Posts Tagged ‘cooking’
Preparing a meal that C.P. Snow would have enjoyed…
When Ferran Adrià, the Spanish maestro who is undisputedly the most influential chef of the last two decades, gave up cooking at his restaurant El Bulli, he announced that he was going to be starting a number of projects. One of them is intended to be a foundation dedicated to the study of himself. Another was a collaboration on the subject of food and science with Harvard. I think quite a few people, on first hearing about that, scratched their heads and wondered what a joint venture between the two might be like. On the one hand, seawater sorbet and ampoules of reduced prawn head bouillon (two Adrià signature dishes). On the other, Helen Vendler. Outcome not obvious…
What we outsiders didn’t know is that all undergraduates at Harvard are required to take at least one class in science. As a result, the university offers some courses designed to be appealing to the kinds of student who wouldn’t be studying science unless they had to. Once that’s known, it makes a lot of sense to involve Adrià, who is rock-star famous in the world of food, in a course designed to appeal to the clever and curious and artily-minded young. So here it is: SPU27, an acronym standing for Science of the Physical Universe 27. Spelled out in English, the name of the course is Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science…
Once upon a time, to take a course like SPU27, you had to be young enough and lucky enough in all the relevant ways to get to Harvard. Today, all you need is to be lucky enough to have access to a computer with an internet connection. SPU27 is part of a remarkable experiment in open access university education called EdX, a collaboration between Harvard and MIT, which gives away entire courses, online, for free…
I registered for EdX and sat down in front of SPU27x (which started on 8 October; you can still sign up and do the course in time to get a certificate). My intention was to ‘audit’ it, i.e. do as much of it as I felt like without subjecting myself to anything too obviously worky. Also, the science of cooking is one of my interests, and I was quietly confident that I knew most of it already. That turned out not to be the case. Looking at the review materials before starting the course, I found myself trying to remember how to calculate the volume of a sphere – it’s (4/3)πr3, in case you too have forgotten – and crunching logarithms in an attempt to answer e3.5=x (answer, x=33.12, obv).
The lectures are broken up into segments of about ten minutes, followed by multiple choice questions which you can do at your leisure, or not, and submit your answers towards a certificate of completion, or not. (Certificates you have to pay for. Everything else is free.) In the first lecture Adrià showed off a few culinary tricks; the second quickly had us working with Avogadro’s constant to determine the number of molecules in a given amount of matter. Homework involves an experiment to calibrate the accuracy of your oven, and some calculations to ascertain the number of various molecules in a recipe for aubergine with buttermilk sauce. Then there’s a test: ‘Estimate the concentration in mol/L of protein using the fact that the average protein is 300 amino acids long and the average amino acid has a mass of 110 amu.’ Er … I think I’ll phone a friend on that one. All this was by way of working with ‘the equation of the week’, which is how SPU27 is structured: it teaches, both by lecture and by hands-on demonstration, the profound and endlessly satisfying mystery of how mathematics penetrates into matter.
In summary, the course is more rigorous, and more educational, than I’d thought it would be… MOOC’s [Massive Open Online Courses] like this one offer something simpler, and in its way purer: education for its own sake. They are purely educational, in the way that so much education increasingly isn’t, as it goes further and further in the direction of box-ticking and teaching to the test. Although it’s already possible to extract a great deal of use from MOOCs, as in the comp sci example I mentioned, I suspect a lot of the good they bring to the world won’t be in the form of anything useful. Instead they offer anyone who can be bothered the chance to learn things just for the sake of learning. As lifetimes get longer, there’s less need for people to stop learning, and less need for the experience of education to be something confined to ghettos of the young. Avogadro’s constant, which is used to tell you the number of molecules in a given amount of matter, is 6.022 x 1023. Isn’t that cool? And now I’m off to calibrate my oven by observing the melting point of sugar. I see in the course notes that the full protocol for doing that comes from a book called Cooking for Geeks.
Read the whole piece at the London Review of Books. And learn to cook in a way that bridges C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”— sign up for the course here.
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As we wear our lab coats into the kitchen, we might send surprising birthday greetings to Rene Magritte; he was born on this date in 1898. Magritte made a living as a draftsman and an advertising artist before putting together the paintings (largely impressionist and futurist in style) for his first show in his native Belgium… at which critics heaped abuse on his work. Disheartened, Magritte moved to Paris, and fell in with Andre Breton, who helped him become the integral part of the Surrealist Movement that he became.
“The Son of Man”
Our robot overlords at work…
The research firm Nanex presented the stunning animation below as part of a presentation at Wired‘s Business Conference. It represents one half-second of trading orders for just one stock– Johnson & Johnson– routed through just twelve exchanges.
This kind of high-frequency trading accounted for approximately 50% of all US equity trading volume in 2012. The central point of the presentation is that the rush by traders to speed-at-all-costs has created a system largely populated by “ghost bids” (meant to bait other traders into inadvisable trades) and a resultant degree of confusion that means that, in a bid-and-ask system that’s meant to clear trades both efficiently and effectively, “it is impossible to verify that a trade received the best price.”
The financial industry’s response? It’s turning to lasers for even faster trades…
See the full Nanex presentation here (and read the underlying research here).
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As we ponder Asimov’s Three Laws, we might send tasty birthday greetings to Nicholas Kurti (nee Miklós Mór Kürti); he was born on this date in 1908. Born in Romania, educated in Paris and Berlin, Kurti fled Hitler’s rise to settle at the Clarendon laboratory at Oxford, where he became was one of the premier low-temperature physicists of his era (he conducted record-breaking nuclear cooling experiments that came within a millionth of a degree of absolute zero).
But Kurti, an enthusiastic advocate of applying scientific knowledge to culinary problems, was also renowned as a chef; with chemist Herve This, he founded the “discipline” of “molecular gastronomy.” In 1969 Kurti gave a talk at the Royal Society (of which he was a member and officer) titled “The Physicist in the Kitchen”, in which he delighted his audience by using the recently-invented microwave oven to make a “reverse Baked Alaska”, aka Frozen Florida (cold outside, hot inside). Nineteen years later, with his wife, he edited the first Royal Society cook book: But the Crackling Is Superb: An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of the Royal Society.
I think it is a sad reflection on our civilisation that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our souffles.
The tastiest of the tasty…
Inspired by The Morning News’ Tournament of Books, the folks at Food52.com launched The Tournament of Cookbooks!— in which “the 16 most notable cookbooks of the year vied for the coveted Piglet trophy,” with leading food writers and chefs servings as judges.
And a winner has emerged: April Bloomfield’s A Girl and Her Pig, Recipes and Stories. Follow her progress– and the fates of the vanquished– in this summary bracket.
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As we reach for our forks, we might spare a sweet thought for Ira Remsen; he died on this date in 1927. An accomplished doctor, medical researcher, and the second President of Johns Hopkins University, Remsen is perhaps best remembered for his discovery (in 1879), with research assistant Constantin Fahlberg, of the artificial sweetener orthobenzoyl sulfimide. (Munching on a roll in the lab, Remsen noticed that it was unnaturally sweet; as there was nothing unusual about the bread, he licked his fingers, onto which a few grains of the chemical had stuck. Eureka!) Remsen and his assistant published the finding the following year, and Remsen put it out of his mind… until Fahlberg patented the sweetener and began to market it as “saccharin.”
Ira Remsen
Now we’re cooking!…
It is not often in life we have the privilege of handling a masterpiece of ingenuity. But we do it without thinking when we cook one of nature’s most brilliant creations—the unassuming but extraordinary egg.
—Anne Gardiner and Sue Wilson, The Inquisitive Cook
From the ever-exciting Exploratorium, “The Science of Cooking“… which, like everything at this marvelous institution, is anything but dull: “Discover how a pinch of curiosity can improve your cooking! Explore recipes, activities, and Webcasts that will enhance your understanding of the science behind food and cooking.”
As we explore the broccoli forest, we might recall that it was on this date in 1973 that the University of Texas- Arlington became the nation’s first accredited institution of higher education to offer a course in belly-dancing.
Giving peas a chance…
Your correspondent is no chef (his oven is used to store books); but he knows a killer recipe when he sees one… from Food Network:
English Peas
Paula Deen
Show: Paula’s Home Cooking Episode: “Hail to the Chief”Ingredients
* 1/4 cup (1/2 stick) butter
* 2 cans (14 1/2-ounces) English peas, drainedDirections
Melt the butter in small pot and add the peas. Cook over medium heat until peas are warm.
But as compelling as the recipe is, the comments that follow on the Network’s web site are the really tasty bit; e.g.:
I substituted bacon for the peas, and omitted the butter. Delicious recipe, would make again.
My husband loves canned peas. Every time I open up a can of them I have to hold my breath, because they smell like a urine-soaked subway car. Can I substitute bacon for peas? I’d appreciate a revised recipe explaining to me how to combine butter and bacon in a pot. And please keep it simple, Paula. None of these 3 ingredient recipes that a home cook can’t possibly tackle.
This was outstanding! I did make a couple modifications. I eliminated the butter, and in place of the peas I substituted one can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti and meatballs.
And many, many more… (Readers interested in pursuing the bacon theme that emerges in the comments might consider the ideas in earlier posts, e.g. here, here, or here.)
As we endeavor to reduce the degrees of separation between ourselves and bacon, we might wish a lightly sauteed Happy Birthday to David Wesson, the chemist who created Wesson Oil; he was born on this date in 1861. Wesson’s achievement was the process that allowed the deodorization of cottonseed oil (which had before been used as shortening, of olfactory necessity, only when combined with twice the amount of less fragrant lard). Wesson’s cottonseed oil was the first vegetable oil used for cooking in the U.S.
source: Lipid Library
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