A Purist and a Modernist Walk into a Bar

When I started working on the rum book, http://amzn.to/1Mnl2zl I was pretty sure what I wanted to do. I wanted to look at noble, fragrant, complex, wood-aged rums: the type of liquor that's served in snifters and consumed slowly, even reverently. I had the suspicion-maybe even the conviction-that rum was a serious, big deal sort of thing, somewhere above single-malt scotch and maybe (just) below cognac. The suspicion was fed by tastes of great, budget-priced rums (Mt. Gay) and exquisite and exquisitely expensive ones (Zacapa).

I was infused for a while with missionary zeal. I think I was hoping to find the rum snobs of the world and go off in a corner where we could all talk about esoteric little bottlings and feel quite content with ourselves. I was a purist and I wanted to meet other purists and convert the uninitiated.

My own drinking history has only lately been touched by purism. I was never a wine snob (purism's semi-identical twin): I was just as happy with a grapey-ripe fruit bomb as I was with an elegant super-tuscan. I'd love a d'Yquem one day and then trot off happily with a banyuls the next.

Beer was, I admit, a bit different. There was a lot of product out there that didn't taste very good. Some of it was so bad that the only thing it could be compared to were nauseating, sweet cocktail confections made with cheap rum. I was a beer snob almost from my first bottle of Saison Dupont, but this was a snobbery that was based on childish delight. "Ooooh! Taste the pretty bubbly!"

Purism is more a matter of thinking than delight. It's 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 the antique original X. 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 Kraftwerk and I'll tell you more about later, but first let's talk about the Purist and the Modernist.

The Purist is humble in the face of the idea that the grape knows more than he does. The Modernist doesn't care about what a fruit might think and owes her allegiance to her imagination.

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.

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 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

Suppose you could take a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich on a brioche, extracted all its flavors and textures and rearranged them. Imagine further 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 foody 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.

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?

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You can probably imagine how pleased I was when I saw the difference between the modernist and the purist as the key to understanding how to approach the disorderly subjects of rum and beer. (I was somehow assuming that wine belonged to the purists alone.) Nothing like a nice dichotomy to tidy things up. In this corner, ladies and gentlemen, the aging world champion, The Holy Ingredient: in the opposite corner the scrappy inventive challenger Sensation by Any Means.

Unfortunately, a few minutes after I started congratulating myself on solving the book's big conceptual problem, I knew that I was at least partially wrong. The modernist depends on the quality of her ingredients, the purist (mostly) values the objects of his desire for their ability to create sensations. The Aristotelian A-or-not-A becomes the Buddhist A-and-not-A.

Zacapa in a snifter and a Dogfish Head Wit Rum Mojito are closer than you might think. I wonder if seeing them as organically connected, as each simultaneously themselves and the other, will make rum more fun to drink. I wonder if today's modernism becomes tomorrow's Purism.I wonder what to make of Budvar Pilsner in the face of All Day IPA. Is what we think the only thing that matters? And do we really taste without thinking? We'll see.