Purism
is a kind of ingredient specific thinking. The best X must be the
most reverently produced, additive-free example of its kind-an
original recipe that outdoes others only in its adherence to some
antique ideal. The real beef lover will only allow some salt and
perhaps a crank of pepper. A true baseball fan despises the
designated hitter. A proper rum enthusiast will allow nothing but
sugar cane in the bottle and maybe a splash of water in the glass.
And so on.
When
I started some serious tasting, what I discovered made me abandon the
purist approach. It even led me to question and finally reject the
whole notion of purism. What derailed my approach to purism was a
sudden appreciation of Modernist cooking. This epiphany happened at a
tavern in Philadelphia called Kraftwork and I'll tell you more about
it in minute, but first let's talk about the Purist and the
Modernist.
The
Purist
You
know this guy: he drinks single-malt scotch, maybe the occasional
cognac. He takes his liquor straight, at cellar temperature in a
thin-walled glass-a tumbler for the scotch, a snifter for the brandy.
He
(it's almost always 'he') is horrified at the thought of soda,
visibly pained at the notion of a cocktail. His wine is organic, his beer (if he deigns to drink the stuff) is Pilsner from Pilsn.
He
is a conoisseur, someone proud of his knowledge of the difference
between good and bad. He's also a purist, someone who revels in,
even worships the idea of a pure, uncompromised thing in itself.
He
likes the solos at the jazz club, the consommés at the restaurant.
He also takes a certain pleasure in the elevation of his purism above
your trashy compromise. He almost needs to snort at your brandy
alexander in order to fully enjoy his VSOP.
He's
an easy object of fun, both because of the supercilious attitude that
often accompanies his pronouncements and for the shaky intellectual
ground on which they stand. (was the scotch purer the minute it came
out of the still? What about the adulteration of it by aging, then
diluting? )
But
there is something sweet, almost romantic about the purist-some
quality that we have to admire and to which many of us aspire.
Admiring things in their simplicity, he turns our attention ot the
beauty in less, encourages a restrained horror of more. There is an
elegance in the drink straight from the artisan's still or the winegrower's
vat or the brewer's barrel. There is also a suitable humility in our
recognition of that elegance by simply leaving it the hell alone as
we put it in a glass.
The
Modernist
You know this lady too. She can't leave well-enough alone. The sage in her garden comes into bloom and the next thing you know, she's making sage-blossom butter and sage-blossom ice cream. then there's sage-blossom vodka and jelly and sage is showing up in her apple sauce and her grilled cheese sandwich. She's wrong about half the time, but when she's right, the angels are dancing and snapping their fingers. Sometimes you wish she'd just give it a rest but most times you're delighted that she can't.
Suppose
you could take a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich on a brioche,
extracted all its flavors and textures and rearranged them. Let's say that you transformed smoky bacon into a chewy roll, made
crispy strips of tomato and layered them with leaves of brioche and
doughy, eggy, buttery slabs of lettuce. Does that sound awful? Does
it offend the purist in you? Hmm.
The
modernist position on food is that no food owns its own properties
and that any manipulation we can do in service of foodie fun is not
only justified, it's holy, worthy, artistic work. The aim is to
create new experience, not to honor old ingredients. So let's
compress a slab of cucumber in a vacuum bag and turn it into
pemmican, then let's sprinkle it with gin and serve it before dinner
where the cocktails used to be. You're not defiling the cucumber,
you're helping it realize its potential, a potential which-by the way-did not exist until you saw it.
Once
you make the sensation the center of culinary effort, you change the
whole view of ingredients. Can you imagine a single-malt sorbet?
Could you imagine its taste as it melts on a jelly-soft square of
sous-vide cooked salmon that's waiting for it in a nest of deep-fried
dill leaves?
If you're not really sure just what Modernism is, the first few paragraphs of this might help:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism
One
of the most lovely things about beer these days is that it seems to invite
collaboration. It wants to entertain a scoop of ice cream or get made into cakes and cookies. Beer is pretty
fond of other liquids too. Purists aside, it doesn't mind a splash of bourbon or a drop of fruit syrup. Not only that, beer doesn't seem to care about the canonical ingredients: malt, hops, water and yeast. It turns out that for most of its history, beer was made from a combination of fermentables. The homebrewer who makes a beer that includes oatmeal, honey and plums is merely resurrecting a tradition that stood from about 9000BP to 1560 AD.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-archaeology-of-beer/355732/
Modernism
in cooking probably begins in France in the early 1970's with cuisine
minceur or nouvelle cuisine. Cuisine minceur with its tiny portions
and elaborate plating was easy to make fun of, but today its
revolutionary principles seem almost axiomatic. The Gault-Millaut
restaurant guide of 1972 listed a few of cuisine minceur's
principles.
•Culinary
rules...must be understood but they should not be allowed to hinder
the development of creative new dishes
•Creatively
breaking culinary rules...is a powerful way to engage diners...
•Diners
have expectations...Surprising them with food that defies their
expectations is another way to engage them...This includes putting
familiar food in unfamiliar forms.
•First-rate
ingredients are the foundation on which cuisine is built.
So, let's start this course in that spirit. Let's marvel at what beer has become and let's also imagine-in the spirit of those ultra-modern homebrewers- all the tasty things it might be.
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Want to know more about The Short Course in Beer?
http://amzn.to/1JWLfXT
