Fork In Review

CUISINE DU MOI by Ben Canaider, Allen & Unwin Publishers

MEDIUM RAW by Anthony Bourdain, Bloomsbury Publishers

These two books deal with chef’s inflated egos. Medium Raw is about Anthony Bourdain’s ego, as well as the chefs and food writers he writes about. Cuisine du Moi is about the ego of Gavin Canardeaux, a global uber chef de chef.

One is about the egos of real people and the other is about the ego of a fictitious figure, who is a confection comprised of celebrity chefs such as Gordon Ramsay, Jamie Oliver, Alain Ducasse and Wolfgang Puck.

Medium Raw contains Bourdain’s confessions about his culinary life and views. It’s admirable that he had the courage to bare all in the public arena and that he wrote some negative opinions about members of the culinary elite. He could never have done that in Australia with our hypersensitive defamation laws.

It seems that some of Bourdain’s “heros” and “villains” deserved the serves that he gave them. As I recall, Alice Waters copped a shellacking for various misdemeanours, ie. not being a chef, taking credit for others’ efforts, having a wonderfully romantic vision about ideal food production, but seeming out of touch when it comes to affordability, and sometimes overlooking the meaning of locovore in practical terms.

On the other hand, Jamie Oliver was ascribed “hero” status for trying to get kids and schools to consume better healthier food. What’s not to like? There was a TV show of Jamie doing a schools program in the US. They were largely intransigent in their attitudes, and will eventually become a cost on the already unhealthy American health system sooner rather than later.

Bourdain goes into bat for chefs whom he considers have been treated badly, such as Matt Moran and Fergus Henderson – mainly due to the ignorance and insularity of their US audiences.

It’s very easy to appreciate a writer who can write entertaining gonzo-style prose, and who will pique the villains’ egos, and have the decency to defend colleagues who have been insulted. Plus, Bourdain as an individual is very cool.

Now let’s move 180o away and have a look at a parodic figure whom Bourdain would have vitriolically described as a villain or a buffoon. When you read Cuisine du Moi, you may think about a Shakespearean line: “all the world’s a stage”. One is left with the impression that Gavin Canardeaux is not so much interested in food per se, but empire-building, doing media, and generally taking himself too seriously. Wonder where Ben Canaider got that idea from?

It’s a tired old cliché that in the last couple of decades restaurant have become the new theatre, and some chefs see themselves as impresarios rather than Manuels. The focus seems to be on marketing and image, rather than culinary ability. No one wants their hands constantly soiled by peeling onions, skinning fish, or dealing with nasty customers. After all they are artistes, aren’t they?

Here are a couple of items from the book’s table of contents, so you can get a taste of what Canaider writes about:

“The Ingredients: The hit list of top ingredients, mostly Bio-dio-orgo, and often grown by Canardeaux himself”

“The Menu:  seasonal, sustainable, non-carbon-emitting and never containing any prices”

“L’Attitude: Being a chef and a celebrity and a corporate citizen”

“The Critics and the Media: what others say about G. P. Canardeaux. ‘It is hearts and minds, not PR…..’

In each chapter there is a recipe, such as, De-Re-Un-constructed T-Bone Foam.

Plus a photo of the recipe

Here’s another quote from this last chapter: “But that’s modern cooking for you: you take a perfectly natural ingredient and deconstruct it so that it is easy for food critics to bring into restaurant bathrooms in order to snort it up their nostrils. These people eat hard, type hard, play hard – which is probably why we are all such great mates. And this is the foundation of our unquestionable professionalism vis a vis their independent reviewing and photography of my restaurants. I demand that they are tough and honest and impartial. I drive this particular point home every time we are drinking bellinis in Venice”.

Both books offer a satisfying read: Bourdain for his candour about himself and trying to maintain the integrity of his craft. And Canaider for sending up the pretentious and Narcissistic media tarts whom Bourdain dismisses, with a dish best served cold.

It seems that it’s now normal for celebrity chefs to do deals with organisations like sports celebrities. So, every time you open a glossy, there’s a chef standing next to a flash car, or some culinary equipment, or even wearing a set of threads which he would hitherto not have even heard of. In their cookery courses, should TAFE teachers include a module about public relations?

Restaurant kitchens would be less brutal if the chefs could be a bit nicer, like Tetsuya. There has been some media about him in the last year or two, and it appears that he is the opposite of the above mentioned specimens. Have any chefs considered asking themselves how to be nice? Or if that’s too hard, ask Tetsuya’s advice about how to go about some ego modification?

Remember the big pile of bricks in front of the Tate Museum in London in the Seventies? All the tabloids and bourgeoisie scoffed their heads off. In spite of their disgust and bewilderment, this pile of bricks forced people to ask the question: what is art?

When you watch a new clip of a fashion show, you tend to ignore it, because it’s mostly unwearable. You can’t see yourself wearing such items to work, or to a show afterwards. And why pay big bucks to look like a circus clown?

Now a reasonable question to ask is: what is food, or cookery? We have gone back to economical nose-to-tail food, which would ideally be local and seasonal.

But 180 degrees away from the peasanty larder food, we now have laboratory food. It’s easy to envisage toddlers playing with food having not yet been cultured by any notions of a cuisine. And like blank slates, they come up with something like coconut water and coconut milk with dabs of caviar. This is the type of thing they dish up at El Bulli in Spain. It invites cynicism, and causes food writers to roll their eyes and sneer.

In some restaurants, the dishes look quite elemental in presentation. For example, a strawberry dessert which looks like a pile of innids, or a beetroot on a pile of ersatz soil.

These types of dishes look more Dali, the charlatan of floppy clocks, than abstract expression or colour field. According to the food reviewers, it’s edible, even though conceptual.

This molecular gastronomy may or may not be a passing fad. But it has a value in that it forces us to ask the question: what is food? The value of abstract expressionism and colour field paintings forced the viewer to ask a few questions about painting, or the painter. After that, the next period was Pop Art.

Why do they do this? Maybe these painters and chefs are drawing attention to themselves to keep their mugs in the media? Or, maybe they are experimenting to stretch the boundaries of various food combinations and techniques? Or, maybe a way of top shelf restaurants trying to justify another level expensive ponce?

Heston Blumenthal’s Feasts (recently on SBS TV) is very watchable if you are a chef and have an interest in food history. Blumenthal said that the future of cooking lies in the past. He uses myth, history and science to provide us with entertainment. But not only us; as the Tudors didn’t have television, feasts were a form of entertainment. According to drama in Shakespearean times, alchemy is about turning base metals into gold. Looks like Blumenthal is aiming for a culinary form of gold.

Adrian Ferra at El Bulli doesn’t use history as an influence. His style is a lot more conceptual and free form. This is similar to the Cubists at the onset of the Modernist period, who ignored the classical rules and genres dictated by the various academies, schools and salons. They took another look at line, form, colour and perspective, which in turn, forced the viewer to do the same.

Later on, de Kooning and Pollock expressed the emotions and thoughts inside their heads at the time, rather than a realistic representation of the world. And it was labelled Abstract Expressionism.

In their times, they were all written off as charlatans and dilettantes, and probably still are to this day. Sometimes we see a piece of something in a gallery, and wished they had left it in the shed.

Ferra calls his way of doing things “technique-concept cuisine”. The ingredients have no historical relationship with each other in terms of cuisine, eg. He will put coconut milk with caviar, as mentioned before. Or, caviar with green tea and sea anemone. The techniques require a knowledge not only of cookery but also chemistry. He transfigures common foods and textures into uncommon.

Blumenthal, it seems, will do something similar. For example, for the Roman feast he made calves’ brains custard with rose petals and garum. (Garum is fermented fish sauce like Thai Nam Pla, and it was the Roman equivalent of our tomato sauce – they had it with everything.) This combination sounds revolting, and in the research and development stage caused the hapless guinea pigs to wretch. So Blumenthal deep-fried the brains knowing that most people like deep-fried food; it’s a traditional post-pub beer-mop. Needless to say the assembled guinea pigs lapped it all up, whereas they would mostly avoid offal as if it were covered in wriggling maggots. It takes an open mind to contemplate eating offal.

The difference is that Blumenthal’s approach refers to history, which makes his food a lot more interesting. It’s a bit tizzied and tweezered, but it’s fun, and fascinating to watch.

On the program of the Sydney International Food Festival in 2010 was a tribute food writers’ dinner held at Bird Cow Fish on Tuesday 19 October. The SIFF program had some fairly pricey events so we decided to push the boat out for this one.