GA: We’re actually going to reference the Mosaic when there are particularly difficult techniques in the book; we’ll tell people go to the Mosaic and watch a movie of it, because one thing I’ve noticed is that it’s pretty difficult at times to convey the simplest things through words. We take it for granted—like when we’re in the kitchen, we might say “Spread a purée on a piece of acetate, roll it into a cylinder, and tape it, with the purée on the inside.” It sounds really simple, and as a cook you know it’s really simple because you do it every day. But then you have to write it down, and you have somebody who’s not a cook read it—and you ask if it makes sense and they say no. So then it’s back to the drawing board to make it understandable. It’s really very educational writing a cookbook, I have to say—it’s a lot more work than I thought it was going to be. We’re cooks, we’re not writers.
CH: Switching gears here from the cookbooks, people tend to lump your two cuisines into the same category—“molecular gastronomy”—and I know that Heston, you don’t use that term.
HB: Well, I don’t have a problem with the term; it’s actually the way the term has been interpreted. Grant and I might have very similar ethos and beliefs and principles, but obviously we have our own styles of cooking. And the trouble is, I just feel that if you say to somebody, there’s a restaurant making a tarte tatin and another one making a tarte tatin, then okay, they could be put into the classical French food category. But if you’ve got one restaurant doing unusual, creative food and another one doing unusual, creative food, they just get lumped into the same category, and that category—especially if it involves doing anything remotely unconventional and nontraditional—is molecular gastronomy. And then people assume somehow that there are chefs walking around with clipboards and test tubes and little lights strapped around their heads.
If you say to people, what if I were to juice this lemon on a glass juicer? Okay, fine. What about juicing raspberries in a liquidizer? No problem. Okay, what about juicing carrots in this veg juicer I’ve got? No problem. And then you say, well, what about this lab-grade centrifuge? Whoa, hang on a sec, now you’re talking funny stuff. And this comes back to the idea of only cooking on fire—where do you draw the line? A motorcar in the 1920s and a motorcar today: still a motorcar. It might have electric windows and stability control and all this stuff, but it’s still a car. You know, we like to embrace modern technology in all other walks of life: It doesn’t dehumanize filmmaking; in theatre you’ve got modern lighting and sound systems, and it doesn’t turn it into something that’s no longer pure and human. With cooking it’s the same thing; we’ve just got more tools in the kit [today]. As long as the tools don’t overtake what we’re cooking, you can look at them as tools. You’ve got tools, ingredients, and technology, and it’s still just cooking.
GA: If you look at gastronomy in the historical sense, you see these patterns, these waves. And it just so happens—fortunately for all of us, I think—that in our time there’s been an explosion in new technique for the first time in years and years. We’re going back to Escoffier or something before there was a time in gastronomic history when chefs had this kind of renaissance of new techniques being developed, and it’s an exciting time in cooking. But what’s going to happen is over time it’s going to become more mainstream, and you already see that happening where a lot of the techniques that have just been developed in the last 5-10 years are filtering down, and then we’ll probably go through a period of, I don’t know what you call it, dormancy or something like that, and then it’s going to explode in another 50 years. I can’t wait to go out to eat when I’m 80 years old!
HB: That’s going to be exciting. I was involved in a discussion panel last year, and Michel Gerard was there; I didn’t know this, but I found it absolutely astonishing: He said that he got a phone call in the early 1970s from his mate, either Pierre or Jean Troisgros, saying he’d just put food on a plate. And [Gerard] said that’s the first known instance of the chef in the restaurant plating food himself. Before that it was always done in the front of the house, from the platter to the plate at the table. So it completely transferred the control of the food to the chef. And you think, I can’t believe that it was only 40 years ago that chefs didn’t plate food.
GA: So can we classify [molecular gastronomy] as a style of cooking? Probably. Like Heston says, there are certain philosophies that are involved and certain techniques that we share, but ultimately I think it’s just an evolution of a certain segment of dining. And I think it will continue to evolve. It’s like anything else—art, technology. And for some reason people didn’t complain when we went from 8-track to cassette to CD to iPod, but they get all freaked out when food starts to modernize.
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