Pairings

Metaphor of taste, or How to make a foie gras dish skipping Jerez
www.drinktime.ru, 5 March 2010

It happens so often: you go to a small-scale regional event, no matter in which country, and phenomenal things are presented there.

Due to some logistical issues, this year I missed Madridfusion, a mega-summit which entails magical performances from super-chefs. The organisers made amends by inviting me to a gastronomic forum in Santiago de Compostela.

Forum Gastronomico has been held in Spain since 1999, alternating venues between Galician Santiago and Catalan Girona. The event isn’t small, but it isn’t grand enough either to compete on the same level with Madridfusion or San Sebastian Gastronomika.

It was nevertheless very interesting. Ferran Adria, as usual, caused the biggest stir. He announced that elBulli, the world’s best restaurant according to various sources, will be transformed into a private, non-profit foundation. In 2014 elBulli will become a centre of creative cooking. Many presentations and master classes were devoted to local products and modern interpretations of old traditions. ‘Autochthonous’ and ‘terroir’ now seem to be firmly rooted in the gastronomic vocabulary. Wine also inspired a chef and a sommelier to build a new paradigm between two adjacent worlds. Defined as enocooking, it was first publicly presented during the forum.

The idea, together with the newly coined label, was born just a couple of months ago. There is a place close to Santiago called Sanxenxo which is the most expensive beach resort in Galicia, if not in Spain. That’s where Pepe Vieira — Camiño da Serpe restaurant is located. It is managed by brothers Xose and Xoan Cannas. Xose is a chef known for his unconventional approach to regional Galician cuisine. Xoan is a sommelier, winner of the prestigious Spanish competition, Golden Nose. Both are creative people who are not afraid to experiment and search for something new.

The brothers asked themselves a question: how do we convey perception of one thing through the other? In the gastronomic context it means: how can wine qualities become a base for a dish and vice versa? It should be made clear at once that Xose and Xoan are not attempting to create a certain perfect combination, an ideal match between wine and food. Their interest lies somewhere else. Can it be possible to convey the idea of wine aromas through differing textures of a dish? In other words, the chef and the sommelier challenged themselves to transpose the experience of one sense onto another.

The idea to experience one sensory perception through another is not new. You have surely heard about ‘coloured’ hearing or ‘musical’ vision, or perhaps even possess one of these abilities. The phenomenon of a double sensory experience is known as synaesthesia. The brothers Cannas admit that when creating new links between smells and textures they were inspired by art, rather than by the creative dishes or wines of their colleagues. The artwork was made by two Russians — artist Wassily Kandinsky and composer Alexander Scriabin.

The chef and the sommelier were impressed that Kandinsky could draw music-based images, and that Scriabin saw his music in colour. They took two simplified algorithms: “Kandinsky — notes — colour” and “Scriabin — colour — notes” and created an enocooking concept called “Metaphor of taste”.

The creative process starts with a beverage. The sommelier chooses a bottle of wine and writes down its important technical and tasting features. Xoan Cannas presented Jerez Oloroso Gobernador by Hidalgo at the seminar. The wine’s key features, according to the sommelier, are oxidised style, dynamic solera aging, elevated alcohol (a fortified wine) and pungency of aromas.

The chef doesn’t taste the wine thus he has no idea about its precise aromas and flavours. His task is to translate given parameters onto gastronomic level, using general experience. On the example of Jerez, it looks the following:

Oxidised style — Smoked — Smoke
Oxidised style — dried fruit — Walnut
Dynamic solera aging — Toasted — Queimada
Alcohol — Unctuous — Foie gras
Pungency — Piquant — Pepper

A metaphoric transformation of dry Oloroso leads to foie queimada — foie gras mousse with herbal and coffee liqueurs queimada and smoking cinnamon stick. We tasted both — the Jerez and the foie gras.

“So, did the dish resemble the wine?” is a common question when I tell people about this experiment. But the question is wrong because it misses out the main point of the new gastronomic idea. It is primitive to make direct comparisons between wine and its food metaphor, just like it makes no sense to ‘translate’ colours on Kandinsky’s pictures into specific musical instruments.

Wassily Kandinsky indeed made an associative table between a colour and a sound of a musical instrument (sky blue — flute, yellow — trumpet, etc.), but in his understanding a colour means a certain timbre corresponding to its ‘inner sounding’. In other words, the artist was interested in the idea of a ‘vibrating’ picture in the same way a musical instrument resonates. He wanted a viewer to ‘hear’ vibrations of colour set on a canvas.

Alexander Scriabin, in turn, saw music in colour, but those were not banal direct links ‘note — colour’. In his time there was a popular theory on this subject but he was negative about it. (By the way, Kandinsky and Scriabin lived in the same epoch, but their roads never crossed.) The composer ‘painted’ tonalities, i.e. complex musical structures. For example, he associated C-major and F-major with red, whilst E-flat and B-flat — with a shining steel colour.

Xose Cannas processed given wine parameters through his own cooking perception in order to create a metaphoric dish. Foie gras ‘resonated’ with Jerez, confirming that synaesthesia is possible in the enogastronomic world, too.

Still, I find a couple of flaws in the enocooking concept of the brothers Cannas. Synaesthesia implies connection between two senses: hearing — vision, vision — hearing, etc. The chef and sommelier’s main intention, by their own admission, is to transform aromas of a wine into textures of a dish, that is to build new links between senses of smell and touch. In reality, their associative line has a branched structure as it actively involves another sense — taste. The sense of taste, naturally, plays a fundamental role in gastronomy, but if one is to analyse carefully the chains created by the brothers Cannas, it is evident, that they lack the algorithmic consistency. Xose and Xoan propose a complex interaction of various senses or differing vectors within a sense. In other words, they are looking for “poly-synaesthesia”.

Inter-sensory experience should theoretically be whole, i.e. felt by the same person. It is logical that for creating a wine metaphor by means of a dish, this person should be a cook (and more so because of the subjective nature of wine assessments). In reality, there is something like a ‘bad phone line’: Xoan interprets wine and Xose creates a metaphor of this interpretation rather than of the wine itself. I wonder if the chef would keep his recipe the same if he had tasted the Jerez?

All in all, the practical part of the enocooking concept proved more interesting than the theoretical, but this is only the beginning. I appreciate that the brothers Cannas had the courage to propose a radically new relationship between wine and gastronomy. Who knows, perhaps one day their metaphors will be the classics of the enocooking genre. Or maybe a poet or a sculptor will be inspired to create new synaesthetic forms. How about tactile smelling, for one?