136. The wine-in-itself

Previous - 135. August Escoffier

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Salesforce Tower...

 ...is rising ever closer to its final height.

View from below my apartment.

View from above my apartment a few weeks later.

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 Subjectivity
p67 ... 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?

Next - 137. Proust!

135. August Escoffier

Previous - 134. Neural plasticity

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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.
...

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.
...

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....
...

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.)
...

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.
...

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.

Next - 136. The wine-in-itself