Heston Blumenthal, owner and chef of the Fat Duck may be the best-known practitioner of molecular gastronomy today. He examines food at the most granular level and searches for a nexus between seemingly irreconcilable ingredients. (He of the infamous bacon and egg ice cream or the snail porridge.) The combinations sound surprising and to many, off-putting. The revelation is in the tasting. I was fortunate enough to eat in this quaint little reconstructed inn back in February. The restaurant is in the village of Bray (which required a train ride and a cab to eventually get to the door). The interior was pleasant but nothing that might indicate the quality of the dinner and service I was about to enjoy.
The first thing I noticed was that all the service was French and uniformly excellent. Shortly after perusing the menu, our waiter brought us over an Amuse-Bouche which consisted of a whole-grain Pomerol mustard ice cream in a red cabbage gazpacho. I was waiting for the wild pairings to begin and was not disappointed. The temperature of the soup served to tame the edginess of the flavors and the experience was quite unlike anything I've tasted before. Frankly I think the language required to describe this kind of thing needs to be rethought. My next course was the Cauliflower Risotto with Carpaccio of cauliflower and chocolate jelly. I think this was just a bit less successful than the gazpacho but still caused my taste buds to ask what the hell was going on.
I called for the sommelier who was friendly and helpful. I ordered the Venison as my entreé (Saddle of Venison - Celeriac, marron glacé, sauce poivrade, civet of venison with pearl barley and red wine; venison and frankincense tea - yes, that's right - tea) and asked for a pairing. He immediately suggested Jim Barry, The Armagh, Clare Valley 1997. He did the full decanting and let it open. The wine, in a word, was phenomenal. Inky, large, chocolate with long finish. (When I got home I found 2 bottles of the 1996 at the Jug Shop in SF...one signed by Jim Barry himself.) The venison was magnificent...wild but not gamey. The wine supported it quite well (except perhaps the tea). X had the Pot Roast Best End Of Pork with gratin of truffled macaroni (fancy macaroni and cheese with black truffles). The macaroni dish remains one of the best things I've ever eaten - the definition of comfort food. Desert for me was an assortment of local cheeses and for X was the Délice of Chocolate, Chocolate sorbet, cumin caramel. All perfect.
This meal started me on my current ruminations on chemistry. This was the best meal I'd ever eaten. Does a similar phenomenon involving the unexpected nexus occur with humans? Do we just not see it for what it is? We frequently see evidently happy couples and wonder what it is they could have in common or question how nature works in such strange ways. Putting a microscope on the relationship is probably not going to explain the connection but moving it to examine some strange, hidden chemical pairings might render answers to the mysteries I'm feeling these days. Why or how is it that I find a woman's nose to be one of the most important aspects of her appearance? Why is it that I am partial to the type of nose that might be thought to be "imperfect"...you know a nose that you won't find on the wall of a plastic surgeon's office? Why do I find myself drawn to smaller-breasted women (and so few of them believe I actually like them that way)? Brunettes? Why do I find Jewish women appealing on a level I can't explore intellectually (and believe me I've tried)? Why is one type of sexual act more preferable with one woman while another is more obviously enjoyable with another? Might is simply be the way they taste or smell? We traditionally suggest there is something "psychological" in determining taste and predilection. I think it might be more causal. Feel free to let me know what you think and I'll continue seeking answers.
g.
There are two concepts you might want to incorporate into your thinking on this topic. Neither one of them is the “answer” but they might take you off in a direction that leads to an unexpected connection. The first is emergence. Within the field of nanotechnology, emergence is a big deal. Size matters much more with nanotechnology than most other fields since many of the properties that apply at the macroscale do not apply at the nanoscale (under 100 nanometers or one ten-millionth of a meter). Consider cutting a cube of gold into smaller and smaller pieces. All the gold bricks’ physical and chemical properties will be unchanged. This much is obvious from our real-world experience – at the marcoscale chemical and physical properties of materials are not size dependent. It doesn’t matter whether the cubes are gold, iron, lead, plastic, ice, or brass. When we reach the nanoscale, though, everything will change, including the gold’s color, melting point, and chemical properties. The reason for this change has to do with the nature of the interactions among the atoms that make up the gold, interactions that are averaged out of existence in the bulk material. Nano gold doesn’t act like bulk gold. The coupling of size with the most fundamental chemical, electrical and physical properties of materials is key to all nanoscience. With the Big Bang, particles of energy and atoms were created with certain properties that govern all larger building blocks and processes of life on Earth. Atoms combine to form molecules, molecules combine to form molecular networks, and so on up to the planet’s ecosystem. With each new level of atomic construction, new properties and interactions emerge that did not exist at the previous level (but are governed by the properties of the preceding levels). One way to think about this is as a complex system – specifically a system whose properties are not fully explained by an understanding of its component parts. Complex systems consist of a large number of mutually interacting and interwoven parts, entities or agents.
In the context of taste and predilection, it’s an interesting question what tendencies or preferences emerge from our genetic makeup and physical condition. For example, pheromones play a huge role in the animal kingdom – and with humans. The series of reactions those chemicals trigger in our body depend on the chemistry of our body – and our overall body chemistry emerges from other individual chemical properties.
The second concept is chaos theory. In mathematics and physics, chaos theory describes the behavior of certain nonlinear dynamic systems that under certain conditions exhibit a phenomenon known as chaos. Among the characteristics of chaotic systems is a sensitivity to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of systems that exhibit chaos appears to be random, even though the system is deterministic in the sense that it is well defined and contains no random parameters.
The thing in your post that triggered this thought is your comment that “we frequently see evidently happy couples and wonder what it is they could have in common or question how nature works in such strange ways.” I was talking to someone about this the other night and he told me that he thought it was almost random which couples stay together over the long term and which relationships fall apart. He’s seen situations where everyone thought a couple was rock-solid and then broke up and other situations where everyone predicted the couple would never make it and they did. That got me wondering whether there is a sensitivity to initial conditions at play with relationships. Just like a butterfly’s wings eventually causing a tornado, perhaps small changes in the initial conditions of a relationship cause a chain of events leading to large-scale phenomena (a break-up). This might even take many years to manifest itself – although the result was deterministic from the start.
Anyway, two random thoughts. Perhaps useless. Perhaps useful in making other connections.
Posted by: GNP | July 09, 2006 at 11:49 PM