It’s only natural, I suppose, for a $625 five-volume, epochal publishing event like Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine to polarize the food world. After all, this is the book the whole culinary world has been waiting for: “the cookbook to end all cookbooks,” as David Chang called it. I witnessed Myhrvold’s impatience with old-fashioned ways of thinking when I visited the eccentric millionaire last fall, and so last week’s dustup with superstar food writer Michael Ruhlman wasn’t unexpected. But it told a lot about how Modernist Cuisine is being misunderstood, and even misrepresented in some ways.
To recap: Ruhlman reviewed Myhrvold’s magnum opus for the New York Times, and found it “mind-crushingly boring, eye-bulgingly riveting, edifying, infuriating, frustrating, fascinating, all in the same moment.” Ruhlman recognized the immense contribution the book makes to culinary knowledge, and no serious student of food doubts that it will stand alongside Escoffier as one of the defining cookbooks in history. But Ruhlman, like many traditional cooks, sees it as a playground for chefs and food geeks rather than the revolution Myhrvold had hoped for. “Can this truly be the food of the future,” Ruhlman asked rhetorically, “or simply an interesting style practiced by a splinter group of passionate chefs who care about this difficult and expensive form of high-end cooking?” He saved his heaviest stroke for last: “Much of this revolutionary cooking is based on ingredients and techniques long fundamental to the processed food industry. Are we to embrace the ingredients and techniques of modernist cuisine at the very moment industrially processed food is being blamed for many of our national health problems?” Ruhlman wasn’t the first food writer to rebel against Myhrvold’s technological gospel. Alice Waters, always ready to reassert the Naturalist party line, came out against the book months ago, but Ruhlman’s review appeared in the Times, and so it has the weight of the official Establishment response behind it.
Myhrvold, not one to take a dismissal lying down, thundered back in a widely quoted post on the popular food forum eGullet. Though taking pains to parse Ruhlman’s equivocating rhetoric and refute an easily checkable claim that all the meat in the book is cooked sous vide
