One thing that has always resonated with me in my culinary education was from Harold McGee, in his classic tome “On Food and Cooking,” the great argument-decider in every fine dining kitchen. McGee’s meticulously scientific approach to explaining food is valuable, but “On Food and Cooking” is a work of opinionated passion as well. He begins his chapter on cheese by proclaiming that “Cheese is one of the greatest achievements of humankind.” That stopped me in my tracks. Not because it’s an outrageous statement, but because I agreed immediately. It was like something I had known all along, but had never been revealed to me.
It is, of course, not the concept of cheese itself - a simple way to preserve the nutrients in milk long past the narrow window of milk’s freshness - but in the endless subtle variations that exist in the thousands of varieties of cheese all over the world. It is remarkable that we, as a species, have produced such diversity from this simple concept, and that It’s remarkable that there exists an innate drive to tinker and improve, a drive which allowed for the flavor profiles we’re familiar with in many staple cheese to be regularly reproduced long before the actual scientific processes were discovered. The same is true of beer, wine, bread - all categories I care deeply about.
This concept of refinement over the course of human history in many of our traditional foods is one that I constantly keep in mind at work . Refinement is what allows for food to be considered as either craft or art. Not that restaurants themselves allow for art by being more culturally refined, but that the food has undergone treatment that represents the sum of human culinary tradition before it even reaches the restaurant. The wine that’s carefully paired with each course was once just grape juice. Even the raising of the cow the filet mignon came from is a complex process in which each step can be optimized for better flavor in the beef that winds up on your plate - not to mention the nutritional benefits and environmental and ethical concerns.
It’s very possible to view these concerns as a more-or-less incidental part of achieving a particular artistic goal once the food is already in the restaurant. It seems to me that such chefs usually put a premium on the processes that occur once the food is already in the restaurant. Do a YouTube search for Heston Blumenthal’s perfect burger for an example of this. Blumenthal’s burger leaves nothing to chance. Everything is made from its most basic ingredients. Recreating this burger yourself would require baking the buns and a trip to the butcher to replicate the ground beef blend, and would probably take up your entire day. A lot of refinement was involved in creating this recipe. Blumenthal’s cooks spend a larger portion of their day than most just tinkering with ideas and seeing of they would work - they have an entire “laboratory” devoted to it. At his restaurant, The Fat Duck, there is no doubt a great degree of care in the procurement of each of the dauntingly long list of ingredients that go into his burger recipe, but functionality within the recipe is just as important a factor as quality or method of manufacture.
One thing I’ve realized in working in the kind of restaurant I’ve worked in over the past year and a half is that you have to focus either on the refinement of the ingredient that occurs before you get it, or the refinement that occurs after its in the kitchen. All great restaurants must do both. We make our own stock. We make complex sauces. We brine, confit, pickle, smoke, braise, marinade - I just recently had the first sip of a mead we made last spring. Still, consideration of where we get our ingredients takes up much more time than devising new ways to process it. We have personal relationships with all of our purveyors. We talk to them about how our produce is grown, what they should grow, when it will be available. Emotional resonance between a season and an ingredient is something I’m constantly searching for. There have even been days when I’ve leveraged a change in weather to sell a special - like a warm roasted root vegetable salad during a nasty late-fall rainstorm. Whatever feelings you already have about warm, earthy vegetables was already in place before you walked into the restaurant. It’s part of the same feelings the local farmers have that motivate them to grow them in the first place. In that sense, a lot of the “work” was done before I even put on an apron that morning.
To put it differently, what Blumenthal does is tilted towards creation, and what the restaurant I do, more towards curation, even if both feature both aspects to some degree. Curation is something I’ve always loved. Curation means you’re part of a community. Curation means you’re helping people enjoy food that was made with passion. Curation means there’s always more to learn.
I have many hours of work to put in before I’m at the level of technical competence that’s needed in a craft like fine dining before I could really articulate a vision with confidence. I focus a lot more on learning and technique in the average day. But the point of this month’s theme was to think about our identity as creative professionals. There is a part of me that loves discovering something amazing and introducing it to people. It’s this part of me that has driven me to focus on learning as much as I can about how artisanal foods are made and making food that allows people to discover them with as little interference as possible. For the time being, I’m going to stick with that.
