I saw an immersion blender for sale the other day—alongside some culinary syringes, cheap rubber molds, spherification tools, and a dusty set of Molecular Gastronomy cookbooks. You remember Molecular Gastronomy? Over the past twenty-five years or so, it repeatedly promised to revolutionize cooking. Modernize it. Scientize it. Change for us all the way the kitchen works. Which it did, to some small degree. But the revolution is over, ending the way that kind of revolution almost always ends: not with a bang but with the whimper of items for sale on a discount table near the checkout line at Kmart.
The beginning of Molecular Gastronomy is usually traced to a set of seminars in the late 1980s, hosted in Erice, Italy, by the physicist Nicholas Kurti and chemist Hervé This. And from its earliest days, the modern attempt to explore cooking science has been a curious mixture.
You can see the disparate elements even in the latest crop of books. Thus, for example, some of this summer’s texts—like Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling—are simply cookbooks that have adopted the word science because they imagine it a necessity these days. Others—like The Science of Cooking—are textbooks for college nutrition courses, training up the next generation of high-school Home Ec teachers. Yet others—like Cellulose and Cellulose Derivatives in the Food Industry—are manuals for large manufacturing companies. And still more—like Gastro Blast: Make Tasty Treats & Learn Great Science—are popular science texts that use food for their examples.
Previous years have seen some better books: Simon Quellen Field’s Culinary Reactions: The Everyday Chemistry of Cooking, or J. Kenji López-Alt’s prizewinning The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, or Hervé This’s foundational Molecular Gastronomy. But the weakness of the current crop—the minor publishers, the general lack of exciting new recipes, the forced tone—are proof of the fading of the idea that science will incite a food revolution and deliver us into a wonderland of an entirely new cuisine.
At its most basic, much of Molecular Gastronomy involved taking techniques and materials well known by commercial manufacturers and bringing them to home and restaurant kitchens. One much-touted recipe, for example, used "meat glue" (transglutaminase, an enzyme that helps a bond form between proteins) to force ground shrimp to cohere into pasta noodles. Hervé This applied commercial food chemistry to obtain an olive oil gel—explaining, "When an egg white is whipped with oil, a white emulsion is obtained. If this emulsion is cooked in a microwave oven, water heats and expands. At that time, the temperature is about 100° C, which is higher than the coagulation temperature of egg-white proteins. The emulsion is then trapped into a gel." (Infusions of vanilla and sugar, he discovered, were necessary to make the stuff palatable.)
Spherification was a popular technique of the movement, shaping liquids into small spheres with sodium alginate and calcium chloride or calcium carbonate. At the peak of interest in Molecular Gastronomy, every hip restaurant had to have a tank of liquid nitrogen for flash-freezing or shattering foods—just as every chef had to have a jar of maltodextrin, a polysaccharide chemical that turns high-fat liquids into powders. How else could one make, say, deep-fried cubes of hollandaise sauce? Meanwhile, a sophisticated ice-cream maker would produce frozen spinach with the consistency of sherbet. Thermal immersion circulators, food dehydrators, and centrifuges all found a role, but the hippest of them all was probably the "anti-griddle" or "reverse microwave," which rapidly reduces temperature, much as a microwave warms food.
And through it all, an odd tone of condescension often ran—a sneer at all the prescientific millennia of human cooking: those dark ages in which no one understood the glorious chemistry involved. "I think it is a sad reflection on our civilization that while we can and do measure the temperature in the atmosphere of Venus, we do not know what goes on inside our soufflés," Nicholas Kurti announced as he began the Erice conferences. And science—the real science of Molecular Gastronomy—was going to make things different.
This revolutionary road is one America had traveled before. Just look back to the end of the nineteenth century, when a woman named Fanny Farmer decided she would be the Copernicus of the kitchen—the Kepler, the Newton, the Madame Currie. The Boston Cooking School had been founded in 1879 by the Woman’s Educational Association to teach the poor about nutrition, and an odor of do-gooderism always wafted from its kitchens. But when Fanny Farmer took over the school in 1891—and published her bestselling Boston Cooking-School Cook Book in 1896—she had even bigger fish to fry.
Farmer intended nothing less than a complete remodeling of the American kitchen. As far as she was concerned, nineteenth-century cooking smelled like a medieval mess: an unappetizing stew of superstition, alchemy, and misinformation. It was an ongoing disease in the modern age, an ancient darkness in a time of enlightenment, and a unnecessary sin against the healthy social order that New England had worked so hard to create. What the nation’s kitchens needed, she decided, was a good spring cleaning. What the nation’s menus needed was a good dose of modern science—which in her mind was indistinguishable from morality, economic uplift, and the Social Gospel of advanced Protestant theology. She was going to drag cooking out of the Dark Ages, modernizing it as Copernicus had modernized astronomy, Luther had modernized religion, and the American Founders had modernized citizenship.
The result was a preference for canned goods over fresh, in the name of accurate knowledge about ingredients. Bleached flour in the name of eliminating impurities. Overcooked meat in the name of preventing disease. Precise measurements in the name of uniformity. And a sneer at the past unmatched even by the proponents of Molecular Gastronomy. The Home Economics movement was born in the kitchens of the Boston Cooking School, teaching generations of schoolgirls the joys of Jello molds and canned-tuna casseroles. The awful food of the 1950s and 1960s, in other words, was Fanny Farmer’s gift to the nation, and she did it to bring the kitchen into the modern world.
As science has a weaker moral reputation now than it once did, so Molecular Gastronomy proved less concerned with (and less confident about) social uplift than its predecessors in what Good Housekeeping boasted in 1910 was the onset of "Scientific Cookery." And the recent social effects, truly transforming modern kitchens, have been correspondingly modest. Perhaps the reason is that Molecular Gastronomy recipes are usually an enormous amount of work. And what does that work produce? Too often, little more than the novelty of making, say, Reverse Ice Cream: a hot dish that melts as it cools. That's nifty, of course, but it's nifty like a science project you can eat, not nifty like a dessert you'd actually want to eat.
And so, here in the summer of 2016, Molecular Gastronomy—the second great wave of the fad for scientific food modernizing—finally curls under and fades back into the sea. Or fades, at any rate, onto the discount tables of Kmart. No great loss, I have to say.