If you think the idea of food as an art form sounds silly, my heart breaks for you. I can't imagine how empty your life must be.
Now that we have that out of the way...
The other day my wife and I were watching "Beat Bobby Flay", a cooking competition show where chefs try to out-cook world-renowned chef Bobby Flay. I'm not the biggest Flay fan (I think his ego is a little out of control [fast forward to 3:30 in that video]), but I'm wise enough to accept that his food is nothing short of art. And in this particular episode, Mr. Flay made that abundantly clear.
The show works like this; two celebrity chefs (often friends of Bobby) will bring in two "champions" to represent them. The two champions will battle each other, and the winner goes on to challenge Flay to cook a dish of their choosing. Wise competitors will bring in a signature dish that is out of Bobby's wheelhouse, or at the very least, a proven winner in their own restaurants. The woman who challenged Bobby in this episode chose the humble Catfish Po'Boy as her battle ground.
A Catfish Po'Boy isn't exactly rocket science. And it's hard to look at a bready, fried, falling-apart sandwich and think "art". But I think Bobby Flay proved that it can be--when intended as such--and he did so by exploring the artistic space more fully than his competitor.
A Catfish Po'Boy consists of the following things: Toasted french bread; some kind of mayo-based sauce (tartar sauce and remoulade being the most common); cornmeal-breaded, deep-fried catfish; lettuce, tomato, and pickles. It's about as simple as simple gets.
The challenger made pretty much exactly what I've just described. She made her own pickles, which was a nice touch, and made a delicious aioli for the sauce. It looked good.
Bobby, on the other hand, chose to explore much more of the available artistic space. He not only made a multi-dimensional remoulade and a well-seasoned breading mixture for his fish, used smoked tomatoes, and a dressed cabbage slaw in place of lettuce. These minor expansions of the elements won him the competition hands down.
Each element of the sandwich (bread, fish, sauce, tomatoes, pickles, lettuce) can be thought of as a dimension of artistic space. Within each dimension, the unadorned ingredient is a sort of "zero point", and any additional ingredient or application of technique (e.g. smoking) moves the ingredient into a new area of the artistic space.
In cooking, the dimensions of artistic (gustatory?) space include the general flavors available to the human palate (sweet, salty, acidic, bitter, umami), a few well-recognized minor flavors (smoky, briny, creamy, fatty), and the entire spectrum of textures (crunchy, crispy, chewy, creamy, juicy, etc). Temperature could be though of as a dimension of gustatory space; the play of hot on cold is one of the most pleasant experiences available to the human palate (apple pie a la mode, ice-cold slaw on top of hot pulled pork) A wise chef keeps all these different angles in balance, while using as many of them as possible.
Perhaps more than any other artistic genre, food relies on balance. In some artistic genres, the more artistic space you use the better. But with food, there is a point at which you've used too much, and the result is a muddy mixture of many dull flavors, rather than a symphony of a few well-developed ones. A wise chef intuitively knows to explore those extra dimensions of gustatory space and furthermore, they know which ones to explore in which dish, and how far to explore them before stopping. It's a delicate thing, but done properly, the results are nothing short of art. And I think Bobby Flay's interpretation of the humble Catfish Po'Boy shows how compelling this form of art can be.
Next: Theater and Film
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