HAROLD MCGEE: Now I want to just give you a very quick overview.
And this is--
I apologize it's such a caricature of a couple hundred, 300 years of
culinary history, which is very rich.
But just to give you a sense of what the last 20 or 30 years have meant,
why we're here tonight.
A very quick look at the professional kitchen pre-Ferran.
So next slide.
1750--
a Frenchman writing about what it is that a cook should be doing in the
kitchen as a chemist.
And the job essentially is to harmonize, to get the essences out of
foods, and then to harmonize them, so that no particular element dominates
the others.
Everything is there in a kind of balance.
And I think that basically holds true even today.
That idea of balance and harmony and so on is sort of at the root of what
classic French cooking is all about.
Next slide.
Careme and Scoffer are two kind of landmark figures in the development of
French cooking.
And basically, what they did was start with that basic idea, and then
elaborate on it.
And by the end of many, many elaborations, what you ended up with
were guidebooks--
"guide culinaire"--
very, very thick, full of what amount to themes and variations--
relatively few themes, lots and lots of variations.
And many of the themes have to do with meat extracts.
That's really at the base.
Even most vegetable preparations were finished with the sauce
that came from meat.
So it's a very highly developed and wonderful cuisine, but it occupies a
fairly narrow part of the spectrum.
Next slide.
The French themselves began to feel a little restless about this in the late
'60s, early '70s.
And so, a new nouvelle cuisine developed.
And these are the Ten Commandments that were kind of formulated not by
the chefs themselves, who tended to be kind of mavericks, not about to make
commandments for other people.
These were put together by journalists, who were trying to
understand the movement in general.
And you'll see various things that have to do, in fact, with eliminating
brown and white sauces, because they were so overused.
But two important things-- seek out what new techniques can bring you, and
you shall be inventive.
At that time, new techniques, new technologies included things like
electrical blenders, which give you really, really fine purees--
finer than what you could make before, easily.
And things like that, things that would not be that
surprising to us today.
Next slide.
So we finally come to Ferran.
And here he is.
This is a meeting in Cannes.
And he's written about this in detail, and in really fascinating ways.
The fact that he went to this meeting of French chefs, and heard the man who
standing at the far left in this photograph, Jacques Maximin, say, "to
be creative means not to copy."
And that, for whatever reasons, resonated with Ferran in a way that
nothing else had, and that kind of changed his life, and that changed the
course of culinary history.
And that's why we're here tonight.
Next slide.
Just to give you an idea of what creativity meant in Ferran's hands as
opposed to, say, the hands of the chefs of the nouvelle cuisine.
Michel Bras is a kind of second generation nouvelle cuisine chef.
Works in the Auvergne, greatly respected--
all kinds of things you could say about him.
And by the way, the molten chocolate cake that is going to be made in the
course is his idea.
So that's why it's there.
Next slide.
He is in a part of France, the southeast, which is very rich in
native plants that are edible, and that had not been used in classic
French cooking.
And so, he thought that one of the things that he could do would be to
use the local things in season to make dishes that were very
special to his place.
And so, he invented something that he called the gargouillon--
in the next slide--
which is a miscellany of herbs, vegetables, sprouts, all kinds of
things that he would gather, or his people would gather, in the course of
the morning, and then prepare over the course of the day.
And each one was prepared separately, because a different leaf is going to
require a different kind of preparation.
You want to do each one perfectly.
So this dish, which was classical in a way but revolutionary in a way,
quickly became an icon.
And people used it as a kind of reference point for the new way of
looking at cooking.
So next slide.
This is what Ferran did with the same idea.
He tasted and experienced the gargouillon.
And as he's written, he thought about it for a few years.
What can I do with that basic idea, but really be creative with it?
And what he did with it is this, which is, again, a mixture of, in this case,
fruits as well as vegetables, and an herb.
But if you look at it, none of the components of the dish look like what
they came from.
So Michel Bras takes the bounty of nature, celebrates the bounty of
nature, presents it to you as the bounty of nature in a beautiful way.
Ferran starts with the