Modernist Cuisine is part of the attack on many fronts on the values of simple family cooking that better than other kind deserves to be called cooking.

“The business of a healthy eye is to see everything that is visible, not to demand no color but green.”Marcus Aurelius, “Meditations” (This quote was posted on Marcella’s page, here is her response).

In case you missed the intent of the Marcus Aurelius quote, it was a barb that was lofted from France in my direction. But, pace, I have grown old, but not color blind. El Bulli and Modernist Cuisine may be examples of ingenuity and engineering but they are not different colors of cooking because they are only about recreational eating, they are not about Cooking. Cooking is the institution that fosters the development and endurance of familial bonds in many of our worlds. In my world, the Mediterranean, it is based on simple meals freshly cooked with fresh ingredients, it is based on the sincerity of the home cook who through custom and experience is intuitively in tune with her craft. Why does Cooking needto be defended? Isn’t it only about food? It isn’t only about food the way love isn’t only about sex.

It is about the societal bonds that made us human. And it needs to be defended because the home cook’s grasp of her craft has been loosened and corrupted by the culture of celebrity chefs, by the homage paid to the technical exploits of such as Ferran and Myhrvold, and because for those that Frank Bruni, the Times critic, has recently described as “the growing ranks of the restaurant-obsessed” home is not the place where you prefer to eat.

Most of the meals Americans are now having, whether they come in the form of deli or Chinese take-out, or tacos and burgers, or packaged supermarket meals, or what the most recently canonized chef is serving at his restaurant, are no longer prepared fresh at home by a member of the family. It is probably too late for any kind of defense. The only thing we can do about it is talk. Futility.

Colman Andrews, a food writer of grace and erudition, has recently published a biography of Ferran Adrià, the Catalan chef. We admire the breadth of Colman’s research for this book, but we cannot agree with the tributes he bestows on Ferran, whom he compares to Picasso, Le Corbusier, and Charlie Parker. A more apt comparison would be to Charlie Chaplin, or to Houdini. Ferran’s routines and slights of hand can astonish, entertain or even please, although some of the culinary jokes fall flat. Colman cites a blogger who describes a dish of sea anemones and rabbit brains as being “Vile. Vomitous. Nightmare”. It is curious too that Ferran’s inventions have no space for meat, outside of offal, they do not agree with wine, outside of a champagne produced by a client of the chef, and they do not require bread, which is banned from the table. We cannot conceive of a cuisine that springs from Latin roots being served without bread. The subtitle of the book describes Ferran as the man who reinvented food, which is an absurdity. Food, like language, is constantly evolving, but the act of cooking, which, like language, made us human, had its moment of creation long before Ferran made foam out of smoke.

Coleman says that Ferran wants us to eat with our brains. Better to eat for pleasure, and to experience the sensations that generate that pleasure, sensations of recognition and reassurance. Even a new dish from an unfamiliar cuisine can reach deeply buried sources of pleasure and in so doing trigger recognition, generating reassurance. That is what the joy of eating is about. For us, as for everyone, there are cuisines whose flavors do not find the way to those sources in us. Coleman says that Ferran is drawn to the concept of food as a language. In Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, a book published 24 years ago, Marcella wrote, “Cooking well is like the telling use of language: Expression must be vigorous, clear, concise. There can be no unnecessary ingredient or unnecessary step. A dish may be complex, but every component, every procedure, must count. …Do not arbitrarily shuffle the vocabulary of one cuisine with that of another to make your cooking (original). There is no more use for use for such a hybrid than there was for Esperanto.” If Ferran has a cooking language may we call it Ferranto? We don’t care to learn it.

CATCHING FIRE,  How cooking made us Human, by Richard Wrangham is rightly taking the food world by storm.  Well researched and documented, the bibliography alone is thirty pages long, it is also an engaging read.  The book itself begs to be read in a group format.  While reading, I kept wanting to discuss passages with the author or fellow readers.  Astonishingly, no other writer has previously advocated the importance of how cooking effected the nutritional quality of food; therefore, enabling human beings to evolve.

Not only does Dr. Wrangham detail the evolution of human kind in terms of our understanding of fire, he also gives historical examples throughout the book.  He takes on the trendy raw food community as well as the fast food chemically processed nation.  He argues that eating calories that are too easy to digest is now a bigger problem for many than getting enough food.  His is a clarion call to gain understanding of how food is actually processed in our systems.

Catching fire, is definitely a book that will be talked about.  It is a must for any foodies library.