The Art of Flavor: Practices and Principles for Creating Delicious Food - Hardcover

Patterson, Daniel; Aftel, Mandy

 
9781594634307: The Art of Flavor: Practices and Principles for Creating Delicious Food
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1594634300 ISBN 13: 9781594634307
Verlag: Riverhead Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

As seen in Food52, Los Angeles Times, and Bloomberg

Two masters of composition - a chef and a perfumer - present a revolutionary new approach to creating delicious food.
 
Michelin two-star chef Daniel Patterson and celebrated natural perfumer Mandy Aftel are experts at orchestrating ingredients. Yet in a world awash in cooking shows and food blogs, they noticed, home cooks get little guidance in the art of flavor. In this trailblazing guide, they share the secrets to making the most of your ingredients via an indispensable set of tools and principles:
 
·         The Four Rules for creating flavor
·         A Flavor Compass that points the way to transformative combinations
·         “Locking,” “burying,” and other aspects of cooking alchemy
·         The flavor-heightening effects of cooking methods
·         The Seven Dials that let you fine-tune a dish
 
With more than eighty recipes that demonstrate each concept and put it into practice, The Art of Flavor is food for the imagination that will help cooks at any level to become flavor virtuosos.
 

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Daniel Patterson founded San Francisco’s Michelin three-star Coi and several other Bay Area restaurants; most recently, he cofounded the acclaimed “revolutionary fast food” venture LocoL. His awards include Food & Wine’s Best New Chef and a James Beard Award for Best Chef in the West. Patterson is the author of two previous books, and his essays have appeared in The New York Times, Food & Wine, Financial Times, San Francisco Magazine, and Lucky Peach.

Mandy Aftel is an internationally known artisan perfumer and award-winning author, most recently of Fragrant: The Secret Life of Scent. She has participated in many exhibitions, panels, and conferences on scent and food, and regularly collaborates with chefs and mixologists. She and her work have been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, Vanity Fair, Gourmet, Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, O,The Oprah Magazine, and Elle, on CNN, and in countless blogs. Aftel lives in Berkeley, California.

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A Brief, Biased History of Flavor

Advanced civilizations were possible because there was a surplus of food, so not everyone had to farm all the time. Advanced civilizations are where cooking for survival changes to cuisine-cooking with awareness, for a purpose other than just to make food edible.

It's clear that people have been eating well-and cooking well-for centuries. The evidence isn't only in old cookbooks, which are a fabulous paper trail of their own. It's also in novels, art, poetry, and song. But what exactly people think defines good food-and good cooking-isn't easy to tease out, because it's always been bound up in broader cultural notions about what is familiar and what is exotic, what is healthful or harmful, what goes together and what doesn't. And of course, it shifts over time. No cuisine is static. Innovations in technology, transportation, and agriculture, currents of trade and migration and urbanization-all of these factors shift cultural preferences over time.

It was fascinating for us to dive into the history of flavor, and to look for reflections of our own notions about it across time and space. One through-line is the sense that the art of cooking is an expression-and reflection-of a civilization itself. As Brillat-Savarin puts it, with typical pithiness, "Animals feed themselves; men eat; but only wise men know the art of eating." The Dao De Jing asserts that "governing the country is in principle like cooking a small fish," meaning that great care and attention are in both cases essential. Culinary skills were a fine qualification for ministerial appointment. In her essay "The Quest for Perfect Balance: Taste and Gastronomy in Imperial China," historian Joanna Waley-Cohen recounts the legend of the rise of one Yi Yin from cook to trusted minister in China's Shang dynasty-a fast track from gastronomy to governance if ever there was one:

His culinary skills brought him to the king's attention, and in his first audience he transformed the greatest philosophical issues of governance into a menu of foods to be coveted. Among other things, Yi Yin likened the whole world to a kitchen in which one prepares food, and proper government to good cooking. Just as in cooking it was necessary to understand flavours to blend them successfully; so in governing it was necessary to grasp people's sufferings and aspirations in order to satisfy their needs.

The cook has always been part levelheaded administrator. As Michael A. Symons entreats us in A History of Cooks and Cooking:

Forget for a moment their mouth-watering creations and think of cooks as rationing resources. Think of them counting out one artichoke for each guest. Think of them balancing the sweet and sour. Think of them ensuring fat, but not too much, and fibre, but not too much. . . . Cooks use their eyes, ears, touch, and, especially, nose, teeth and tongue, to share. And the most balanced results become the most satisfying, those we agree are the most pleasing. We like fairness. Not just through the dishes, cooks conjure harmonious blends out of the social, cultural and physical worlds.

But what, beyond notions of basic evenhandedness, has determined our views on what goes best with what? Of course, before it was possible to ship food easily from one place to another, what was cooked together was largely dictated by what grew together in a given region. In the south of France there was lamb and wild thyme; in Thailand, seafood, lemongrass, and galangal; and in Mexico, corn, beans, and squash. Over time, these combinations became traditional; when people were transplanted to other countries, as travelers and immigrants, they reached for the combinations they'd grown up with, introducing their favorite ingredients even as they adapted to new ones. But cuisines are more than rote combinations. They gradually evolved overarching principles that attempted to impose structure on how to bring ingredients together in harmony.

As in our own time, ideas about what constitutes good food have always been entwined with rules governing the health of the body. For example, Taoist theories dictated that foods should achieve a balance between yin and yang. Yin is cool, dark, moist, and associated with the feminine; hence yin foods-green vegetables and creatures that live in the water-are considered cooling. Yang is hot, bright, dry, and associated with the masculine, and yang foods-fatty and spicy and piping-hot foods, for example-are considered heating.

Similarly, the medieval practice of balancing humors-which had its roots in philosophical and medical concepts from ancient Greece-held that the universe was made up of four elements: fire (hot and dry), water (cold and wet), earth (cold and dry), and air (hot and wet). The human body had four related fluids or humors: choler or yellow bile, phlegm, black bile, and blood. The aim was to eat so as to balance the individual's humors, achieving an optimal state of warm and moist. Disease was understood to be the result of humoral imbalance and was to be avoided (or treated) by adjusting one's diet, as described by medieval food scholar Ken Albala in Eating Right in the Renaissance: "Cloves would bring into balance the excessively phlegmatic person. . . . Conversely, a sanguine youth should abstain from wine because it would only increase his natural imbalance toward heat and moisture."

As Paul Freedman explains in Out of the East, the ideas that animated such principles of "healthful" eating were not like "the American practice of having a diet soft drink to offset a cheeseburger. Rather it is a notion of harmony and complementarity, linking foods and ingredients that belong together for reasons of both taste and balance, or even that medical balance is what lies behind the achievement of beautiful gastronomic effects." In fact, under the trappings of healthfulness, deliciousness often seems to be the real point. Albala underscores this:

The key to understanding the qualities in the humoral system is flavor. Behind nearly every single qualitative evaluation is ultimately a taste test, and flavor is the most consistent criterion for categorizing foods. . . . Everything can be placed into one of seven basic flavor categories: sweet, bitter, acute, salty, acidic, styptic, and unctuous. Most would add an eighth as well: insipid. The Hellenists also added "acrid" as the hottest of flavors, associated with pepper and mustard.

Mandy had done a deep dive into the history of perfume for her previous books on perfumery, and had been entranced by the sense of stepping back into epochs when the lines between enterprises-cooking, medicine, worship, adornment-were not drawn as they are now. The very notion of cooking as a discrete activity is a modern invention. In the medieval world, cooking, perfumery, and medicine were entwined. Little distinction was made between end uses of ingredients. Edward Schafer makes this point in The Golden Peaches of Samarkand:

Just as no hard and fast line can be drawn between cosmetics and drugs in the civilization of the medieval Far East, so any attempt to discriminate precisely between foods and drugs, or between condiments and perfumes, would lead to frustrated misrepresentation of the true role of edibles in T'ang culture . . . spices and perfumes had their parts to play in...

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Verlag
Riverhead Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594634300
ISBN 13 
9781594634307
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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Verantwortliche Person
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