The Prodigy's Cousin (8 page)

In practice, molecular gastronomy looks a lot like science.
Hervé This, one of molecular gastronomy's chief practitioners, has created charts illustrating when coffee chills depending on when milk is added, spent more than three months researching the texture of egg
whites used in soufflés, used nuclear magnetic resonance to analyze carrot-based soup stocks, and puzzled out how to uncook an egg (he said the key was to add sodium borohydride to detach the protein molecules from one another).

Such experiments aren't restricted to the laboratory. The restaurant luminary Pierre Gagnaire regularly incorporates This's ideas into recipes. Heston Blumenthal, the maestro behind the Fat Duck, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in Bray, England, explored the science of cooking on
Kitchen Chemistry with Heston Blumenthal,
a series of six half-hour programs. Exotic-sounding ingredients and techniques like liquid nitrogen (causes rapid freezing), hydrocolloids (substances that form a gel when mixed with water), and dehydration (removing the water from food) are the tools of chefs as statured as Thomas Keller of the French Laundry and Per Se, Grant Achatz of Alinea, and Greg's culinary idol, Ferran Adrià. Molecular gastronomy was all the rage. The chef as scientist was king.

Greg hated the term. He thought it implied flashy cooking. He preferred to call his cooking modern cuisine. The core idea was to enhance the flavor of the food, not to show off fancy ingredients for their own sake.

But molecular gastronomy or not, Greg's method of cooking was, at heart, a science experiment. He used the precision of a chemist to test temperatures, cooking times, and preparation methods, always trying to extract the best of an ingredient's flavor and texture. Greg wasn't slaving over equations in the back rooms of academia, but in practice his cooking was just a different expression of the same thing. Joanne decided that Greg Grossman was a prodigy. She wanted the kid in the kitchen, if she could get him.

Joanne clicked her way through articles on Greg and stumbled upon a story detailing his involvement with Veggie U. Greg had recently been in Ohio—a mere fifteen minutes from Joanne's house. She had just missed him.

She called her husband, Jim. He contacted a family friend who
worked at the Chef's Garden, an organization connected with Veggie U, and got the Grossmans' contact information. A male voice answered Joanne's call; she asked if she was speaking with Mr. Grossman. When the caller confirmed, Joanne launched into her pitch.

There was something a bit uncomfortable about asking parents if she could study their child, but Greg's father immediately put her at ease. Her work sounded fascinating. He was interested. But about twenty minutes into the call, Joanne realized that the Mr. Grossman she was speaking to wasn't Greg's father; it was Greg. A fourteen-year-old with the voice and confidence of an adult.

Greg tried to reassure Joanne that it was no big deal—he did all kinds of cooking deals without his parents' knowledge—but Joanne hung up. Her Institutional Review Board, the organization that oversees research ethics, forbade her to talk to a minor about her research without the consent of his guardian.

Joanne waited until Saturday morning and tried the Grossmans again. This time, Greg's mother, Terre, answered her call. Joanne explained that she had inadvertently asked Terre's young son if she could put him through a battery of psychological tests.

Terre just laughed. She said it happened all the time. A major broadcasting station talked to him for three weeks before she even knew about the conversation. Joanne offered to travel to New York, but Terre told her there was no need: they would be back in Ohio for another Veggie U event the following July.

When Terre and Greg arrived, Joanne dropped Greg off at the Chef's Garden to prepare for the next day's competition and drove Terre back to her house. Over the next two days, Terre detailed Greg's development. The media was right: Greg was an astounding kid. But that was only part of the story. From Terre's perspective, the road hadn't always been smooth.

When Greg was born, Terre was forty-one years old, and her husband, Ed, was fifty-two. At six months pregnant, Terre had been
bitten by a Lyme-infected tick in the Hamptons and panicked that her baby might be stillborn. A doctor put her on antibiotics, and the pregnancy continued.

Greg entered the world seven weeks before his due date. He weighed a mere four pounds, eleven ounces, but he was otherwise healthy. He began speaking at the usual time, but he garbled his words well into preschool, spitting out syllables that sounded nonsensical to all but his mother. Greg eventually corrected his speech through therapy and tongue exercises. School presented other problems. In early grade school, Greg often finished assignments quickly, leaving him with free time. He filled it by talking or joking around, and this often landed him in trouble with his teachers.

But from Greg's youngest days, an irrepressible industrious streak propelled him to learn, to do, to create. When Greg's parents bought him a battery-operated toy piano to play with during car rides, he quickly began composing little ditties, such as “Black Notes,” a tune played exclusively on the sharp and flat keys of the piano. He demonstrated a knack for computers and, at four, declared himself the “Komputer Kid.” He generated business cards to advertise his services and offered his computer expertise to friends' parents. A couple of years after that, Greg grew fascinated with clusters of rocks, shapes in the snow, and other natural formations that looked like human faces. He began photographing these as part of a venture he dubbed Naturefaces and developed plans to display them on a Web site, a calendar, and a movie. Eventually, Greg became fully engrossed with food, and his other interests fell by the wayside.

Greg's insatiable fascination with food unexpectedly provided common ground with his classmates. Greg loved to teach other kids the ins and outs of cooking, and Terre often found him and his buddies in her kitchen, making tortillas or fanning sushi rice. When a colleague asked Greg to store his anti-griddle (a cooking appliance with a surface that plummeted to -30°F), Greg invited classmates over to
flash freeze their favorite foods, creating frozen chocolate pudding and olive oil treats.

The Grossmans sold their East Hampton home during the financial crisis and relocated to Manhattan. Greg finished the school year in the Hamptons, living on a friend's couch.
But his need to cook didn't flag. Through all the upheaval—and his first year of high school—Greg grew ever more consumed by food. At school, he assembled a proposal for a culinary-focused course of independent study. After his idea was approved, he vacuum-sealed meat and then cooked it in a vat of water, flash pickled foods, and experimented with creating new textures using hydrocolloids. On his own time, he attended the International Chefs Congress, yukked it up with fellow chefs online, devoured forty-plus meatballs at the New York City Wine & Food Festival, and bemoaned the closing of
Gourmet
magazine. He launched the Amaya Project, the aim of which was to integrate food with other forms of art, with a ten-course meal; celebrated the end of the Food Network's banishment from Cablevision; and attended a competition at the Culinary Institute of America. It never occurred to Greg to take a break.

This constant call to create followed Greg when he traveled to Ohio for the Veggie U Food and Wine Celebration. It was a behemoth of an event. More than thirty chefs, together with their teams, participated.
Greg and his team prepared thirty pounds of beef tongue as part of a dish that also included chickpeas, caramelized fennel, and a sugar snap pea broth. When the event ended, Greg got dropped off at Joanne's house. Like a moth to a flame, he went straight to Joanne's kitchen. He got a knife in his hand and vegetables on the table. Within moments, he was chopping.

Another piece of the prodigy puzzle fell into place as soon as Greg completed the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

He did well across the board, never dipping below the ninetieth
percentile in any subtest and often hovering far above it. But it was the working memory result that again caught Joanne's attention.
It's a score meant to reflect an individual's ability to manipulate (rather than merely recall) information stored in short-term memory. Repeating a series of numbers back to the examiner would measure recall, for example, while adding together the first three numbers in the list would measure working memory. On this subtest, Greg reached the tip-top of the scale, registering a score at the 99.9th percentile—just as Garrett James had before him.

And just like Garrett James,
Greg had plenty of amazing-memory anecdotes. As a small child, he could listen to a complicated musical piece and then reproduce it from memory. For school plays, he memorized not just his own part but the entire dialogue; he could always be counted on to help classmates struggling with their lines.

When it came to food, he almost never forgot.
His mind was awash with all he had learned about restaurants, chefs, and supplies, techniques he picked up on TV, and knowledge gleaned from food Web sites. His memory for cooking formulas, ratios, and recipes was sharp. When Joanne asked him to write down the recipe for one of the dishes he prepared at her house, Greg seemed surprised by the request: you'll remember it, he said.

It's well documented that experts have exceptional memories for information relevant to their specialty.
In a groundbreaking 1946 doctoral dissertation, the Dutch psychologist Adriaan de Groot reported that expert chess players could recall the configuration of pieces on a chessboard with much greater accuracy than less skilled players.
Since then, dozens of studies have examined the power of expert memory, and the same supremacy of experts for recalling facts relevant to their domain has been found in fields as varied as engineering and figure skating. The pattern holds for food and music, Greg's and Garrett's specialties:
waiters demonstrate better memories for food and drink than nonwaiters, and
musicians demonstrate better memories for
music notation than nonmusicians. It was fairly predictable, then, that Greg would have a great memory where food was concerned and that the same would be true for Garrett with respect to music.

But it's equally well established that the memories of these experts tend to be notable
only
for facts relevant to their domain. Master chess players demonstrate superior recall for configurations of pieces that could emerge in real games.
But when chess pieces are positioned randomly across the board, their recall is no better than that of weaker players.
Psychologists have thus theorized that the memory advantage is due to the experts' greater experience and familiarity with their subject matter,
not
superior overall memory capacity.

What was interesting about Garrett and Greg, though, was that they weren't following the typical pattern for adult experts. Their memories were certainly finely tuned with respect to information relevant to their specific fields. But when Joanne administered the working memory section of the Stanford-Binet, she wasn't quizzing Garrett on music patterns or grilling Greg about recipes. She was reading off sentences or pointing to strings of numbers and listening as Garrett and then, later, Greg flawlessly repeated them back to her. The information had nothing to do with music, nothing to do with cooking. But the prodigies were unstoppable. Unlike the adult experts, the prodigies' working memories were excellent
in general
.

As Joanne moved forward with her research, the pattern she saw with Garrett and Greg repeated itself.
Again and again, the prodigies earned exceptional scores on the working memory portion of the Stanford-Binet. It wasn't that they remembered everything. Many of the prodigies reported that their memories were nothing special when it came, for example, to names or faces or movie plots. But when they paid attention to a particular task, as they did during their IQ testing, their working memories dazzled.

This pattern seemed to suggest that the prodigies' abilities were somehow different from those of typical experts. But if the prodigies weren't
operating like miniature adults, how to explain their abilities? Could the prodigies' extreme memories have something to do with the link to autism that Joanne was pursuing?