Comments on: The Essence of Dirt

By: Tags

Tags — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Kinda like after it rains and you can almost taste the smell of concrete in the air. Sometimes I’ve fantasized about cooking soups with different rocks in it to gauge the difference in flavor. Maybe now I’ll try it.

By: Silverbrow

Silverbrow — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

A Ruhlman/McGee/Keller cookbook? That’s got good ‘un written all over it.

By: Lucy Vanel

Lucy Vanel — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Roca’s message was a strong one in any case, the conceptual point being his ‘re-inserting’ the terroir into his cooking with the aid of scientific instruments. That’s the ‘incredible’ and ‘genius’ thing about it because it is such a blaring fact – truly great cuisine must come from the terroir. The statement can only be made once to a captive audience in that context. It then becomes a point of departure for wordplay.

As I read this post, I thought for the first time in years about the big stone oven that was in my great Aunt’s backyard in Cordova Alabama. I spent hours happy making mud pies at the oven, I even had my own collection of old pie tins. I did taste them now and then, and at the time, in the moment, they tasted very interesting.

By: Carolyn Birchill

Carolyn Birchill — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

I laughed so loud reading the last part of your post I nearly fell off the couch! I agree with Lucy the mud pies I made and often tried as a child did seem pretty good though dirt on oysters… no matter what boiling or beakers and tubes it goes through dirt is dirt and it isn’t that tasty.

By: Steve

Steve — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Due to my own ignorance, I had to look up “terroir” in the dictionary. I feel inadequate when a word I don’t know is used 5 times on the same page.

Anyways, according to the OED, terroir refers specifically to “The growing conditions in a particular region, viewed as contributing distinctive flavours to the grapes, and hence the wines, produced there.”

Is there a generally accepted but unofficial use of the term in reference to effect of growing conditions on *all* food in a region (not just wine)? This obviously has very little to do with the post (which was very good, of course) and everything to do with me expanding my vocabulary.

By: RobertdelG

RobertdelG — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Molecular cuisine is to non-molecular cuisine what classical haute cuisine was to peasant and later, bourgeois cuisine: a rarefied, nearly impossibly expensive abstraction of the foods of the underclasses designed to flatter and self-impress a class of people who consider themselves to be smarter and more worldly than the proletariat. It also has the smell of fetishism, like those Asian restaurants where people sit on and eat from toilet bowls.*

I suppose though, that from the cooks’ perspective it’s an intellectual thing and hell, if people are willing to pay them to learn and have fun, then why not?
I don’t know this Roca fellow at all, but I can imagine his incredulity over seeing people wax poetic over his meal of oysters and dirt. And Harold, well, he’s probably right and the guy is a sort of genius, but I cannot believe that this Kadinsky of a surf and turf actually tasted good.

And what has terroir to do with oysters? Last time I looked oysters were marine animals. Oh wait, I get it: oysters live in estuaries which are fed by streams that carry sediment (dirt)! That’s the nexus, duh!

I also share your conundrum over the choice of Adria to represent Spain. His food is about as Spanish as Borat is Khazakstani. It’s beautiful, it’s thought provoking and has a lot of appeal to people like me who know a little bit about the physics and chemistry behind it’s construction. But I’m not so sure that I’ll be stopping by there on my next trip to Europe unless I suddenly decide that I cannot die until I eat a serrano ham lollipop or whatever. Then, on the other hand, if you are paying…

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8417691/

By: Faith

Faith — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

It is usually us Southerners that are accused of eating dirt. I feel vindicated.

By: Rory

Rory — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

The following day, after the conference, Susie, I, McGee and Keller met at Bouchon Bakery to discuss a new book we’re about to begin work on.

ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod…

Please keep us posted as more details emerge on this project. Would be really cool for you to blog about the bookwriting process.

By: RobertdelG

RobertdelG — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Faith
The practice of geophagy, dirt eating, is widespread throughout the world and is usually only practiced by the underclasses. However, sometimes the upper-classes in their search for unique experience will abstract a food from the lower classes and “elevate it” by gussying it up so that it seems to have nothing to do with where is came from. This distilled dirt thing might be one of those cases.

But I think that Chef Roca might have done a better job of producing something that someone would actually want to eat if he had chosen to distill the kind of “dirt” that white southerners, Native and African Americans actually used to eat a lot: clay.

Clean clay has a really nice alkaline taste similar to the flinty edge that one finds in some champagnes and which would go quite well with oysters. His choice of plain old dirt, might have been a useful for making his point, but makes me wonder why he thought it would taste good with oysters.
I also wonder why he did not choose to distill sea-water as a seasoning, after all oysters do not come from Napa valley.

Okay, enough fun, it’s voting time!

By: Ming

Ming — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Give a guy a some beakers, a handful of dirt and way too much time on his hands and he’s a genius. I really think our standards are lowering.

By: ruhlman

ruhlman — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Lucy’s point is exactly what roca was after. i believe he didn’t want you to taste the dirt, but he wanted to evoke it somehow, a memory of feral youth, the way you can brighten something by a few drops of lemon juice, not enough to taste lemon. and i think that’s why mcgee appreciated the oyster dish.

By: Ming

Ming — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

But McGee said he did taste the dirt. If he didn’t want you to taste the dirt and you tasted the dirt then he failed so what is there to appreciate? That it was a “good try”? That makes somebody a genius??? I just think that nowadays some people are just too dazzled by BS, and if you are bold enough to stand in front of enough people with something different no matter how whacky or ludicrous, somebody is going to be naive enough to be impressed by it. The guy managed to make dirt infused water taste like dirt, oooo but it was perfectly clear, Einstein move over!! What a joke.

By: gb500

gb500 — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

So, who’s going to be the first to say the emperor has no clothes? Fer cryin’ out loud –

By: ruhlman

ruhlman — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

ming,

mcgee said the distilled liquid at the cia demo tasted like dirt, but when he had the dish previously he didn’t taste the dirt, that it was a really good dish.

By: gb5000

gb5000 — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Michael,

Then what’s the point of adding it to the dish if you can’t taste it?

By: ruhlman

ruhlman — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

like lemon juice or salt, you don’t taste it, per se, but it has an effect on the dish.

By: Ming

Ming — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Oh now I see, just like packing fish in ice in the same position that it swims makes it taste better.

By: Tags

Tags — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

Let’s also keep in mind that our vegetables eat dirt and our meat eats dirt eating vegetables. They do tend to refine it a bit, but whatever they’re made of has its source in dirt.

By: gb500

gb500 — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

And actually, what could be more appropriate than a little “mud slinging” — especially on election day. Get out and vote!

By: Jon

Jon — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 06:00:00 +0000

If Roca got his “dirt” from the woods where organic matter is replenished annually from leaf fall we aren’t talking dirt at all but “soil”. Dirt is what you find on the playground or on fertilizer-dependent industrial farms. Soil is what you grow good food in. Good soil is full of life, some billion or so living organisms (15,000 speices)per tablespoonfull. If you distill the flavor of the living matter in soil in the matter described, maybe you would get the essential flavor of what was living in the soil. A good mix of microscopic crustaceans, fungi and what not might be tasty if you could extract their flavors.

Looking ahead, if there is really something to this, I see food societies staging “degustations de terre” and farmers touting the merits of their bagged up humus
at farmer’s market stalls and offering samples of freshly made “eau de terre” on slices of tomato or whatever. But on oysters? Why would anyone want to muck up a perfect food?