R.I.P. Alain Senderens

Alain Senderens is probably one of the greatest chefs that nobody has ever heard of.

Most of the modern clichés and techniques were invented by him. It's actually a tribute to his genius that they are so widespread that they have turned into clichés.

Just to mention two — the notion of "wine pairings" in restaurants, and the originally shocking pairing of lobster and vanilla.

The CC just happened to be in Paris a few days before M. Senderens passed away and he just happened to eat at a restaurant run by his most famous product, Alain Passard.

It isn't well known but L'Arpège was originally L'Archestrate. It's literally the space where the pupil learned from the master.

Note the names being rather classical. Arpeggio for the former, and Archestratus, the famous gastronome, for the latter.

Even the first syllable hasn't changed!

(And note that master and pupil share the same first name too.)

L'Arpège is deeply deeply based in French gastronomy at a level that no restaurant in New York ever will be or ever can be.

New York is too much of its own device. The whole world's cultures clash and rub against each other here generating furious sparks of electric energy and it's impossible for chefs not to be influenced by it. The offerings in a truly great restaurant reflect that unease and friction, and the sheer joie de vivre of new cultures and new ideas. Concepts could very well be incoherent but there's a furious sense of experimentation with ideas yet unexplored.

L'Arpège exists in a different space. It's inside a culture that understands itself, is entirely comfortable, and brings refinement to the palate. It may borrow from other cultures but its own sense of identity stands as rock-solid as the terroir.

Read a book of M. Senderens and you will understand in even a few pages that he may borrow ideas from Thailand, India or Japan, but at no point in time will the original French concept be subordinated. It will be integrated into the food grammar coherently.

Once you understand the difference, his genius just simply sits there in plain daylight.

Adieu, maestro, adieu.

Technical Artistry

At its broadest level, the art of cooking is split into three broad categories - cooking, bread-making, and pastry.

It's routinely mentioned that the pastry-making is a science but the remaining two are arts. Ever wonder why that is the case?

Let's digress since the CC loves digressions (particularly when they shed light on the subject via metaphor.)

Many moons ago when the CC was but a wee lad, he studied chemistry. Inorganic chemistry was all moonlight and madness but organic chemistry was systematic and staid. It took twenty further years to figure out why this was the case and the answer is obvious as all answers, in hindsight, routinely are.

Organic chemistry consists of studying just three molecules (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen) which have the advantage of being "light" (meaning: the quantum mechanics is particularly simple.)

(You can add in the rest - nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, etc. but it doesn't change the basic fact.)

So it's simple because it's a highly restrictive system. The interactions are easy to understand and model.

Compare with inorganic chemistry (100+ fuckers!) with complex quantum interactions and you've gotten yourself a mess.

What does this have to do with cooking?

Everything as it turns out.

Pastry-making consists of manipulating just four variables - flour, eggs, milk^†, sugar. The products are complex but the interaction can be modeled almost perfectly. Even better, the products are regulated so you know exactly how much fat and water there is in the milk and you can weigh the flour, eggs and sugar. There is total control.

Compare it with cooking - you have almost no control. The ripeness of roughly 200+ ingredients varies, the meat and fish vary in complex ways, and the water content of vegetables changes with the seasons.

Bread-making, at least classically, is the same. You have no control over the starter (= combination of yeast + bacteria.) Plus, it changes seasonally with the temperature and humidity.

So you must improvise even though you know the rough path of the score.

Pastry-making is score-driven. Cooking needs basic routine and technique but is ultimately improvisatory.

Cooking is jazz, baby!

---

† Milk includes milk-related products like butter, cream, cheese, etc.

Food Metaphors in Shakespeare

There are any number, of course.

First up, the classic on alcohol and sex from Macbeth on what drink provokes:

Marry, sir, nose-painting, sleep, and urine.
Lechery, sir, it provokes, and unprovokes; it provokes
the desire, but it takes away the performance.
A brief admonition from A Midsummer Night's Dream that the CC emphatically does not agree with:

And, most dear actors, eat no onions
nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I
do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet
comedy. No more words: away! go, away!
Finally, the classic opening of Twelfth Night that tickles the CC in two different ways by combining his favorite two objects in one coherent metaphor:

If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.

That Burger-y Feeling!

Jimmy Buffett's Cheeseburger in Paradise

Tomato Broth

The recipe bears a great deal of resemblance to your basic tomato sauce so you may want to read that first.

You must take your time with frying the tomato purée. Yes, this is Maillard. As Brahms once told a critic, "Any ass can see that!"

Ingredients

1 medium red onion (diced very fine)
4 cloves garlic (crushed)

1 lb tomatoes (passed through a food mill)

olive oil
sea salt
black pepper

Recipe

Fry the onion and the garlic at very low heat for at least 10 minutes. Yes, this matters.

Add the tomato purée, salt and pepper and fry for a bit. Let it reduce at a low heat for the better part of 20-25 mins. All the taste comes out of this extreme reduction so deal.

Add the water to dilute it to the required consistency, and let it come to a boil.

This is the point in time you can add "seasonings" (for example, rosemary, etc.) Let it simmer on a low heat for 20 mins.

You need to pass the stuff through a strainer to get the broth. Dilute further (if necessary.)

The Depression Special

Food, Glorious Food from Oliver!

Coffee Addiction?

Somewhere roughly between 1732 and 1734, Bach wrote, essentially, a miniature comic opera, popularly known as the Coffee Cantata (BWV 211.)

Featuring such lovely lyrics as "Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht" ("Be still, stop chattering"), it's basically an ode to the trials and tribulations of coffee addiction.

The mini-cantata ends with the trio which exults in the fact that "drinking coffee is natural".

And never a truer word was said.

Food and Celebrities

"The rich are different from you and me."
Celebrities of all ages have always had food made in their honor. After all, they were the ones who could always afford it, and blew inordinate amounts on it.

More interesting are the cases when chefs were so moved so as to name dishes after their supposed inspirers.

Opera singers used to be the Hollywood celebrities of their day and age. Escoffier goes crazy over a soprano, and we are lucky to have two dishes -- "Melba Toast", and "Peach Melba". Next century, a San Francisco restauranteur goes ga-ga, and thus was born "Turkey Tetrazzini", and more recently, "Lamb Kallas".

Movie stars are the next order of business, and hence the "Shirley Temple".

Financiers, in their own way, were celebrities of their time. Hence, "Oysters Rockefeller", and "Eggs Benedict" (the latter a hangover cure after the kind of drunken debauchery that only Wall Streeters are capable of.)

Kings and their mistresses have been naturals for scandal long before the current pileup at Windsor Castle. Thank them for the existence of "Crêpes Suzette".

And every once in a while, an artist makes his way into the culinary vocabulary -- "Beef Carpaccio". The conversion of the latter word into an adjective borders on the absurd, as it specifically refers to the pale pinks in his paintings.

The Rossini roster ("Tournedos Rossini", "Maccheroni Rossini") seems to have waned from the culinary catalog just as his music seems to have waned from the standard operatic repertoire. Perhaps shift of contemporary tastes away from foie gras also had something to do with it.

"They just don't make them like they used to."
Somehow, a "Hilton Hoagie" or a "Anna's Banana" doesn't quite cut it.

They may have the scandal but they lack the sizzle and the sex appeal. Why bother to symbolically consume something when you can get it on YouTube?

And now that chefs are celebrities in their own right, a few narcissistic names may come along. Maybe, "Puck Pockets" or "Natto à la Nobu".

The CC doubts it'll catch on though.