the picture is one of a radical decline in cooking. When British chef Jamie Oliver went to northern England, to the town of Rotherham in 2008 for his TV program Ministry of Food, he met people who owned electric ovens but had no idea how to switch them on. A 2006 survey by the Institute of Food Technologists found that although 75 percent of Americans ate dinner at home, fewer than one-third were cooking their meals from scratch. The real culinary breakthrough would be to get the remaining two-thirds of the population to cook with whisks, fire, and saucepans, rather than persuading them that these technologies are outmoded. The act of whipping egg whites with a whisk may seem unadventurous, but the cook holding the whisk has had to overcome numerous obstacles to continue being one of those who engages with cooking technology at any level. The noncooking majority don’t get anywhere near this far. To repeat Dr. This’s question, why don’t cooks reinvent the whisk? There are a hundred reasons why not, ranging from “It’s not how my mother did things” to “I don’t have all the time and resources in the world” to “My balloon whisk works fine.”

  In recent decades, however, there has been a movement in cookery that endlessly asks “why not?” Why not serve ice cream hot instead of cold? Why not vacuum seal eggs in a plastic bag and “scramble” them in a sous-vide bath? Why not take mayonnaise and fry it? This movement has gone under many names: molecular gastronomy, techno-emotional cookery, hypercuisine, vanguard cooking, modernist cuisine. Whatever you call it—and I will stick with “modernist” for now—this movement represents the biggest rethink of kitchen technology since the microwave (a gadget that the modernists adore).

  When Nathan Myhrvold wants to eat a hamburger, he doesn’t take down a trusty cookbook or try to remember some advice his mother once gave him. Nor does he mindlessly sling a burger patty on a griddle. He first works out exactly what he wants from a burger—the “ultimate” hamburger. Myhrvold likes his meat to have a rosy-red inside with a dark, caramelized exterior. This wouldn’t be everyone’s “ultimate” hamburger, but it is his. And it turns out to be nearly
impossible to achieve with conventional cooking methods. On a griddle, by the time the outside is brown enough for Myhrvold’s liking, the inside tends to be gray and overcooked. So Myhrvold used some of his immense wealth (in a previous life he was chief technology officer for Microsoft) to experiment until he came up with a technology that gave him the results he desired.

  The answer, it transpired, was far from obvious, not to say impossible to achieve in any normal domestic kitchen. To stop the inside of the burger from overcooking, you have to first dunk it in liquid nitrogen to cool it down fast. To ensure the caramelized exterior, you then deep-fry it in hot oil for exactly one minute: long enough to brown all the surfaces, not so long that the heat penetrates the center. But before either the liquid nitrogen or the hot oil, Myhrvold applies yet another technology, cooking his burger long and slow in a sous-vide machine: for about half an hour in tepid water—to ensure perfect medium-rare tenderness.

  Sous-vide is to modernist cooking what spit-roasting was to the Elizabethans: the default technology for cooking almost everything. The name comes from the French for “under vacuum,” and the process means cooking vacuum-sealed food at precisely controlled temperatures in water. Food is vacuum-packed in heavy-duty plastic bags, then suspended in a low-temperature water bath, sometimes for many hours (cheaper cuts of meat may take as long as forty-eight hours to tenderize). In principle, sous-vide is a bit like the slow cookers that have been around for decades, or the bain-maries of which the Victorians were so fond, but the overall effect is entirely novel. To someone reared on homespun meals, sous-vide hardly seems to be cooking at all. The food in its plastic looks alarmingly like medical samples, or brains in formaldehyde. Another unsettling aspect is the total absence of aroma. Sous-vide enthusiasts boast that the food’s scent is all locked up in its silent bag. With sous-vide, you have none of the normal sensory cues that a meal is cooking: the smell of garlic sizzling in oil, the blip-blip of risotto in a pot.

  I was a sous-vide skeptic. I didn’t like the aesthetics, the wasted plastic and lack of romance. To cook sous-vide, you need two separate pieces of apparatus: two more possessions to add to our already overequipped kitchens. First, a vacuum-sealing machine, which looks more like a laser printer than anything to do with food. It is a plastic rectangle with buttons on the top. Ingredients are placed in thick plastic pouches. The edge of the pouch is fed into the vacuum sealer, which sucks most of the air out, leaving the food shrink-wrapped. The second component of sous-vide is the water bath, a stainless steel vat. It gets filled with water and set to very precise temperatures using a digital control panel, ready to cook the shrink-wrapped food.

  I didn’t want this giant metal thing on my countertop. Then I borrowed one from the main seller of sous-vide for the UK domestic market (Sous Vide Supreme) and discovered that food cooked by sous-vide was qualitatively different from food cooked by any other technology. Not that it was always better. Misjudging the cooking temperatures and times with sous-vide is disastrous because you can’t check the progress of the food as it cooks in the same way that you can using a pan. You set the water bath to the required temperature, vacuum seal the food in the bag, submerge the bags, set the timer, and wait for the bleep. No stirring, no basting, no prodding or tasting. No human input at all.

  When you get it right, however, sous-vide food is extraordinary, even hyperreal. Fruits and vegetables that might otherwise be boiled, steamed, or poached assume a concentrated flavor. Globe artichokes tasted, almost overwhelmingly, of artichoke; I could feel that odd soapy taste on my tongue almost an hour after eating them, because none of the flavor compounds had leached out into the water, as they do in a pan. Sous-vide apples and quinces, cooked for two hours at precisely 181.4°F, were deeply fragrant and golden, with a far better texture than I’ve ever achieved by poaching: dense but not too grainy, like the essence of autumn. Carrots with rosemary seemed to be infused through every cell with the herb. And potatoes! For years, I have fantasized about some perfect boiled potatoes that I once ate as a child on holiday in France: firm, yellow, and buttery, the platonic ideal of potato. Little did I think that they would one day emerge from a plastic bag in my own kitchen.

  The sous-vide machines aimed at domestic kitchens sell themselves mostly as devices for cooking meat. The images on the box are all of fillets, chops, and steaks. A kitchenware buyer told me that this was because “meat and steak are such an investment,” and most people (vegetarians aside) do not want to lavish so much money—$400 and up—on a tool for cooking vegetables. It is also true that sous-vide meat and fish yield results that are unique and new. You can take tough cuts of meat and, by cooking them at the lowest possible temperature—just high enough to denature the proteins and kill off pathogens, but no higher—achieve a tenderness that would once have been unimaginable. For the first time, you can cook proteins with minimal loss of juices. Chewy flank steak now melts like mousse. Cuts that were tender anyway, like pork fillet, become alarmingly soft, almost jellylike. A traditional pan-fried steak cooks in gradations as the heat gradually conducts through the meat, from a very cooked exterior to—if you are lucky—a pink inside. Sous-vide proteins are different: they are cooked to the same degree all the way through. And in contrast to the meat cookery of the past, you sear it after it has cooked, not before (without this final searing stage, sous-vide meat is pallid and moist).

  Sous-vide technology was first invented for industrial food in the 1960s by French and American engineers working for Cryovac, a food packaging business. It was initially seen as a way to prolong shelf life, and indeed vacuum sealing is still widely used for that purpose in the food business. It was only in 1974 that a chef first found that Cryovacking could make food better rather than just longer lasting, if the vacuum-sealing technology could be combined with slow, gentle cooking. In France, the triple-Michelin-starred Pierre Troisgros was dissatisfied with his methods of cooking foie gras—swollen goose or duck liver at that time being considered an essential component of any Michelin-starred restaurant. Troisgros found that the foie gras was losing up to 50 percent of its original weight when it was sauteed. Troisgros consulted an offshoot of Cryovac, a school called Culinary Innovation, and was advised to shrink-wrap his foie gras in several layers of plastic before slow-cooking it. It worked. The loss of weight was reduced to 5 percent, thus saving Troisgros a fortune. The liver tasted better, too (at least to those who like foie gras). The fat that had previously melted away in the pan was now retained, giving the liver exceptional richness.

  Six years earlier in Britain, a Hungarian physicist named Nicholas Kurti had been making some discoveries of his own. In 1968, Kurti gave a Friday-night lecture at the Royal Institution, entitled “The Physicist in the Kitchen.” Kurti found it very sad that the role of science in the kitchen had not been given more attention. He showed the audience a series of hypodermic syringes, which he used with a dramatic flourish to inject pineapple juice into a loin of pork to tenderize it (pineapple contains an enzyme, bromelin, that breaks down proteins). He used a microwave oven to construct an “inverted Baked Alaska” with an outer layer of chocolate ice cream encasing an inner layer of hot meringue and apricot puree. Finally, Kurti brought in a leg of lamb cooked for eight hours at precisely 176°F until fantastically tender: here already was a version of the sous-vide idea of cooking meat low and slow at highly controlled temperatures. Kurti is now revered among the modernist chefs and food scientists as one of the fathers of high-tech cuisine.

  In the 1960s and 1970s, however, the food culture was not quite ready for hypodermic syringes and vacuum packing. Sous-vide was widely practiced in the catering industry, but it was a dirty little secret. Many of us have eaten sous-vide without knowing that was what it was. If a caterer needs to make something like coq au vin for a corporate dinner for 200, sous-vide is highly convenient, because the dish can be portioned up in its bags, then entirely precooked in the water bath, and reheated as required. It cuts down on labor costs, too. But it was not so
mething chefs generally boasted about. As recently as 2009, there was a scandal when British chef Gordon Ramsay was “exposed” for serving “boil-in-the-bag” food at some of his restaurants.

  Sous-vide has really only come out in the open over the past couple of years as part of the rise of modernist cooking. Now, restaurants will advertise the fact that they have used sous-vide to compress watermelon, “flash pickle” celery, or reinvent hollandaise. The shame surrounding this technology has been replaced with pride. It has gone from being an indication of thoughtlessness to a sign that culinary experts have gone to great trouble to make an ingredient taste more intensely of itself. Sous-vide is just one of the bewildering tools in the modernist kitchen, along with cream whippers installed with liquid nitrogen canisters for making foams and “espumas,” and crazily powerful homogenizers for making “nano-emulsions.” Around the world, chefs are wielding freeze-dryers and centrifuges, Pacojets and siphons. And, like children at play, they are constantly asking, “why not?” Instead of cooking something on a hot griddle, why not put it on an Anti-Griddle, whose surface chills food to–22°F, so cold that the surface takes on a crispy texture, as if it had been fried?