a recent post and an email

K

kirk wallace

kirk wallace
A friend (OK, my partner of 30 years) on Facebook, where i am not, forwarded the below, from Victor Hazan on Marcella's FB page, to me this AM. A recent post on here made me think about it again. Maybe some of our confreres on this bored feel the same; maybe some do not, but after many years of cooking and dining, it says almost everything I look for these days:

"Yes, of course, Marcella and I were one, but we were also two. Marcella had an inexhaustible inquisitiveness toward the natural world, which is not surprising in someone with two graduate degrees in the sciences, but where cooking was concerned she didn’t need to check how others were doing it. She didn’t have to because Marcella didn’t have doubts, she knew, and out of that knowledge, whose mysterious creative source had always been a wonder to me, she produced the pure, expressive taste of her cooking. As for me however, I need to look around. I have to see what’s cooking in the blogs, in the digital newsletters, in the weekly food columns. I compare what I am reading with the memory of the food that, for nearly sixty years, Marcella put on our table. What I am finding is that food has entered a perplexing period, its roots have come loose, its identity is unfocused. Voices everywhere join in calling for simplicity, Marcella’s guiding principle, but how simple can a dish be when it comes with a list of ten ingredients, three of them herbs and spices? Its canvas of flavor is stippled with many hues, each clamoring for attention. Marcella used to say that when you cook, what you leave out is just as important as what you put in. Yet what I read yields images of cooks reaching for something to add on, something novel, something scented, something crunchy, something spiced. It doesn’t persuade me. It doesn’t because I have had those dishes, at other people’s homes, at restaurants, I have had them in my mind because I have learned to think taste. And that is what is missing. Not the impact, not the novelty, not the scents, there is plenty of all that. It’s the flavor that is missing. The truth of the dish. Victor."
 
Thanks for posting this (fascinating cornucopia of discussion points). I identified with much of it, though I am a little wary (but only a little) of the "born knowing" school of talent hinted at here, whether in painting, writing or cooking. But what I really loved, but found to be a misreading, was the use of the word taste in the next to last line: at first I thought he meant the word as in discernment rather than flavor. Because it seems as if knowledge has never been more available, yet discernment remains elusive, not only in cooking but in everything. Though I am also a little wary of the idea of discernment as anything but completely contingent.
 
Oswaldo, I didn't read VH to being saying, or hinting, that MH was born knowing.

He says
whose mysterious creative source had always been a wonder to me,
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.

I read into that -- freely admitting it isn't in the text -- that the source was of course the combination of her childhood and young adult experiences and whatever innate skill and inclinations she had. (I've met some folks who were surrounded from a young age by great traditional cooking and great cooks, but who never took an interest in, or developed much proficiency in, cookery.) From that, i would say sprung her discernment.

And I wonder if knowledge is different than control over (or access to) data. It seems somehow to mean something more than just that. But i may be conflating knowledge and discernment; or at least flavoring the former with a bit of the latter.

Maybe i found the post to be so resonant because I happen to agree with his less subtle point, which i take to be the same as Robuchon's no more than three flavors in a dish rule.
 
I guess I got that impression from the part that says "Marcella didn’t have doubts, she knew." That rubbed me the wrong way, I suppose, though that sort of thing is often said about "naturals." I'm generally suspicious of those that don't doubt, all the more so for having a huge attraction to certainty (though her undoubtingness is described as restricted to that one area only).

I agree with your main point about fewer flavors and simplicity, apologies for detracting from it with an utter tangent.

I tend to use knowledge as command of data (but not always); the existence of words like knowingness, to mean something closer to wisdom than knowledge, only attests to the potential for slippage around what it means to "know."
 
we definitely agree on suspicion (and in my case dislike) of fundamentalists. that sort of not doubting is as dangerous as it is tedious.
 
I think this piece is missing a touch of sriracha sauce.

NWA had it right when they sang Don't believe the hype.
 
Well, interesting point of view but after reading it several times I just don't agree. This is a wonderful time to be exploring chef's different takes on mixing ethnic influences in their preparations. Some work, some don't certainly but I don't find it "perplexing" at all.
I've also never really bought into the " I cook from the heart " or "the truth of the dish" mantra. I understand the intention and it has a certain appealing romantic notion but it doesn't guarantee " flavor" .
There are also many, many resources available today for the home cook that are full of simple preparations that are grounded in tradition. probably more so than ever. So I also disagree that when it come dto today's food "it's roots have come loose" . For every Grant Achatz, Ferran Adria, etc there are many chefs preparing cuisines that are firmly rooted in tradition.
 
Flava Flav opened a chicken and ribs place in the eastside suburbs of Detroit. It was all hype. I don't think it lasted a year. Apparently he's not even listening to his own advice any longer.
 
originally posted by Bill Lundstrom:
For every Grant Achatz, Ferran Adria, etc there are many chefs preparing cuisines that are firmly rooted in tradition.
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I don't think VH is disputing that; he seems to be reacting more to brother Dentice's observation. And the recent post here that made VH's remembernce of MH's cooking apt fits that paradigm to a T.
 
I am beyond sympathetic to the pursuit of clarity in cooking. But when I go to a restaurant, I'm not seeking truthful restoration because that's what I get at home. In a perverse twist of the word's meaning, for me restaurants are about gastronomic entertainment.

So I'm happy to see folks trying new things. Even if they often fail. And quite frankly I wouldn't waste my energy, time or money on much of it. But the broader collective effort is probably worthwhile.
 
...its roots have come loose, its identity is unfocused...
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Durn kids, these days! Go changin' everything, even if it don't need changin'!

Why, in my day, we had a nice bean stew and it shoar didn't need 10 ingredients! No sir! Look:

recipe.cassoulet_postcard.jpg
.
That's right, Mr. H. It has 13 ingredients, five of them herbs and spices. Come back when you have something to say beyond how much you like Mrs. H's cooking.
 
Jeff, surely you don't read VH to be saying there is no traditional cooking out there any more, nor that all traditional dishes have fewer than 10 ingredients? But yes, of course, I agree with you that his FB post --indeed as i understand it, all of his posts on MH's FB page -- is mainly a wistful, sweet remembrance of her and her cooking that, as he notes, they shared for 60 years. To me that doesn't rob it of it validity.

He may overstate the point, but, to be fair to him, he limits it to what he "finding" in "the blogs, in the digital newsletters, in the weekly food columns." He may not be reading broadly enough. For example, i am sure he would find in Alan Passard's regular twitter posts of the description and photo's of his current dishes nothing extraneous, nothing that fits VH's "images of cooks reaching for something to add on, something novel, something scented, something crunchy, something spiced."
(Passard )

None of that disproves that way too much cooking -- and it is not a new-fangled problem -- involves people throwing way too many flavors into a dish because they think it makes it fancier or more impressive. in fact, making a dish with clean, clear flavors is what I think is impressive and is often the hardest thing to do.

Robuchon was recently quoted saying the following:

"The older I get, the more I realize the truth is the simpler the food, the more exceptional it can be. And it's extremely difficult, because to do something that's very sophisticated that utilizes these very high quality ingredients is very easy, but to do something simple that is exceptional — that is where the difficulty is, and it's the hardest thing to do in a kitchen. It really asks for a mastery of the ingredients and a mastery of taste."

His food is not "simple", and it may indeed have more than 10 ingredients; but it does not, as a general rule, have more than 3 flavors.

Passard is even more an icon of this approach. The food at Arpege is anything but simple, but a dish may often have only 1 or two flavors. His giant beet baked in salt with very old balsamic vinegar --pretty sure in that dish there is only the beet, the grey salt the beet is baked in and the balsamic vinegar that is drizzled over your slice of beet as it is served. Or the onion gratin with sarawak black pepper, which has, if you ignore butter and salt, 3 ingredients (onion, parmesan, and black pepper), whose flavors play back and forth in overlapping and amplifying waves as you eat it.
 
Of course, I've had plenty of plates that are just ingredients hurled on willy-nilly, with no thought to how they taste together. And I also appreciate that simplicity, when done well, is stunning, refreshing, even enlightening.

But he throws out the baby with the bath water. I like a new dish, too. I like a new twist on an old dish, if it's judged well. I don't want to stop all chefs from reaching for something novel, scented, crunchy, or spiced, just because some chefs aren't good at it.

And before you complain about my quantifiers, go back and read what Mr. Get Off My Lawn says... "food has entered a perplexing period", "Voices everywhere", "images of cooks reaching" ...he compasses all of cooking in his complaints.
 
It sounds like you and I largely agree on the substance, although you may have kept more youthful willingness to explore and be experimented on than I in the land of food.

As to whether VH is painting with too broad a brush, I don't feel the need to defend his post. I will note, however, your quotation picking, and like a good cook, what you leave out is as important as what you keep, is not quite fair: "Voices everywhere join in calling for simplicity..." "Yet what I read yields images of cooks...."
 
I'm on Kirk's side here. I don't think that he is condemning all dishes with over ten ingredients so much as the formulaic approach of "you must have x, y and z" (crunch, spice, etc.). I see that on cooking shows all the time.

As someone who only picked up his first Marcella Hazan cookbook about 9 months ago and has become enamored of her approach I have a hard time saying anything that could be considered critical of someone praising her. Much less someone who is basing that praise not only on her genius in the kitchen but on his love for the person. I cut a lot of slack for the latter.
 
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