Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat (23 page)

Weight and temperature are by no means the only things measured in the modernist kitchen. These high-tech cooks are like explorers mapping new culinary lands. They wish to quantify everything, from the heat of chilies (measurable on the Scoville scale) to the chill in the ultra-low-temperature freezers they favor. If they wish to test how tart a fruit puree tastes, they do not use their tongue, but whip out an electronic pH meter that can give an instant and exact reading on how acidic or alkaline any fluid is. To gauge the sugar content in a sorbet mix, they use a refractometer, a tool that responds to the way light bends as it passes through a given material. It will bend more or less depending on the density of a given liquid, which in turn tells you how sweet a syrup is (sweeter is denser). This is a technological step up from the old saccharometers used by brewers and ice-cream makers from the eighteenth-century onward, consisting of a calibrated glass bulb that measured sugar content through the principle of buoyancy (the higher the bulb floated, the sweeter the substance). Before that, mead makers would drop an unshelled egg into the honey-sweet liquid; if it floated, it was sweet enough.

Chefs today are measuring things no one ever thought to measure before, such as the exact water content a potato needs to make the ideal French fry. Heston Blumenthal, visionary chef of The Fat Duck in Britain, prides himself on his Triple-Cooked Chips (cooked once in water, then in a sous-vide bath, finally in groundnut oil—I have tasted them only once and they were indeed superbly crisp).
He has found that the perfect “consistently crunchy” French fry can only be made from a potato with a dry-matter content of around 22.5 percent. “The problem,” Blumenthal has noted, “is that there is no easy way to look at a potato and know how much water it contains.” The answer is a special “dry-matter” scale that determines the water content of a small sample of raw potato by weighing it and cooking it simultaneously. It then finds the difference in weight between the cooked potato and the raw potato, in other words, how much water has evaporated.

Measures such as these undoubtedly help professional chefs achieve dependable results. Blumenthal knows that his Triple-Cooked Chips will always be as near the same as possible. I’m not so sure whether ultraprecision is what the average home cook is looking for, though. I glance through a Heston Blumenthal recipe for “sand,” part of a recipe for something he calls “Sound of the Sea.” It calls for 10 g grapeseed oil, 20 g
shirasu
(baby eels or anchovies), 2 g blue shimmer powder, 3.5 g brown carbonized vegetable powder, and 140 g “reserved miso oil,” along with various other baffling things. Having measured these peculiar ingredients on our laboratory scales, we are supposed to saute and grind them until they become a kind of savory sand. The whole recipe is deeply intimidating.

Even if I possessed brown carbonized vegetable powder—and alas, I have rummaged in my kitchen cupboards in vain—I have neither the technology nor the patience to weigh out 3.5 grams of the stuff. This is cooking as pure mathematics: everything is quantified; nothing is left to chance; there is no room for variation or judgment. For restaurant chefs who want to produce the same—often spectacular—results time and time again, Blumenthal’s way makes sense. Blumenthal is the master of food as theater, and the performance only works when everything is just so. The imperatives of home cooking are different. We’d rather have flexibility than absolute control.

What if I wanted to substitute something else for the blue shimmer powder (or preferably, leave it out altogether)? What if my
shirasu
taste saltier than Blumenthal’s? Pointless to ask. I have nothing to
compare this recipe with, and therefore no way of knowing how it could be tweaked. Such hypermeasuring makes the average cook feel lost in a sea of numbers. Blumenthal’s measures may be accurate, precise, and consistent, but no one could accuse them of being easy. Nor are they meant to be. They are aimed at chefs like him whose ambition is to push food in extraordinary new directions.

Compare and contrast with Fannie Farmer’s trusty old cup measures. For all their faults—and, as we have seen, they are many—they do have one huge virtue. For cooks who have learned to cook using cups, they bestow a feeling of calm competence. They may not score highly on precision or consistency, but they are wonderfully easy. When asked to measure three level cups of flour, you think: yes, I can do this. Scoop and sweep, scoop and sweep; one, two, three. To measure with cups requires such little expertise, it can be done by a child who has only just learned to count and in a kitchen with the most minimal equipment. Because Fannie Farmer came so late to cooking, she remembered what it felt like to be perplexed in the kitchen. She herself had found reassurance in her level cup measures and warmly passed this reassurance on to her readers. Blumenthal’s recipes seek to amaze, to confound, even to disgust. Farmer hoped her directions would “make many an eye twinkle.” For the thousands who bought her book, reading Fannie Farmer was like having a friendly but firm red-haired woman holding your hand as you cooked, whispering: follow me and it will work.

Fannie Farmer’s cup measures may not have bestowed the accuracy they promised. But she understood something every bit as important: the technology of measuring in the kitchen needs to be tailored to the person doing the measuring. Most chefs and food writers have been cooking for so long, they forget what it feels like to be thrown into a panic by the simplest of recipes.

In 2011, Tilda, a leading rice brand, conducted a UK focus group of around 500 people looking at factors inhibiting the British public from buying rice. They found that many households possessed no kitchen scales. Even when they did, there was a widespread terror of
getting the measuring wrong: of overestimating the portion size or cooking the rice for too long. For many, the focus group revealed, this terror was enough to stop them from buying even the smallest half-kilo bag of rice in the supermarket: the risk of failure was too high. This stood in stark contrast to customers in Asian communities in Britain, who buy their Basmati in 20-kilo sacks from the Cash and Carry and cook it with effortless confidence, using a thumb to measure the correct quantity of water every time, just like their mothers and grandmothers before them. They hold a thumb on the base of the pot and measure rinsed rice up to the thumb joint, then rest the tip of the thumb on the rice and pour in water until it again reaches the joint. It is then easy to cook perfect fluffy rice by the absorption method. The technology being used here is sheer know-how. We all have thumbs; what we lack is the confidence to use them.

Lack of confidence also explains the existence of the most curious measuring spoon I have ever seen. Instead of tablespoons and teaspoons, it has: a dash, a pinch, a smidgen, and a drop. Those of us who feel reasonably relaxed at the stove might have assumed that you can’t assign an exact quantity to a smidgen. We would be wrong. All of these terms now have technical definitions (as of the early 2000s, when this type of measuring spoon first started being manufactured). A dash = ⅛ teaspoon (0.625ml). A pinch =
teaspoon (0.313ml). A smidgen =
teaspoon (0.156ml). A drop =
teaspoon (0.069ml). Clearly, there is market out there for people who will not rest easy unless they can measure out every pinch of salt. Even if from the point of view of an experienced cook, the idea of measuring a single drop seems to be overkill.

 

A
ttitudes to measuring in the kitchen tend to be polarized. On the one hand, there are creative spirits who claim that they never weigh or measure anything. If you ask for a recipe from such a person, you will be told airily, “Oh, I never look at a cookbook”; if they do consult recipes, they happily play fast and loose with quantities. Every meal they cook is pure invention, pure instinct: cooking is
an art and cannot be reduced to numbers. At the opposite end of the spectrum are those who want to assign an exact figure to everything. They view recipes as strict formulas, not to be tampered with. If a recipe calls for 325 ml double cream and a carton contains only 300 ml, then such people will anxiously buy a second carton to make up the shortfall. If a recipe says tarragon, they wouldn’t dream of using chervil instead. People in this second group are more likely to think that what they are doing is scientific, the idea being that the more we can measure and pin cooking down, the more like science it will be.

Both groups are probably deluding themselves. Artistic cooks do far more measuring than they admit. And cooking-by-numbers cooks are much less scientific than they pretend.

Cooking by numbers is based on a subtle misunderstanding of the scientific method. The popular view of “science” is one of unswerving formulas and a set of final answers. In this reading, scientific cooking would be able to come up, once and for all, with the definitive formula for, say, bechamel sauce: how many grams of flour, butter, and milk, the exact temperature at which it should cook, the diameter of the pan, the precise number of seconds for which it should simmer and the number of revolutions of your whisk as it cooks: cooking by numbers. The problem with this—apart from the fact that it leaves no room to improvise, which is half the joy of cooking—is that no matter how many factors you succeed in pinning down, more spring up that you haven’t thought to measure or that are beyond your control: where your flour was milled and how old it is, the ambient heat in the kitchen; whether you actually like bechamel.

Often, with all this focus on numbers, the really important thing gets overlooked. Take seasoning. It is striking how often cooks and chefs who are otherwise wedded to the numbers game do not quantify the salt content in a recipe. Nathan Myhrvold in
Modernist Cuisine
weighs everything, gram for gram, even water, yet advises that salt is “to taste.” Similarly, Heston Blumenthal measures the dry-matter content in his potatoes but does not measure the salt and
pepper in his signature mashed potatoes. This underscores the point that no kitchen formula can ever be definitive.

The scientific method is far more open-ended than is generally allowed. It is not a dogmatic set of numbers but a process of forming and testing conjectures based on experience using controlled experiments, which then throw up new conjectures. The process of cooking supper every night can certainly be understood in this light. My experience tells me that lemon and Parmesan taste delicious together, particularly in a pasta sauce. This leads me to form the conjecture that lime and Parmesan might go well together, too. I test for this by tossing some lime zest into tagliatelle with olive oil, basil, and parmesan one evening. We eat it. No one asks for second helpings. My provisional conclusion is that: no, lime and Parmesan do not improve one another, but further work needs to be done to eliminate the possibility that the oil was the rogue element.

Some of the wisest words ever written on the subject of weights and measures in the kitchen appear in
The Zuni Café Cookbook
by the California chef Judy Rodgers, whose approach to cooking is both very artistic—her signature dish is a bread and chicken salad made from rustic bread torn into variegated pieces—and very precise; she tells you exactly how to season the chicken and (without going so far as to use a pH measure) names the ratios in the tart vinaigrette with which it is dressed. She gently suggests that when professional cooks claim that they “never measure,” it is “frankly, not entirely true”: