It started with an innocuous question: “If music can be art, why can’t food?” Well, former Microsoft whiz kid Nathan Myrhvold—a physicist and engineer by trade—is used to asking (and solving) such thorny questions. That’s why, after retiring at 40, Mryhvold holed himself up in a lab with an autoclave, centrifuge, tanks of liquid hydrogen, ultrasonic bath, and regular cooking equipment, as well, to create the formidable tome Modernist Cuisine.
And it is quite a formidable tome. At six volumes, 2,438 pages, costing more than $600, Modernist Cuisine is quite the doorstopper. Mryhvold spent years crafting the techniques used in the book, and gaining knowledge about food.
The book is not a normal cookbook. In fact, as the question above suggests, it’s more about art than eating. But still, it’s quite the culinary accomplishment.One of the keys to enabling this kind of allusiveness is increasing our knowledge of culinary history. “Even those who are very into food are — and I don’t want to sound arrogant — ignorant about the history of food,” says Myhrvold. He points out that the molten-centred chocolate cake, star of those near-pornographic Marks & Spencer adverts, was invented within our lifetime. More surprisingly, it isn’t just the rich who eat foreign food: “Africa survives on maize and cassava — those are the number one and two staple crops — and they are both from South America.”
Myhrvold is a font of odd facts such as this. Mark McClusky of Wired likened talking to him to taking several graduate seminars all at once. My favourite anecdote is the history of Egypt’s national dessert, Om Ali. “It is clearly not an Egyptian dessert,” he says, “because it is puff pastry with nuts and heavy cream poured over the top. It’s bizarre — puff pastry cannot possibly be Egyptian. The story is that it was [thought up by] an Irish chef at the British embassy named O’Malley.” He laughs, loudly.
