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

Patterson, Daniel; Aftel, Mandy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594634300 ISBN 13: 9781594634307

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2017

Synopsis

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.
 

About this title

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 religion as well as in medicine, and also in daily life, to preserve food, to repel unpleasant insects, to purify noxious airs, to clean the body and beautify the skin, to evoke love in an indifferent beloved, to improve one's social status, and in many other ways.

Medieval apothecaries, cooks, and perfumers alike used musk and ambergris and civet and rosewater along with precious spices to bring both exquisite fragrance and extraordinary flavors to their concoctions. Their recipes were jumbled together in volumes that were sometimes called Books of Secrets. Yet there is no doubt that the sensual orchestration of ingredients was a driving force in the composition of such concoctions from their earliest manifestations-and the systems that emerged in many cultures for categorizing them reflected this. In cooking during the Arab empire, as Bernard Rosenberger notes in the essay "Arab Cuisine and Its Contribution to European Culture," fragrances were "the noblest of all food additives." Those derived from animals headed the list, chiefly musk and ambergris, although their costliness meant that only the very rich could afford them. Also prized, and more readily procured, were rosewater, saffron, cinnamon, galangal, clove, mastic, nutmeg, cardamom, and mace.

We were delighted to discover an unapologetic sensualist in Ghiyath Shashi, the sultan of Mandu (near present-day Mandav, India). An eccentric with some very modern interests and attitudes, he is the original author of The Sultan's Book of Delights, a collection of recipes for cooking and perfumes that dates to the late fifteenth century. A lone copy of it survives, in the British Library, but versions of many of the recipes it contains are still in use today. Upon assuming the sultanate in 1469, Ghiyath Shashi immediately announced that, having supported his father, Muhmud Shah, for thirty-four years, he decided not to extend his kingdom or spend his time on the cares of state. He left that to his son, Nasir Shah, while he gave himself up to seeking pleasure, a pursuit that he hoped his subjects would share.

The recipes-to which Nasir Shah later added-reflect a culture that literally feasted on aromatics. Many concoctions are recommended both for perfume and for flavoring-instructions to "eat this or rub it on the body, or put it in food" are not uncommon. Readers are exhorted to "rub rosewater and musk onto their private parts and in their mouths and to put sandalwood on their throats. Essence of musk is good for the mouth, [also] put aloes perfume into the mouth. Rub rosewater on the forehead, sniff flowers, scatter spikenard on the head, rub saffron on the face, use scented flower oils of every kind, make scented powder with the sweet scent of flowers, polish the two front teeth, rub perfume into the handkerchief, wash the whole body with rosewater." Other tips: "Fill pockets with musk and sew them up. Rub scented paste into every belt and into the armpits." For fresh breath, "hold a white China rose in one side of the mouth and turmeric leaves in the other side."

The recipes are a marvel of specificity and creativity, reflecting a deep understanding of ingredients and the nuances that distinguish them from one another, all fueled by a sensual delight in creating delectable concoctions. They are careful to indicate when to use dried ginger and when fresh, or when to roast cumin with salt. One recipe calls for both sweet orange peel and sour orange leaves, and another recommends putting dough that has been fried in ghee "amongst roses so it acquires a sweet smell." Not a page passes without mention of musk or ambergris, and often a recipe specifies white ambergris or black. Methods for stuffing limes and oranges capitalize on the essential oils that are concentrated in the peels of citrus fruits. The attention to the details that make flavor exquisite extends to the serving suggestions, such as the recommendation to present a lime sherbet seasoned with pepper in glasses that have been scented with aloeswood.

It was this kind of sensual, sophisticated engagement with a range of alluring ingredients that made us sit up and take notice. We felt like we were discovering kindred spirits who thought about flavor the way we do. From an earlier period of the history of what is now modern-day India had emerged the concept of rasa. Reading about it was like finding a fellow traveler, or a long-lost lover. We quickly recognized that the concept comes close to the way we think and talk about flavor-centuries ago and a world away. The concept refers both to the essence of an ingredient, its purest and finest part, and to the pleasure one takes in experiencing that flavor. Moreover, rasa conceives of both the flavor of a dish and the process that achieves it as irreducible. "Rather than thinking of flavoring as an enhancing additive," writes Susan L. Schwartz in Rasa: Performing the Divine in India, Indian traditions view flavor as an essential, defining quality of food. "One does not add herbs and spices as a separate and intriguing supplement but as a part of the process of creation."

Rasa acknowledges the entirely new flavor that can emerge from a combination of ingredients: "The standard analogy is that of a blend of a basic food, such as yoghurt, with a number of spices; the resulting substance has a unique flavor (rasa) which is not identical with any of the single elements comprising it," writes Donna M. Wulff in "Religion in a New Mode: The Convergence of the Aesthetic and the Religious in Medieval India." Rasa is about creating flavor in a way that is integral to a dish, not an afterthought or adornment-it puts flavor at the center of cooking and eating.

Cultures with this kind of thoughtful and intricate engagement with flavor seem to use the widest array of ingredients, and appear particularly alert to the possibilities presented by the most intensely aromatic of them-the herbs and spices and flowers and citruses. The carefully orchestrated use of spices is a game-changer in the mastery of flavor, and Indian cooking is rightly celebrated for that.

You may be surprised to learn that for a long time even Western cuisine was more adventurous than its reputation would lead you to believe. Herbs, of course, grow locally the world over and so were always at hand for use in food and medicine alike, and some spices, such as anise, fennel, and coriander, were widely available as well. Yet we tend to forget how early the more exotic spices became available in the West, and how popular they were. With their penetrating aromas that could survive long voyages, they mounted a multipronged attack on the senses that few could resist. They could be worn on the body as perfumes, season food, or fragrance your home as incense. Part of their appeal, too, was their exotic origins. They came from fabled, faraway lands and carried the whiff of all that was beautiful and rare. As Paul Freedman notes in Out of the East, spices appeared in 90 percent of the recipes in medieval English cookbooks and in 75 percent of the recipes in European cookbooks from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries-a proportion that covers both sweet and savory dishes (a distinction that, for that matter, did not yet cleanly exist).

Sugar was considered a spice in its own right-a way of making medicinal concoctions with bland or unpleasant tastes more palatable. It was also valued for its ability to influence texture, whether as a syrup or boiled to candy. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the increased availability of sugar from the colonies had paved the way for the dichotomy of dishes into separate categories of sweet and savory, and sugar began to be limited to what we now think of as "sweets," with a higher concentration of sugar used in fewer kinds of dishes. Sugar also played a decisive role in the popularity of coffee, chocolate, and tea-inherently bitter substances that were initially introduced into Europe as medicines and didn't become widely popular in the West until they were sweetened with sugar.

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1594634300
• ISBN 13: 9781594634307
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 288