The Perfect Meal

The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining

Charles Spence, Betina Piqueras-Fiszman

• Verlag: Wiley-Blackwell
• Jahr: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781118491027
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Technology & Engineering
• Thema: Food Science

The authors of The Perfect Meal examine all of the elements that contribute to the diners experience of a meal (primarily at a restaurant) and investigate how each of the diners senses contributes to their overall multisensory experience. The principal focus of the book is not on flavor perception, but on all of the non-food and beverage factors that have been shown to influence the diners overall experience.

Examples are:

• the colour of the plate (visual)
• the shape of the glass (visual/tactile)
• the names used to describe the dishes (cognitive)
• the background music playing inside the restaurant (aural)

Novel approaches to understanding the diners experience in the restaurant setting are explored from the perspectives of decision neuroscience, marketing, design, and psychology.

2015 Popular Science Prose Award Winner.

Chapter 1
Introducing the Perfect Meal

“Once at least in the life of every human, whether he be brute or trembling daffodil, comes a moment of complete gastronomic satisfaction. It is, I am sure, as much a matter of spirit as of body. Everything is right; nothing jars. There is a kind of harmony, with every sensation and emotion melted into one chord of well-being.”

(Fisher 2005, p. 325)

1.1 Introduction

This is a book about the perfect meal and how to get it, or at least how to get closer to it: not in the sense of the chef travelling to the furthest corners of the globe in the search for the über-unusual and extreme of culinary delights (Bourdain 2002)¹; nor in the behavioural economist's sense of trying to optimize the benefits, while minimizing the costs, of the financial transaction that is dining out (Cowen 2012); and nor does this book offer a chef's guide to, or search for, perfection as seen through the lens of molecular gastronomy or (better said) modernist cuisine (Blumenthal 2007; see also Rayner 2008). Rather, this is a book about how the latest insights from a diverse range of fields of research that include experimental psychology, design, neuroscience, sensory marketing, behavioural economics and the culinary and sensory sciences can, and in some cases already are, being used by a number of the world's top chefs in order to deliver multisensory dining experiences that are more sensational, more enjoyable and consequently more memorable than anything that has ever gone before.

“What is ‘real’? How do you define ‘real’? If you are talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see then ‘real’ is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

(Morpheus in The Matrix; see Haden 2005, p. 354)

Here we are talking about experiences that are based on the emerging insights concerning the mind of the diner and not just on the whims and intuitions of the chef, or increasingly the culinary team, beavering away behind the scenes in many of the world's top restaurants (Spence 2013). It is our contention that, in the years to come, the search for the perfect meal will be facilitated as much by knowing about the mind of the diner and what makes it tick as it will by gaining further insights into the physiology of the human flavour system or by sourcing the most seasonal of ingredients and knowing how best to prepare (and present) them on the plate (Pollan 2006). The revolutionary new approach to the science of the perfect meal that we wish to showcase here is called ‘gastrophysics’. Before immersing ourselves in it, let's take a look back over the evolution of gastronomic movements and trends that has led to our current culinary practices and food knowledge.

1.2 A brief history of culinary movements

Over the last half century or so there have been a couple of major culinary movements that have left their indelible mark on the way in which we think about food today. The first of these was Nouvelle Cuisine which emerged in France during the 1960s. In the early 1990s, molecular gastronomy arrived with a bang (often literally). Let's take a brief look at these movements in order to get a better sense of the culinary landscape in which we find ourselves today.

“Periods of gastronomic change are inevitably periods of gastronomic controversy. When there is no controversy, there is no inventiveness, because controversy of course doesn't appear if there is no tension between tradition and innovation, or the other way, between innovation and academic conventions.”

(Revel 1985, on the introduction of the Nouvelle Cuisine)

1.2.1 Nouvelle Cuisine

The term itself dates from the 1730s–1740s when French writers used it to describe a break with the traditional way of cooking and presenting foods (Hyman and Hyman 1999). However, the culinary movement that now bears the name really took on a life of its own in the 1960s when the French food critics Christian Millau and Henri Gault used the term to describe the new culinary style that was then just starting to make its appearance in the kitchens of some of France's top chefs. Nowadays, the term nouvelle cuisine is used to refer to the use of seasonal ingredients with a focus on natural flavours, light textures (e.g. sauces that have not been thickened by the addition of flour and fat) together with a visual aesthetic that focuses on a presentation that is both simple and elegant (see Chapter 4). The French chefs who were instrumental in developing this new type of cuisine, including Paul Bocuse and Jean and Pierre Troisgros, were undoubtedly influenced by the minimalist Japanese style that placed a value on serving smaller portions. Indeed, the opening of the first French culinary school in Japan in 1960 by chef Shizuo Tsuji resulted in a much greater cultural exchange between Japanese and leading French chefs, including Paul Bocuse and Alain Chapel. The latter also embraced the use of ingredients sourced from many different parts of the world. In fact, this is also why it was so natural for nouvelle cuisine to morph seamlessly into ‘fusion’ food.

“Really, the concern with how the food looked can be traced back to the emergence of nouvelle cuisine. The pictures of these dishes have set themselves in the mind of the public. Nouvelle cuisine was essentially photogenic …Think of the glorious coloured photographs of these dishes, which have become eponymous with the purveying of recipes.”

(Halligan 1990, p. 121)

It was precisely this emphasis on the visual appearance of food that led Alexander Cockburn, in a 1977 article that appeared in the New York Review of Books, to introduce the term ‘gastroporn’.² This term, which has now made it into the Collins English Dictionary, is defined as ‘the representation of food in a highly sensual manner’. It should therefore be noted that even food writing can qualify for this epithet.

1.2.2 The rise of molecular gastronomy

There can be no doubt that the fusion of the physical sciences with culinary artistry has fundamentally changed the fine dining landscape over the last couple of decades or so (Belasco 2006; Roosth 2013) and has been enthusiastically covered in the press under the title of ‘molecular gastronomy’. This revolutionary new approach to cuisine is one that has attracted a phenomenal amount of media interest from pretty much every corner of the developed world (see Barham et al. 2010). The term itself was first coined by the Oxford-based Hungarian physicist Nicholas Kurti (who back in 1969 gave a presentation at the Royal Institute in London entitled The Physicist in the Kitchen; see Kurti 1969; Kurti and Kurti 1988). Particularly influential here was also a paper that Kurti wrote together with the French physical chemist Hervé This in the popular science magazine Scientific American (Kurti and This-Benckhard 1994a, b).

But what exactly is molecular gastronomy? McGee (1984) talks in terms of “the scientific study of deliciousness”. Perhaps a more precise, albeit less grammatical, definition comes from Roosth (2013, p. 4) who describes it as “a food movement whose practitioners – chemists who study food and chefs who apply their results – define [sic] as the application of the scientific method and laboratory apparatuses [sic] to further cooking.”

Nowadays, there is certainly a bewildering array of new techniques and ingredients, some natural, others much more artificial/processed,³ available to the budding modernist chef, no matter whether operating in the restaurant or home environment (e.g. see Blumenthal 2008; Myhrvold and Young 2011; Youssef 2013). Harold McGee, the brilliant North American author on kitchen science, has written a number of influential books in which he explores the science underpinning the practice of molecular gastronomy (McGee 1984; 1990). There he investigates such things as culinary proverbs, sayings and old wives' tales. He has done more than perhaps anyone else to explore the physics and chemistry that lie behind a host of everyday culinary phenomena such as, for example, the Maillard reaction (McGee 1990).⁴

Fortunately for us there are already many great chefs and eminent scientists, not to mention flavour houses, working on the physics and chemistry of flavour (e.g. Barham 2000; Alícia and elBullitaller 2006...