My road of Damascus

 Answers to a journalist

 

As a child, I was a strange boy who spent his time doing chemistry, reading (I love the chiselled style of great writers like Rabelais or Flaubert), and sleeping very little. 

 I got a chemistry box at the age of six. From then on, all my pocket money and all my weekends were spent practising chemistry. As a teenager, I already loved cooking. When I roamed the seas on sailboats with friends, I always was the cook. 

In 1976, my kitchen and my lab were merged together because I lived in a small one-room apartment. So I began to cook using chemistry utensils, for they are identical to cooking tools. 

 

My road-to-Damascus experience happened on Sunday, March 16, 1980. I had friends for dinner, officially to work on our exams, but actually to have a good dinner. I made a Roquefort cheese soufflé from a magazine recipe. The recipe stated: add your eggs two by two. “This is strange”, I thought: “two by two doesn’t make sense, so I’ll add all the eggs together.” And the soufflé went wrong. The following Sunday, I picked up the same recipe and thought: “The only thing I didn’t do according to the book was adding the eggs two by two. I’ll add them one by one.” And the soufflé was a success. 

 

From then on, I decided to write down every culinary trick, saying and tour de main in a notebook, and test them in my lab. Now, I have twenty-five thousands of them. In 1987, some physicians from the École normale in Paris invited me to their seminars; later I got a laboratory in the Collège de France, and I was also the editor of a review. 

Molecular gastronomy was created in 1988 as a scientific discipline, and it grew quickly. The international press was, and still is, all abuzz. It should be distinguished from molecular cooking. The former is a science, and my primary interest. Molecular cooking is an entirely different thing that I created to renovate cooking and make life easier for cooks and chefs. Then again, molecular cooking, the technique, is to be differentiated from molecular cuisine, which is the style. 

 

Why did I create that? Because an artist whose ankle is chained to a ball doesn’t go as fast as an artist who has wings on his back. I wasn’t going to leave the poor chefs with outdated whisks and saucepans; I wanted to change their techniques, but they were reluctant. So I used the Parmentier strategy: in the same way that Parmentier offered his potatoes to the king of France so that the people would want to eat them too, I went to see the greatest chefs and presented them with my techniques… And their food had to be very expensive so that people would rush into their restaurants to try it. Many other chefs were interested, bought the products, and now you can find low-temperature cooking everywhere, and my “perfect egg” in any bistrot. Children make my chocolate chantilly. I have won! And now I am trying to kill molecular cooking in order to promote the Note to Note concept, which also has a cooking side and a cuisine side.