LAUREL BERGER

GILT TASTE

The world’s most influential chef is known for elBulli, but he had a book for grocery shoppers too.

by Laurel Berger February 29, 2012

A half year ago, the restaurant elBulli closed its doors, inviting endless encomiums and accounts of journeys to Catalonia to pay respects to its chef Ferran Adrìa, the man who made the entire culinary world turn to Spain for inspiration.

Soon came word that for three months, Grant Achatz’s restaurant Next will feature a 29-course menu of elBulli classics in homage to the master. Scarcely had I heard the news when a brochure arrived for the archaically-titled My Molecular Cuisine Kit which promised to “demystify” Adrià’s techniques. I ordered one straight away. With its eye droppers, syringe, rubber tubing, and other oddments, the package contains everything one needs to set up a meth lab—Sorry! I meant to say a molecular gastronomy workshop—in the privacy of one’s home.

But my interest in cooking à la Adrià wasn’t without precedent. In Madrid, 14 years ago, I picked up a slender spiral-bound cookbook at the supermarket. Now out of print, it was entitled Cocinar en 10 minutos con Ferran Adrià—seven minutes, really, after one has dutifully engaged in the exercise its author calls mental preparation—and it featured fast versions of classic Spanish dishes in distinctly elBulli-ish tones. Arms crossed, looking impatient, a young Ferran glowers from the cover as if waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

Commissioned by the retail chain El Corte Inglés, the book was conceived for the spoilt adult darlings whose papá y mamá still set a place for them at the dinner table. To paraphrase the flap copy, these people were so loathe to cook for themselves that the tedium of enduring yet another wedding, baptism, or first communion was as nothing to the terrors of their own kitchens.

I remember the type very well, since for a period in the mid-Eighties, during my first months in Barcelona, I was one of them. In a rare show of punctuality, I could be relied on to knock on hospitable doors – none of us had telephones in those years – on Sunday afternoons, just as my friends and neighbors were sitting down to lunch. What a pity such a corrective didn’t exist back then! With its detachable laminated shopping lists and progress cards, “Cocinar en 10 minutos” is a veritable rehab regimen for moochers.

Unfortunately, the one dish I served from Cocinar en 10 minutos soon after its publication was greeted with bemused silence. My Spanish guests, free-thinking in every way except when it came to food, didn’t know what to make of the flaccid blob of whipped cream drizzled with olive oil on the asparagus soup, and the cook was subjected to hard teasing. 

Nonetheless, one evening last fall, emboldened by all the elBulli retrospectives and curious to see what lessons could be extracted from the most experimental chef on Earth’s most obscure and populist work, I gave Cocinar en 10 minutos another shot.

“Quick!” I urged Isabel, my only guest. “Set the table! Supper in diez minutos!” Accustomed to being told that dinner in my home might be years away, the expression on her face changed from alarm to disappointment. What sort of meal was this?

“Home cooking with Ferran Adrià,” I explained, waving the book in one hand and clutching an egg timer in the other. “We’re having almond-dusted hake dressed with a pine nut vinaigrette on a bed of spinach with almonds and raisins. Oh, and crema Catalana-stuffed pears with a vanilla emulsion! You do the pears.” I handed her a can opener and a pastry bag. “I’ll see to the rest.”

Alas, some of the dessert ingredients (store-bought crema Catalana, caramelized macadamias), would require a transatlantic shopping trip to El Corte Inglés. Consoled by the publisher’s pledge to bring “Ferran Adrià’s creativity and imagination … within everyone’s grasp,” I opened the fridge and removed a tub of Italian mascarpone. We’d thin it with water, then introduce it into the bellies of the pears. 

When the egg timer beeped, I was still mentally chopping the spinach per Adrià’s instructions. I opened my eyes to find Isabel studying the pear recipe as though it were a manuscript page from a lost work by Cervantes.

 “What’s a Thermomix?”

“Um… it’s a magical appliance manufactured in Cloyes-sur-le-Loir, France.”

Isabel jabbed her fork at a picture of a coconut-strawberry cake. “Why can’t we make a nice ordinary dessert like that?”

“Because the hardware store closed an hour ago,” I explained, resetting the timer, “and we haven’t got any PVC.” 

Diez minutos on the dot, we sat down to eat. We agreed the hake and the spinach would have been better if only I’d paid more attention to them, instead of compulsively checking the clock as the seconds vanished and submerging myself in a cloud of existential gloom (How brief our lives…et cetera). Let’s just say if you don’t mind canned, those pears were fine.

Yet I couldn’t shake the sense that something was lost in translation. Adria took Spain from being a country where you could be chided for scattering basil over mussels to being the world’s capital of innovative cooking, and his secret weapon wasn’t powders and foams and machines, but an insight: As Nietzsche held, nothing is true and everything is permitted. Given that, then surely his recipes weren’t meant to be followed to the letter. Asked to prepare a 10-minute meal from Adrìa’s book, a Spanish person would protest loudly and at once (not because the recipes broke with tradition but because protest is akin to throat-clearing in Spanish culture,) after which paying no mind to the time constraint and taking only glancing notice of the ingredients list, they would cheerfully and instinctively produce a delicious dish.

The next day, determined to do the same, I forced myself to tackle the one recipe in the book I was convinced would never work. Adrìa’s interpretation of Ensalada de constrastes by the great Carme Ruscalleda of Saint Pau calls for eleven varieties of herbs and leaves, a dyspeptic assortment of fruits and nuts – eight different kinds— lashings of Parmesan and dollops of mató (a bland curd cheese) and more. There used to be a little antiques shop near the Plaça de Rius i Taulet in Barcelona crammed with rustic pottery from the provinces. You stepped inside and were afraid to move a limb for fear of toppling an earthen water jug or a funeral bowl or the shouty old proprietress demanding to know what you wanted. Overcrowded to the extreme, the recipe put me in mind of that shop. Warning myself in Spanish to prepare for disaster, I got on it with it nonetheless and made do with good-quality ingredients that were close to hand.

It took only a few bites to understand that the competing textures and flavors were precisely Adrià’s point. Like a dish at elBulli that looked like one thing but metamorphosed into another, the combination of sweet raspberries, fresh goat cheese and toasted pistachios (the latter two were my improvisation) played off each other in a way I could never have anticipated, and I realized there must be a multitude of wondrous recipes that we dismiss for want of imagination. As I dispatched my salad of contrasts, I discovered that to cook in the spirit of Ferran Adrià one doesn’t need a stop watch or a molecular chemistry set. All it takes is raw courage and a mind freed of received ideas.