Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who Reinvented
Food
By Colman Andrews
(Gotham Books, 301 pages, $28)
The plague of the food fashionistas is upon us. Not satisfied
with debasing and trivializing writing, painting, sculpture, and
the performing arts, our buzz-loving, Tina Brownish pop culture
arbiters are now playing with our food. The spectacle is as
unedifying as the results are inedible. More and more, objective
standards of quality, taste, and simple gastronomic good sense are
trampled underfoot in a Gadarene rush after novelty. This mindless
pursuit of ever-odder prep, taste, and ingredient combos, coupled
with an emphasis on innovative “presentation,” frequently results
in trendy restaurant fare that looks like the work of a crazed
interior decorator on uppers while tasting like the residue of a
high school chemistry experiment gone terribly wrong.
The late Kingsley Amis, who knew a thing or two about good food
as well as good writing, saw it coming. Addressing an earlier wave
of “edgy” nouvelle cuisiniers he declared: “I want a dish
to taste good, rather than to have been seethed in pig’s milk and
served wrapped in a rhubarb leaf with grated thistle root.” Amis
thought he was being satirical when he created the imaginary entrée
but, 15 years after his death, it seems tame stuff compared to what
is actually being dished out today. Consider a few of the offerings
at what many food fashionistas claim is the world’s finest
restaurant, El Bulli, presided over by Catalan master chef Ferran
Adrià. One such item, as described by American food writer Colman
Andrews in Ferran: The Inside Story of El Bulli and the Man Who
Reinvented Food, involves “using a large plastic syringe” to
inject “a mixture of coconut milk and xanthan [a gum additive] into
a balloon — an ordinary toy-shop one,” which is then rotated in
liquid nitrogen. When the balloon is stripped away, the frozen
coconut milk “has formed into a round ball, thinner than an
eggshell.” Good for it. But so what? This kind of kitchen gimmickry
is the culinary equivalent of engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the
head of a pin: it requires incredible ingenuity and considerable
skill… but, other than that, what’s the point of it?
Borrowing a term from darkest, dimmest academe, Mr. Andrews
tells us that “[s]ome of Ferran’s most successful and beguiling
creations” are the result of culinary “deconstruction,” breaking
down familiar dishes “into their constituent parts, changing the
physical identity of at least some of those parts, and then
reassembling the pieces in new ways.” Why?” So that the dishes can
“take on different forms while retaining sensory connections with
their models.” Thus chicken curry — a real meal — is
deconstructed into “curry ice cream with chicken sauce, apple
gelatin, and coconut soup.” In what, if any, way this costly,
time-consuming, and rather bizarre deconstruction is more
satisfying or nourishing than a real chicken curry is never
explained.
The same goes for “spherified green olives,” described as
“intense olive juice enclosed in a skin of olive juice, shaped and
cured like real olives” and a “tomato soup with virtual ham” that
is “a clear broth tasting vividly of tomatoes, with strips of
gelatin somehow imbued with all the flavor of the best jamón
ibérico.” Wasting endless effort and ingenuity to make ersatz
Spanish olives and virtual Spanish ham when the real items are
available in delicious abundance at your doorstep may pass for good
performance art but it’s downright silly as cooking. Nevertheless,
Mr. Andrews — a former editor in chief of Saveur magazine
and a respected cookbook author who ought to know better — gushes
on at book length about these and similar kitchen conjurings,
suggesting that the hero of his culinary biography is a creative
genius on par with fellow Catalans Salvador Dali and Antoni
Gaudi.
HERE, AT LEAST, he may be on to something. Gaudi’s over-the-top
architecture, while certainly distinctive, was a striking example
of artistic eccentricity; it made a splash and still attracts
tourists, but it has had no lasting impact on mainstream
architecture. Which is even truer of the art of that brilliant
self-promoter, Salvador Dali. One suspects that, like his two more
illustrious fellow Catalans, in the long run, Ferran Adrià will
prove to be an heirless innovator. Perhaps there is something
imbedded in the Catalan psyche — so determined to prove both its
superiority to, and “otherness” from, the rest of Spain — that
explains this drive to be different for its own sake. Besides, as
George Orwell and many other foreign visitors recognized long ago,
there is something in Catalonian air that breeds anarchy. The
Catalans themselves have a word for it, rauxa, which the
author defines as “something like wildness, foolishness, or
abandon.”
Mr. Andrews, on the other hand, is temperamentally more La
Manchan than Catalan, a sincere but slightly addled knight errant
who renders himself more than a little absurd while vainly seeking
the sublime. Although clever and obviously talented in the kitchen,
the object of his adoration, Ferran Adrià, perhaps deliberately,
reveals little of his inner self to his biographer, always assuming
that there is much of an inner self to be revealed. In his
introduction, Mr. Andrews quotes from a conversation with his hero.
In it, Ferran declares: “This will be the last book about me. No,
really. The last one that I will collaborate with.”
An admirable decision, that. What a pity it came one book too
late.
