Omnivore Atlanta

It’s actually quite hard to characterize A Day at elBulli: An insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adria (Phaidon, $49.95) as a cookbook. At least, I was not able to cook anything from this huge, fawning book covering the self-declared “best restaurant in the world”. The book does contain 30 recipes in its 600 pages, from the kitchen of the famously cutting edge chef in Northern Spain. But if any of them look doable, invariably something will trip you up.

Usually it will be a matter of equipment (what, you don’t have a candy-floss machine in your kitchen?). If not that, it will be a matter of ingredients. The two recipes I thought I might be able to cook left me stranded at the store, hopelessly staring at my shopping list. The first, samphire tempura with saffron and oyster cream, didn’t call for any machines or chemicals I was unlikely to have. Of course, I had no idea what samphire is. I was saddened to find that it is a plant that grows on rocks near the coast of the United Kingdom. Drats. My brother suggested we substitute another green vegetable – asparagus perhaps? But I felt that would be contrary to the spirit of the book, which is basically that almost all of this stuff is totally unattainable.

The second, pine nut marshmallows, looked almost easy (see recipe below). My problem was finding extra virgin pine nut oil. I looked for it in a lot of stores. I didn’t find it. If anyone has any leads, let me know and I’ll give it a shot.

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the psychology of taste in recent weeks. In my other occupation, the psychology one, I conduct workshops related to the imagination and creativity.

I’ve been developing one specifically about the interplay of taste and the imagination. About five years ago, I came across a study — I’ve lost the citation, unfortunately — that concluded that people who develop an adventurous palate also tend to develop a more adventurous, open-minded approach to life generally. The study, which followed students, advocated gastronomical education in the schools.

This seems sensible to me, but I’m also interested in the specific effects of different flavors. We’ve appropriated those to describe mental states. She’s sweet. He feels bitter. John McCain has a salty disposition. I’ve soured on Sarah Palin.

There is a fairly common but little discussed condition, synesthesia, in which the senses overlap naturally (as they do sometimes in the psychedelic experience). Synesthetes, about one in 2000 of the general population, most often hear color or see colors when they hear music, but taste is often involved too. I’ve been interested in the phenomenon since I interviewed R. E. Cytowic, author of The Man Who Tasted Shapes, in 1993 for Creative Loafing.

Recent research has concluded that the synesthetic experience seems to be within everyone’s capacity in childhood. In fact, people who don’t “outgrow” it report that their experience has been consistent ever since they can remember — meaning that if a particular word produced a particular taste in childhood, it continues to do so in adulthood. In short, it’s a virtual language of taste.

Neuroscience hasn’t concluded yet whether the synesthetic experience can be developed or intentionally recovered, although, as I said, psychedelic drugs often produce the effect, meaning that the overlap of the senses is not neurologically inhibited in all scenarios.

I have posited that part of the appeal of Ferran Adria’s so-called molecular gastronomy may have to do with synesthesia. By breaking down the elements of a dish into its purest flavors and then playfully rearranging them, does molecular gastronomy affect our perceptual and psychological experience? I don’t mean to suggest that it literally causes a synesthetic experience but that it does disorient our usual experience of flavor and, in that moment of disorientation, may awaken an imaginal capacity that’s not so present in day-to-day experience.

Adria has gotten a lot of publicity in the last month because of the publication of his newest book, A Day at elBulli: An insight into the ideas, methods and creativity of Ferran Adria. Find NPR’s recent essay here.

I was interested to read in a BBC essay that Adria’s style has been re-dubbed “techno-emotional cuisine,” a term that hints at its psychological effect. Adria himself says his work is most analogous to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction. In that controversial discourse, Derrida argues that our sense of the unified whole — the meta-narrative — is basically a delusion, whose elements, broken down, turn out to be full of contradictions.

I won’t bore you with an entire discussion of deconstruction (and someone would invariably argue that I misunderstand it, anyway), but I can tell you that, at a psychological level, it’s a stimulating challenge to the usual sense of identity. By challenging identity, it invites us to try on different behaviors.

The point, gastronomically, is that by, for example, foregrounding the technological aspect of cooking, Adria sabotages our usual assumptions about dining. (Indeed, he’s come under intense attack for this by another famous Spanish chef, Santi Santamaria, in a kind of culinary debate between the essentialist and the relativist). Adria’s (and Richard Blais’) separation and intense distillation of flavors into their separate parts, often allowing the diner to play with taste, induces reverie in my experience and, whenever the imagination is intensely stimulated, there is an opportunity to increase awareness.

This of course also happens with traditional cooking, but, in my experience, the psychological effect is typically nostalgia or a sense of the beauty that architectural symmetry induces. When I eat this kind of food, I see Greek temples. When I eat Adria’s kind of cooking, I see fractals and Rorshach inkblots. One invites reverie on the solid and immobile; the other evokes a sense of the new and the changing.

By paying attention, mindfully eating, there is a kind of synesthetic response at the level of sensation and thought. I’m speaking metaphorically, although the experience is often literal. It’s worth cultivating in any case.

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The New York Times featured an interesting story Sunday about an unexpected culinary controversy that has erupted in Spain.

As any foodie worth his liquid nitrogen knows, Spain is the progenitor of so-called molecular gastronomy, a cooking style that employs unconventional technologies to change the ordinary form and texture of ingredients. This style, whose best example in Atlanta is Richard Blais, is witty above all but it also often heightens the experience of flavor.

The godfather of this movement is Ferran Adrià whose restaurant, el Bulli, I visited about six years ago with a Greek friend from London. It was as much theater as dining and, while I enjoyed it, my friend detested it. He’s a scientist and complained, predictably, that it was like eating “laboratory experiments.”

The Times reports:

Santi Santamaría, one of the country’s most prominent chefs, has directed bruising public attacks at his avant-garde counterparts, accusing them of producing pretentious food they would not eat themselves — and potentially poisoning diners with chemicals that he says have no place in the kitchen.

“Some chefs are offering a media spectacle rather than concerning themselves with healthy eating,” Mr. Santamaría said as he accepted a recent prize for his new book, “La Cocina al Desundo” (“The Kitchen Laid Bare”). In it, the burly, outspoken chef, who trumpets his own dedication to natural ingredients, assails the proliferation of junk food culture — and once again takes on the effete creations of the Spanish avant-garde kitchen.

“We have to decide, as chefs, if we want to continue to use the fresh products of our Mediterranean diet or opt for using additives,” he told journalists in Madrid on Monday, when he repeated a call for the Spanish authorities to investigate restaurants’ use of, for example, liquid nitrogen, for instant freezing, and methyl cellulose, a gelling agent.

The predictable response has been that there is nothing incompatible about avant-garde techniques and healthy cooking with top-quality ingredients. I say it’s “predictable” in part because this style of cooking has helped make Spain’s culture the European Union’s most cutting-edge. So, there is a broad investment in maintaining that rep.

For myself, I think Adrià’s influence has only improved Spanish cuisine. I’ve traveled frequently in Spain and never found the cuisine up to the Italian or French style. I remember once, in Barcelona, becoming so starved for a green vegetable that I sought out a very hippie-esque vegan cafe that was full of other Americans.

The Times piece concludes with this cogent observation:

Dan Barber, chef of Blue Hill in New York, said that the dispute was reminiscent of the storm over nouvelle cuisine in France in the 1970s and a more recent, nationalist debate over the use of non-French ingredients in haute cuisine. Mr. Barber, an advocate of organic, local ingredients who is an admirer of Mr. Adrià, said the controversy bore testimony to how mature the Spanish culinary movement had become.

Read the entire story here.

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