Good cooks carry with them secrets locked away in
the arcane languages of foods, herbs and spices. They study their
alchemical properties, creating potent combinations that not only arouse
our sense of taste, but offer well being and longevity. In India, the
5,000 year old Ayurvedic systems of cuisine promise the knowledge for
prolonging a healthy life. Through a careful combination of spices and
foods the system seeks to balance the six rasas or “tastes” of
the Ayurvedic diet: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent.
The proper Ayurvedic mix delivers a sensual, tantric experience of
food. The Ayurvedic physician prepares meals in concordance with the
seasons, the freshness of the food available and the individual’s health
needs. The cook is a physician and spiritual director, using the
spiritual and physical properties of the food to enrich the consumer’s
life.
Lassie Hallström offers a fairy tale version of this ancient science in his film Chocolat
(was there ever a food given more magical properties?), based on the
novel of the same name by Joanne Harris. Juliette Binoche play a
mysterious stranger who arrives at a sleepy village during a wild storm.
Although Lent has started, she opens a “chocolaterie,” a small store
filled with sublime candy, directly opposite the church. With an uncanny
wisdom, she knows which confection will unravel the private misery of
her reluctant buyers. Before long, her enchanted chocolates have
transformed the lives of the villagers,
rekindling passion in a dull marriage, providing the needed courage
for an abused housewife to leave her violent husband and a spirit of
loving acceptance to a bitter landlady.
In Laura Esquivel’s delicious
novel of magical cooking, Like Water for Chocolate (complete
with recipes), and the movie made from it, the narrator’s great–aunt
Tita is born in the middle of the kitchen table amid the spices and
fixings for the noodle soup. Preparing food becomes a way of life for
the child and Tita grows up to become a master chef. As she cooks, her
own emotions mingle with the food and the diners are taken by sudden
bouts of longing, regret and passion.
Quail cooked in a delectable rose petal sauce causes her sister
Gertrudis to become so inflamed with lust that her body produces
unquenchable heat. Water evaporates before it can cool her, and her
scent carried on pink clouds, attracts the object of her passion, one of
Pancho Villa’s men, who arrives in time to pull the naked Gertrudis up
in front of him on a galloping horse, allowing the lovers to face each
other as they ride away to conjugal bliss. Like the bystander in the
film When Harry Met Sally who witnesses the famous scene of Meg
Ryan as Sally faking a loud orgasm in a crowded restaurant, we want to
lean over to the cook and demand, “I’ll take whatever she’s having!”
More recently the alchemy of cooking has given way to a new and
perplexing science of food which is no less magical in its ability to
transform our sense of taste and propriety when it comes to cooking.
Molecular Gastronomy, a termed coined in the 1980’s by French scientist
Hervé This and Nicolas Kurti, a professor of physics at Oxford
University in England, has sought to unravel the deep chemical
structures of food and to discover the science beneath home cooking.
Studying more than ten thousand adages and myths about cooking, these
two scientists set out to prove or disprove these long cherished maxims.
(I remember my French grandmére insisting that it was impossible for a
menstruating woman to make mayonnaise; the oil and the eggs would not
blend.) Along the way to collecting empirical data they inadvertently
established a new realm of cooking possibilities. Foods that have
similar molecular structures can be combined
to produce fantastic and unexpectedly compatible flavors such as
garlic and coffee creme brulée, dark chocolate petit fours infused with
pipe tobacco, barnacles with tea foam, a cappuccino of forest mushrooms
with mushroom biscotti. Heroic young chefs are now determined to change
the traditional expectations of diners. Heston Blumenthal, chef at the
Fat Duck
restaurant at Bray–on–Thames in England, has produced award winning
combinations of caviar and white chocolate, spice bread ice cream and
crab syrup, and smoked bacon and egg ice cream served with French toast
and tomato jam.
Chef Richard Blais, an innovative chef in Atlanta, conjures mustard
ice cream tableside by mixing custard with liquid nitrogen. In Houston,
Chef Randy Rucker says his goal is to serve food the city “has never
seen, ever” with items such as cod served with white–chocolate sauce. In
Miami, Chef Gerdy Rodriguez has been experimenting with bread ice
It makes me dizzy, these new spells, and I wonder what will be
the results of such incantations on the adventurous diners. Will they
be enchanted or ensorcelled? Of course I will try such strange delights
at least once should I have the opportunity. But for now, I linger on a
last memory, looking backward at the magic of older cooks. I visited my
father a month before he died. We were, as always, in the kitchen and he
wanted to make Champignons á la Grecque, a simple dish and one
that I loved.
Usually I sat perched on a stool, watching his swift hands, the
spices tossed in without the benefit of measuring, a certain bottle of
wine upended with a flourish, some of it poured into the cook and some
into the pot. But this time he was tired and I was the apprentice,
following his direction while he sat and watched. It was one of the most
poignant moments of my life. Nothing else would have moved him to
relinquish his position at stove except the knowledge of his impending
death.
I listened to his instructions and heard the underlying melancholy
in his voice as I chopped, tossed, and stirred. What a final gift this
was as I learned the spell that turned the mushrooms into fragrant
golden morsels. We ate then, a quiet dinner by candlelight, and for a
brief time all the fears, all the anxiety attending the gathering storm
of his last days subsided, rolled back by the enchantment of good food.
Text copyright © 2005 by Midori Snyder.