John Lanchester, writing for the New Yorker:
The other techniques offered some successes: slow-and-low is a great way to cook beef, as long as you can spare the time, and can go to the trouble of making a sauce separately. The most instructive dish, however, was one of the failures, a slow-and-low chicken, cooked for several hours and served when its internal temperature had hit 149 degrees Fahrenheit. The problem was that, with all its juices still inside, it tasted far too chickeny. If you oven-roast chicken the regular way, you get used to the drying effect of the heat, and to the fact that some juices go into the pan and are recycled as gravy. With this version, the bird was so moist that its texture was almost jellied, the flesh was a faint pink, and the chicken-explosion of flavor was overwhelming. In a sense, it was too good. My roast-chicken-obsessed children threw down their cutlery in protest after a single mouthful.
The lesson was that no taste is inherently better than another: within certain physiological constraints, tastes are not innate but learned, and the acquisition of tastes is a kind of dance between the person at the stove and the person at the table. The dance between the cook and the eater goes on longest at home, which is why we grow up loving a food from our first and most sustained encounter with it: nothing will ever beat your mom’s chicken, or meat loaf, or whatever it was. No food can ever mean as much to you as that food once did. That is why most of all the cooking in the world is comfort food. It is food designed to remind us of familiar things, to connect us with our personal histories and our communities and our families. That has always been true and it always will be true.
I liked this piece, once I got over the authors characterization of Intellectual Ventures, Myhrvold’s patent trolling firm, as having “developed hundreds of patents”.
Though I’m not sure I agree with the conclusion — modernist cuisine may indeed become the province of the professional chef, bus so long as most of our experience with food is in the home, we’ll continue to be attracted to simpler tastes and experiences.