Previous - 135. August Escoffier
Salesforce Tower...
...is rising ever closer to its final height.
The location of the tower was determined by the placement of the Transbay Terminal from the 1930s -- the cost of replacing which, Salesforce is helping to cover. So I'm certain no one "planned" on how wonderfully the new tower is working as a downtown orientation marker. It seems to appear prominently from any number of major streets because of how the various street grids mesh. The view down Columbus from North Beach would have been significantly better if the tower were a block further east, but it still works from one sidewalk at least. I was at Land's End the other day and it now dominates the skyline from that perspective as well -- with hawks soaring about for decoration.
Here's what puzzles me about this: My architecture education is very limited, I only took a few survey classes, yet I clearly recall the lessons on how focal points like this were crucial to urban design in Rome and London and Paris in the 19th century. I can still see the slides... though now, I suppose, I'm only seeing some re-imagining of those slides (sorry, that's coming up in the next chapter when we get to Proust.)
So if I remember this from school, why does it seem that actual city planners don't? Here I'm thinking about what should be a similar focal point in Mission Bay at the end of 4th street -- a wasted opportunity. They get it right by accident and where they could have done it on purpose there's nothing.
Anniversaries gone wild
A while back I wrote about all the 30 year anniversaries coming up having to do with my transition from bookstore clerk to computer coder. And recently I wrote about my 20 year illness cycle. This morning it occurred to me that 40 years ago was both another of those colds but also when I moved here to SF. And 50 years ago was when my family moved from the San Fernando Valley to Central Arizona. Now I'm wondering if anything happened in 2007, and if not, why not? (My move to SF was actually in 1976, but rather than a break in the pattern, I see this as extra credit for getting out of Arizona a year early.) Now I think of it, 2007 should have been about when I started my greening work.And 1957 was peak (or near enough) of American car design, to my eyes,
Auguste Escoffier cont.
A Sense of Subjectivityp67 ... When we bind or parse our sensations, what we are really doing is making judgments about what we think we are sensing. This unconscious act of interpretation is largely driven by contextual cues. If you encounter... the smell of demi-glace in a McDonald's -- your brain secretly begins altering its sensory verdict... The fancy scent of veal stock becomes a Quarter Pounder.
p68 Our sense of smell is particularly vulnerable to this sort of outside influence. Since many odors differ only in their molecular details -- and we long ago traded away nasal acuity for better color vision -- the brain is often forced to decipher smells based upon non-olfactory information. Parmesan cheese and vomit, for example, are both full of butyric acid, which has a pungent top note and a sweetish linger. As a result, blindfolded subjects in experiments will often confuse the two stimuli. In real life, however, such sensory mistakes are extremely rare. Common sense overrules our actual senses.
...Although Escoffier spent eighteen hours a day behind a hot stove, crafting his collection of sauces, he realized that what we taste is ultimately an idea, and that our sensations are strongly influenced by their context...
...
This is where we come to the clever wine tests that the "experts" all failed.
p70 What these wine experiments illuminate is the omnipresence of subjectivity. When we take a sip of wine, we don't taste the wine first and the cheapness or redness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of this-wine-is-red, or this-wine-is-expensive...
...what we experience is not what we sense. Rather, experience is what happens when sensations are interpreted by the subjective brain, which brings to the moment its entire library of personal memories and idiosyncratic desires. [Footnote: ...Escoffier always believed that a steak seared at high temperature is juicier, for the seared crust "seals in the meat's natural juices." This is completely false... a steak cooked at high temperature contains less of its own juices, as that alluring sizzling noise is actually the sound of the meat's own liquid evaporating... Nevertheless... even if a well-seared steak is literally drier, it still tastes juicier... it makes us drool in anticipation... what we are actually sensing is our own saliva, which the brain induced the salivary glands to release. Our personal decision to drool warps the sensory experience of the steak.] As the philosopher Donald Davidson argued, it is ultimately impossible to distinguish between a subjective contribution to knowledge that comes from our selves (what he calls our "scheme") and an objective contribution that comes from the outside world ("the content"). [Now I see why Lehrer brought up solipsism in a passage I haven't quoted.] In Davidson's influential epistemology, the "organizing system and something waiting to be organized" are hopelessly interdependent. Without our subjectivity we could never decipher our sensations, and without our sensations we would have nothing about which to be subjective. Before you can taste the wine you have to judge it.
And we're back to phenomenology and the thing-in-itself again. Here we are crushing Descartes's assertion, that we can trust our God given senses to reveal the world as it truly is, under yet another level of stones. Our reality is never objective.
p71 But even if we could -- by some miracle of Robert Parkeresque objectivity -- taste the wine as it is (without the distortions of scheming subjectivity), we would still all experience a different wine. Science has long known that our sensitivity to certain smells and tastes varies by as much as 1,000 percent between individuals. On a cellular level, this is because the human olfactory cortex, the part of the brain that interprets information from the tongue and nose, is extremely plastic, free to arrange itself around the content of our individual experiences. Long after our other senses have settled down, our sense of taste and smell remain in total neural flux. Nature designed us this way: the olfactory bulb is full of new neurons. Fresh cells are constantly being born, and the survival of these cells depends upon their activity. Only cells that respond to the smells and tastes we are actually exposed to survive. Everything else withers away. The end result is that our brains begin to reflect what we eat.
...
p72 ... every time a customer devoured one of Escoffier's dishes, choosing the fillet over the rouget, the sensations of that person's tongue were altered. When Escoffier was working at the Savoy in London... he had faith that he could educate even the palates of the British. At first, Escoffier was horrified by how his new patrons defied his carefully arranged menu. (He refused to learn English out of fear, he later said, that he would come to cook like the English.)... He invented the chef's tasting menu as an educational tool, for he was confident that people could learn how to eat. Over time, the English could become more French. He was right: because the sense of taste is extremely plastic, it can be remodeled by new experiences. It's never too late to become a gourmet.
Interesting to note that he was also a contemporary of George Gissing and published his cookbook only a few years after Gissing published The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft with those curious passages about English cuisine.
p73 ...Escoffier's culinary inventions have gone on to modify untold numbers of olfactory cortices, noses, and tongues... This is the power of good cooking: it invents a new kind of desire... He led us to expect food to taste like its essence...
How many times have we been here? Starting with Proust talking about how artists have to create -- through education and exposure -- the audience for their work. He was talking about painting but we've extended this to music (and in particular Jazz dissonance). It should be no surprise that it also extends to food.
...[Escoffier] knew that deliciousness was deeply personal, and that any analysis of taste must begin with the first-person perspective. Like Ikeda, he listened not to the science of his time, which treated the tongue like a stranger, but to the diversity of our cravings and the whims of our wants...
Of course, the individuality of our experiences is what science will never be able to solve. The fact is, each of us literally inhabits a different brain, tuned to the tenor of our private desires. These desires have been molded -- at the level of our neurons -- by a lifetime of eating... The individuality of taste, which is, in a way, the only aspect of taste that really matters, cannot be explained by science. The subjective experience is irreducible. Cooking is a science and an art....
The next chapter is the one about Proust, but I can't imagine it can be better than this one. Who would have guessed?
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