Molecular Gastronomy Is a Scientific Discipline, and Note by Note Cuisine Is the Next Culinary Trend Hervé This

Molecular gastronomy is a scientific discipline, and note by note cuisine is the next culinary trend Hervé This To cite this version: Hervé This. Molecular gastronomy is a scientific discipline, and note by note cuisine is thenext culinary trend. Flavour, BioMed Central, 2013, 2 (1), pp.1. 10.1186/2044-7248-2-1. hal-01269404 HAL Id: hal-01269404 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01269404 Submitted on 28 May 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. This Flavour 2013, 2:1 http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/2/1/1 OPINION Open Access Molecular gastronomy is a scientific discipline, and note by note cuisine is the next culinary trend Hervé This1,2 Abstract For the past two decades, there has been much confusion about molecular gastronomy. This confusion has arisen because people ignore that the word gastronomy does not mean cuisine, it means knowledge about food. Similar to ‘molecular biology’, molecular gastronomy is a scientific discipline that looks for the mechanisms of phenomena occurring during dish preparation and consumption. As with any other scientific discipline, it can have many applications. One of the first was ‘molecular cuisine’ but since 1994, ‘note by note cuisine’ has also been promoted. The latter involves preparing dishes using pure compounds, or more practically mixture of compounds obtained by fractioning plant or animal tissues, instead of using these tissues themselves. Note by note cuisine raises issues in various fields: science, technology, nutrition, physiology, toxicology and politics. Keywords: Cuisine, Molecular cuisine, Molecular gastronomy, Note by note cuisine Molecular gastronomy nutritional value, eventual toxic effects, and so on, of the In 1988, a new scientific discipline, molecular gastron- various compounds released by food systems [4]. omy, was defined as ‘looking for the mechanisms of phe- During food preparation, plant or animal tissues are at nomena occurring during dish preparation and least washed and cut, and most food are thermally pro- consumption’ [1,2]. This new definition presented the cessed. For example, even for a simple carrot salad, opportunity to discuss the precise content of molecular which requires no thermal processing, there is a big dif- gastronomy and its relationship with other existing fields ference between the raw product in the field and what is of science. consumed - that is, grated carrots on a plate: this is be- There has always been much confusion between sci- cause cutting the tissue triggers enzymatic reactions [5] ence and technology when it comes to food, including and because compounds get transferred between the over exactly what food is. Dictionaries give the defin- dressing and the plant tissue [6]. This analysis leads to ition: ‘any substance that can give to living beings the the conclusion that reagents and products of ‘culinary elements necessary for their growth or for their preser- transformations’ (transformations performed in the kit- vation’ [3]. However, one has to recognize that human chen) should not both be called food. The specific trans- beings very seldom eat non-transformed tissues or nat- formation occurring from the raw materials to the final ural products; raw materials are transformed so that prepared dish is worth studying, both for scientific and chemical and physical changes determine the final com- technological reasons. position of all food as well as its ‘bioactivity’, a term Making the difference between science and technology which we propose to describe the sensory effects, clear is particularly important for molecular gastronomy because of the confusion between science and cooking (see, for example [7]), and because the public unduly fears ‘chemistry in the plate’ (this will prove important Correspondence: [email protected] 1INRA, UMR 1145, Group of Molecular Gastronomy, 16 Rue Claude Bernard, for the future development of note by note cuisine, Paris 75005, France described below). The French chemist, Antoine-Laurent 2AgroParisTech, UFR de Chimie Analytique, 16 Rue Claude Bernard, Paris de Lavoisier, was right when, in his article about meat 75005, France © 2013 This; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. This Flavour 2013, 2:1 Page 2 of 8 http://www.flavourjournal.com/content/2/1/1 stocks [8], he wrote that the two fields of science and before 1950 to mean the study of structures, functions, technology ‘do not meet’. The French chemist and biolo- and genesis of biological molecules [19]. What Kurti and gist Louis Pasteur, who was so successful in both science I had in mind was more or less the same, but concerning and technology, was also fiercely opposed to the expres- another field of knowledge, so the name molecular and sion applied sciences [9]. We believe that there is an physical gastronomy was chosen. important difference between the science and the tech- The choice of ‘gastronomy’ in this title was obvious: it nology of food transformations [10]. The latter is not does not mean haute cuisine but rather ‘intelligent comparable to the scientific study of the phenomena oc- knowledge of whatever concerns man's nourishment’ curring during dish preparation and consumption, that [20]. When Kurti died in 1998, the name was abbre- is, molecular gastronomy. Let us add that phrases such viated to molecular gastronomy, and Kurti’s name was as ‘culinary science’ or ‘science of cooking’ [11] are given to the international meetings of the discipline. wrong, strictly speaking, unless science here means The appeal of this new field was and remains scientif- knowledge in general. Also, there are no ‘scientific chefs’, ically clear: if one wants to discover new phenomena, contrary to what is too often encountered in the media the exploration of a new field is a safe bet, as there is [12]. Of course the discipline of molecular gastronomy plenty of easy exploration. As always, when new know- had precedent [13], and many chemical or physical phe- ledge is produced, it is possible to make technological nomena occurring during dish preparation and con- applications. Since 2000, innovations based on molecular sumption were studied before 1988 [14]. However, food gastronomy have been introduced almost every month science in the 1980s neglected culinary processes. For (frequently, names of famous chemists of the past are example, textbooks such as the classic Food Chemistry given to new kinds of dishes) [21]. contained almost nothing on culinary transformations However, the initial program of this discipline was in- (this is still the case in the most recent edition) [15], appropriate because it mixed science and technology. In with less than 0.5% of the important chapter on meat 2000 [22], it was realized that any recipe has three parts: dedicated to culinary transformations (for example, meat a technically useless part, a ‘definition’, and ‘technical shrinkage during heating because of collagen denatur- added information’. This last term describes information ation); most of the chapter described raw meat compos- that is not absolutely necessary to make the dish (old ition and structure, or industrial products (sausages, wives tales, proverbs, tips, methods, and so on) [23]. meat extracts, and so on). The same textbook contained Some years later, it was realized that the appreciation of nothing about the effect of thermal processing on wine, a dish by an individual is a question of art, not of tech- despite the widespread use of cooked wine in culinary nique; thus, cooking involves an artistic activity of fun- activity (48% of French classical sauces contain wine; J damental importance. At the same time, it was Henne, MB France, K Belkhir and HT, submitted work). understood that social context is also very important: a The complexity of culinary transformations and the dish is not “good” if it is thrown in the face of the guests. general lack of funding by the food industry for studies All these facts led to the proposal of new program for outside of its field were probably responsible for food molecular gastronomy: science drifting slowly toward the science of ingredients and food technology, neglecting the phenomena that 1. to scientifically explore ‘culinary definitions’; occur when cooking cassoulet, goulash, hollandaise 2. to collect and test technical added information; sauce, and so on. It was considered an eccentricity when 3. to scientifically explore the art aspect of cooking; a paper on béarnaise sauce was published in a scientific 4. to scientifically explore the social aspect of cooking journal in the 1970s [16]. This lack of interest in culinary [24]. transformations is why the late Nicholas Kurti (1908 to 1998) [17], former professor of physics in Oxford, and I Application in the kitchen decided in March 1988 that a new discipline had to be At the time that molecular gastronomy was introduced, introduced [2]. we and others wanted to modernize culinary practices The situation at that time in food science was more or using what was done in scientific disciplines such as less the same as it had been for molecular biology some chemistry, physics or biology [25]. The idea to modernize decades before. The term molecular biology was first techniques has come up many times in the history of used by Warren Weaver in 1938 to describe certain pro- cuisine.

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