Kurti demonstrated his point in a speech more than 30 years ago to some of the world's leading scientists, at the Royal Institution, in London. He hooked up scientific instruments to a mixture of whipped eggs and sugar and liqueur, and showed how the goo's internal temperature rose and fell as he baked it. "I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization," Kurti told his audience, "that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés."
As Kurti got older, it looked as if he might never realize his dream of getting scientists and cooks to collaborate. But then he met a kindred spirit, a younger man named Hervé This, who tells me his story one evening after we've left the workshop "Parameters That Control the Texture of Gels." "At the time when I met Nicholas, I was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," says This. "During the day, I was editing the French edition of Scientific American, and at night I went home to my kitchen where I have a lab, and I did scientific experiments to improve the way we cook."
As This warms to his topic, the disconnect between science and cooking, he leans across the table to make his points; he's movie-star handsome, in a boyish way, and when he revs up, his eyes go to afterburners. "It's indecent that we cook as people did in the Middle Ages," he says. "They had whisks. They had pans. They had stoves. The microwave is the only really new kitchen tool we've had in the past five hundred years. But in the science laboratory, ooh-laaa … we have many tools that could do wonderful things in the kitchen."
He rattles through a veritable catalog of scientific equipment, which he actually uses to churn out dinners for his family. Forget that obsolete business of straining sauces through wire mesh and clarifying consommé by adding egg whites: This uses a chemist's filter spun from glass, and he produces crystal-clear liquids almost instantly. He would never emulsify homemade mayonnaise with a whisk—or, worse, bruise the ingredients in a processor. "I put the egg yolk and oil and other ingredients in a laboratory ultrasound box," he says, "then press a button, and in two seconds—poof!" The high-frequency sound waves whip the ingredients like millions of miniature beaters. "My mayonnaise is perfect.
"But I was explaining to you about Nicholas," he says. When This, the young, charismatic editor, met Kurti, the old, charismatic physicist, the two men bonded. More importantly, they agreed to launch a crusade to convince chefs that science could lead them into the new millennium. The pair tracked down a group of soul mates in the U.S. and Europe, and in 1992 they all went up to the mountaintop in Erice—and the era of "molecular gastronomy" was born.
Over the next four days, the molecular gastronomists often veer toward the surreal. A British scientist named Robin Heath shows a bizarre film that looks like something out of a 1950s horror movie. His lab, which is funded by the British government and major food companies, has cajoled some poor volunteers into sitting in front of a camera that takes X-ray movies of their heads. So we sit there like voyeurs and peer into some man's skull and jawbones projected up on the screen. We stare right into his mouth as he chews various foods, moistens them with saliva, and tosses the balls of glop around with his tongue, which looks a writhing snake. Until he mercifully swallows.
"We're learning that people perceive flavors differently depending on how they chew their foods," says Eric Dransfield, who's doing similar work at the National Institute for Agricultural Research, in France. His lab, determined not to be outdone by the British, wires electrodes to its victims' faces and jaws, and measures exactly the amount of force the various muscles of the head exert when people chew. When the researchers spike a food with bold flavors—like quinine—the subjects who chew vigorously, with lots of force, rate the foods as much more bitter than do those who chew slowly and with finesse.
Group question: Does this mean that chefs will have to tailor their seasonings to diners' chewing styles?
When you get a few dozen scientists and chefs in the same room, of course, you can't always expect the conversation to go smoothly. Or civilly. The physicists tend to wander off into the stratosphere. One day, they erupt into an argument (which starts to turn bitter) about which principles of physics are at work when you beat egg whites into fluff: Are you exerting shearing forces or extensional flow? (You'll have to look it up in a textbook.)
As Harold Mcgee wraps up his talk on better grilling through computer-monitored heat-diffusion techniques (see box at left), one of the participants looks as if he can barely stay in his seat. It's Heston Blumenthal, the 35-year-old kickboxer whose restaurant on the Thames has led British critics to rave about him and led the Automobile Association Restaurant Guide to recently name him Chef's Chef of the Year.
"I think Harold's experiment confirms some of the principles that I've already been working on in my restaurant," Blumenthal says. And as this muscular young man with a blond buzz cut modestly lays out his philosophy—explaining the zany method he's developed to cook his signature tenderloin of lamb, describing how chemists and physicists across Europe are helping him take meat and potatoes where no meat and potatoes have gone before—the molecular gastronomists start to murmur and trade meaningful looks. "Heston's the future of our movement," one of them whispers.
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