Previous - 134. Neural plasticity
August Escoffier - From Proust Was...
I'm going to take this from the top later, but I have to record this first impression,p70 ...Our human brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that prejudices feel like facts, opinions are indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a Grand Cru, then we will taste a Grand Cru... our expectations of what the wine will taste like "can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself."
I had to note this passage because of its obvious political and sociological implications, but the wine aspect is also interesting. What I left out is the experiment in which wine experts were unable to notice that what was served as a red wine was actually a white with food coloring, or that what was served to them as a Grand Cru and a vin du table, was in fact the same wine.
Because I know I don't have any taste when it comes to wine, I tend to order either the house wine or the cheapest wine on the list, just to see if it's drinkable. Often I find the cheapest wine is the one I like best (not always). So, is that because I'm determined to find it a hidden gem, or simply because I have no taste when it comes to wine?
When I realized this chapter was about the origin of "modern" French cooking (and isn't it interesting that Escoffier was publishing his works at the same time Einstein was publishing his works on Relativity? I would have thought this kind of cooking went back much further than Special and General Relativity) I thought this was something I could probably skim since I can't even eat any of this food. Instead, it was amazingly interesting and the neurological aspects of smell are a great extension of other things about the brain I've learned in the past year. Now to resume at the beginning,
p53 At the heart of Escoffier's insight... was his use of stock. He put in it everything. He reduced it to gelatinous jelly, made it the base of pureed soups, and enriched it with butter and booze for sauces... "Indeed, stock is everything in cooking. Without it, nothing can be done. If one's stock is good, what remains of the work is easy; if, on the other hand, it is bad or merely mediocre, it is quite hopeless to expect anything approaching a satisfactory meal." What every other chef was throwing away -- the scraps of tendon and oxtail,the tops of celery, the ends of onion, and the irregular corners of carrot -- Escoffier was simmering into sublimity.
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p54 Escoffier's emphasis on the tongue was the source of his culinary revolution. In his kitchen, a proper cook was a man of exquisite sensitivity, "carefully studying the trifling details of each separate flavor before he sends his masterpiece of culinary art before his patrons." Escoffier's cookbook warns again and again that the experience of the dish -- what it actually tastes like -- is the only thing that matters...
p55 Deglazing was the secret of Escoffier's success. The process itself is extremely simple: a piece of meat is cooked at a very high temperature -- to produce a nice seared Maillard crust, a cross-linking and caramelizing of amino acids -- and then a liquid, such as a rich veal stock, is added. As the liquid evaporates, it loosens the fronde, the burned bits of protein stuck to the bottom of the pan... The dissolved fronde is what gives Escoffier's sauces their divine depth...
The Secret of Deliciousness
This is the story of Kikunae Ikeda and the discovery of "umami" and MSG. In short, despite the prevailing wisdom that the human tongue can only taste sweet, salty, bitter, and sour, Ikeda was convinced there must be something else, which turns out to be umami -- Japanese for delicious.
p56 ... To be precise, umami is actually the taste of L-glutamate (C5H9NO4), the dominant amino acid in the composition of life. L-glutamate is released from life-forms by proteolysis (a shy scientific word for death, rot, and the cooking process)... [Escoffier's] genius was getting as much L-glutamate on the plate as possible. The emulsified butter didn't hurt either.
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p57 Glutamic acid is itself tasteless. Only when the protein is broken down by cooking, fermentation, or a little ripening in the sun does the molecule degenerate into L-glutamate, an amino acid that the tongue can taste....
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p59 Everything from aged cheese to ketchup was rich in this magic little amino acid... (Salted, slightly rotting anchovies are like glutamate speedballs. They are pure umami.)... Umami even explains... Marmite... (Marmite has... a higher concentration of glutamate than any other manufactured product.)
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p60 And of course, umami also explains Escoffier's genius. The burned bits of meat in the bottom of a pan are unraveled protein, rich in L-glutamate. Dissolved in the stock, which is little more than umami water, these browned scraps fill your mouth with a deep sense of deliciousness, the profound taste of life in a state of decay.
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p62 ...We love the flavor of denatured protein because, being protein and water ourselves, we need it. Our human body produces more than forty grams of glutamate a day, so we constantly crave an amino acid refill...
The Smell of an Idea
Now we get into how important smell is to the enjoyment of food. And he starts with Marie-Antoine Carême who didn't care what his fancy meals tasted like if they looked spectacular.
p62 ...Before Escoffier began cooking in the new restaurants of the bourgeoisie (unlike his predecessors, he was never a private chef for an aristocrat), fancy cooking was synonymous with ostentation. As long as a dinner looked decadent, its actual taste was pretty irrelevant...
p63 ...While Carême feared heat (his lard sculptures tended to melt), Escoffier conditioned his diners to expect a steaming bowl of soup... "The Customer," Escoffier warned in his cookbook, "finds that the dish is flat and insipid unless it is served absolutely boiling hot."
What Escoffier inadvertently discovered when he started serving food fresh off the stovetop was the importance of our sense of smell. When food is hot, its molecules are volatile and evaporate in the air. A slowly simmering stock or a clove of garlic sauteed in olive oil can fill an entire kitchen with its alluring odor...
p64 ...Escoffier aspired to a level of artistry that the tongue couldn't comprehend. As a result, Escoffier's capacious recipes depend entirely upon the flourishes of flavor that we inhale. In fact... the hint of tarragon in a lobster veloute, the whisper of vanilla in a creme anglaise, the leaf of chervil floating in a carrot soup -- are precisely what the unsubtle tongue can't detect. The taste of most flavors is smell.
Here there is a lengthy description of smell from the neurological perspective, most of which I'm skipping.
p66 ...the demi-glace our nose knows is actually composed of many different aromas. Neurons all over the brain light up, reflecting the hodgepodge of smells simultaneously activating our odor receptors... Within a few milliseconds of being served the demi-glace, the mind must bind together the activity of hundreds of distinct smell receptors into a coherent sensation. This is known as the binding problem.
But wait: it gets worse. The binding problem occurs when we experience a sensation that is actually represented as a network of separate neurons distributed across the brain. In the real world, however, reality doesn't trickle in one smell at a time. The brain is constantly confronted with a pandemonium of different odors. As a result, it not only has to bind together its various sensations, it has to decipher which neurons belong to which sensations. For example, the demi-gace was probably served as a sauce for a tender fillet of beef, with a side of buttery mashed potatoes. This Escoffier-inspired dish instantly fills the nose with a barrage of distinct scents... Faced with such a delicious meal, we can either inhale the odor of the dish as a whole -- experiencing the overlapping smells as a sort of culinary symphony -- or choose to smell each of the items separately. In other words, we can parse our own inputs and, if we so desire, choose to focus on just the smell of potatoes... Although this act of selective attention seems effortless, neuroscience has no clue how it happens. This is known as the parsing problem. [Synesthesia! And autism.]
p67 Parsing and binding are problems because they can't be explained from the bottom up. No matter how detailed our maps of the mind become, the maps still won't explain how a cacophony of cells is bound into the unified perception of a sauce... Neuroscience excels at dissecting the bottom of sensation. What our dinner demonstrates is that the mind needs a top.
I'm going to break here and finish up this chapter in my next post.
Vertigo
I've already quoted (122. Venice) the passage where the guy talks about how, "The audience no longer understand that they are a part of the occasion..." but this is such a huge part of how the world has changed since the introduction of recorded music, then radio, then TV. Life has gone from being a performance to being a media stream. The average person -- by which I mean someone who can't be described as the "talent" -- has left the stage and, at most, occasionally takes a seat in the audience. And this isn't just about "society" as it also includes poor people who used to congregate on stoops and porches -- so we should probably add air conditioning and the automobile to the evils contributing to the new reality.
In general, today it is only young people eager to mate that take the trouble to venture out onto the stage in this way. And a vestige of "society." I'm as bad as anyone when it comes to staying home and minding my own business. It takes something really special to get me out. And it's not like there aren't things to do here. I'm not even sure I would have been different in the past. I do identify with characters like Mr Bennett in P & P who's content to retreat to his library and has to be dragged to the occasional ball by his wife.
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