The Fat Duck Cookbook

"Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck Cookbook is my fifth book choice, the first of a number of cookbooks that have come out from Heston and have been following the development of some of his own recipes. I’ve picked Heston Blumenthal because he is exactly the sort of figure who is the chef-scientist: he blurs the boundary between chef and scientist. In fact, he may have been the first to lead the science and lead us to the multisensory understanding of tasting. He was the chef who realised very early on that it’s not just knowing about the ingredients and the process of preparing that matter. If you’re really going to understand what you’re doing as a chef, you have to have to understand the diner. You have to understand the diner’s senses. In The Fat Duck Cookbook , Heston says eating is one of the few experiences that involves all of the senses and then he walks us through just how that works. His fascination with this area came from his own experience: he was a self-taught chef, he didn’t go and work as a pupil with some of the great masters; instead he read books, rather more like an academic. He worked his way through all the classic cookbooks; he tried things out; he experimented and found out. Why was he motivated to do that? He tells of us his experience as a young boy being taken by his parents to a Michelin three star restaurant in the south of France. He remembers arriving, the sound of the cicadas and the noise of the gravel underfoot, and seeing this wonderland in which large shiny wine glasses were on the table and the shining silver, and waiters gliding around producing all sorts of unusual concoctions. The whole thing, on a sensory level, was quite spellbinding for him. Heston Blumenthal describes himself as having fallen down the rabbit hole: he was in this strange otherworld where the smells, the sights, the sounds, the feels — everything was contributing to the experience. In a sense, he never lost that because he understood that as a chef providing exquisite extraordinary experiences to diners was about stimulating their senses. So, he knew, and will say, that the most important thing that a chef has to think about when thinking about the diner is not the tongue or the nose or the mouth or the eyes or the ears: it’s the brain, it’s the way the brain is putting together all of this information and coming up with a result and a judgement and an experience of the flavour, the whole sensory experience of eating and drinking. He got on to that issue very early on, and actually provided some of the materials that stimulated the sensory scientists to say ‘He’s done these funny things of confusing us with swapping the colour of dishes and we’re puzzled and we’re surprised.’ An example of this is this famous dish: the beetroot and orange jellies — this was on the menu very early on at The Fat Duck. You get a purple and an orange jelly on the plate, and your waiter will say to you ‘We suggest you start by eating the orange one’. And of course diners dig into it, and it tastes of beetroot, and then they try the purple one, and it tastes of orange. This is because the purple one is made from blood orange, and the other is made using orange beet. So, this sort of playfulness is interesting. He made bacon and egg ice-cream and people said well that’s a bit strange and maybe a bit off-putting but he was interested in why using the word ‘ice-cream’ would actually deter people. He had a crab ice-cream, but if you called it a ‘crab frozen savoury bisque’, people thought it tasted delicious. If you called it ice-cream, they found it rather strange. He’s interested in how our expectations are led by words. He made bacon-and-egg flavoured ice-cream to, served with a little piece of fried bread, and you’re told to eat the two together. The interesting thing is that the bacon flavour seems to migrate and stick to the fried bread when you eat them together, whereas the egginess sticks with the ice-cream. So, you’re getting into the realm of sensory ventriloquism. The sorts of experiments that Heston Blumenthal conducted early on actually stimulated some of the sensory scientists to think about cross-modal effects of one sense on another — the ways in which the eyes are influencing the ears, and the ears are influencing the mouth, and the way in which taste and smell influence each other, and feel affects taste. This led to collaborations between Heston and scientists. I think that form of collaboration between the sciences and the arts and the industrial practices or the gastronomy of high cuisine, that’s all part of a very exciting experimental process that is all about understanding how our senses work and how they can surprise and delight us. It’s a wonderful time for interaction and interdisciplinary collaboration in the service of understanding what’s going on in us when we do the things that we do every day and that we care about, when we choose and select and enjoy what we eat and drink."