Gastronomy, TV and 'Culinary Texts of Indirection' II

The second part of a discussion by Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones which thinks about Heston's Feasts as a televisual form of the 'culinary text of indirection'.

In her work on the establishment of the culinary field in France following the 1789 Revolution, Parkhust Ferguson argues that in order to redefine the prosaic activity of dining out as a phenomenon of a higher moral and intellectual order it was essential for gastronomic writers to produce ‘culinary texts of indirection’ which aestheticized the dining experience by transforming food into literature. Therefore, at this stage, gastronomy emerged as part of the literary field.

We have been thinking about how Heston’s Feasts might operate as a televisual form of the ‘culinary text of indirection’ which enables Blumenthal to aestheticize his own work. In this way we can think of Heston’s Feasts as enabling the chef to engage in the practice of ‘self-theorization’ that Svejenova et al associate with his contemporary Ferran Adria. In this process, the chef theorizes their own culinary practice as an aesthetic practice rather than simply being dependent on food critics for recognition. As Bourdieu notes in his discussion of the creative ‘break’ established by Modern Art, the conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp altered the rules of the game: while previous artists had to be ‘made by the field’, the modern artist is self-creating and self-theorising, ‘producing art objects in which the production of the producer as artist is the precondition for the production of these objects as works of art’ (1993: 61). While the celebrity diners in Heston’s Feasts act as a chorus who affirm Heston’s achievement, it is his own commentary that legitimates his practice as art.

For Mennell (1996: 266), in origin both the writers and readers of gastronomic literature were members of an elite. This literature laid ‘down canons of “correct” taste for those who were wealthy enough to meet them’. However, over time ‘whether they intended to or not’, these texts ‘also performed a democratizing function’ by disseminating knowledge ‘of elite standards beyond the elite’. To an extent, this judgment would hold true for Heston’s Feasts. The cuisine on offer unashamedly draws on aristocratic traditions in its conception, ingredients and its service. At the same time, it performs some kind of democratizing function by disseminating knowledge of the practices and techniques of high-end cuisine to a wider audience, using some of the conventions of both popular history and arts programming. This is anticipated in the programme through the choice of celebrities, some of whom are drawn from popular entertainment. Indeed, the very appearance of such a show on a popular medium such as television could be read as essentially democratic (and evidence of Blumenthal’s ability to transgress boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural forms).

However, as David Bell argues, television chefs – like gourmands in general – inhabit the paradoxical position of ‘marking distinction while democratizing tastes’ (Bell 2002). Indeed, we would suggest that HF – in which the audience is witness to a one-off spectacular event rather than encouraged to ‘try this at home’ – makes very little attempt to democratize anything but Heston’s brand image. So while much tv cookery might seen as both a televisual equivalent of the cookery book and also an extended advert for the book of the series, HF transforms the relationship between television and written texts. Indeed, with no book of the series to date, the show can be seen to perform two functions. First, the only product being publicized is Heston and the experience offered at his restaurant, The Fat Duck. Second, by breaking the relationship between the tv cookery programme and the written recipe book, the series gestures towards television as a proper medium for producing ‘culinary texts of indirection’.
(Photo credit: robertpaulyoung. Permissions.)

Gastronomy, TV and 'Culinary Texts of Indirection' I

Since writing a quick response to the Channel 4 cookery show Heston’s Feasts in an earlier blog entry, Joanne Hollows and Steve Jones have been thinking in more depth about the show. In the first of two entries, they explore the idea that the show drew on some of the conventions of gastronomic writing to produce a televisual form of the ‘culinary text of indirection’.

Each episode of Heston’s Feasts saw Heston Blumenthal creating a memorable meal for celebrity diners which evoked a particular historical period: the Victorians, the Middle Ages, the Tudors and the Romans. At the outset of each episode, he says that ‘the future of cooking lies in the secrets of the past. I’m on a mission to use myth, science and history to create the greatest feasts ever seen’. These features give the programmes a scholarly feel that is accentuated by his use of the literary: for example the first episode on The Victorians is inspired by the spirit of the age but mediated through Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In this indebtedness to literature, Blumenthal plays with the connections between the gastronomic and literary fields identified by Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson and Stephen Mennell.

Of Mennell’s four characteristics of gastronomic writing, two concern us here: first, gastronomic literature aims to provide ‘a brew of history, myth and history serving of myth’ and second, it is a nostalgic ‘evocation of memorable meals’ (1996: 271). Blumenthal’s characterization of his own practice as using ‘myth, science and history’ corresponds with Mennell’s first definition while his continual emphasis on the meal as the source of memory corresponds with the second. In this way, HF draws on the conventions of gastronomic literature to reconceptualize cookery TV. Like Mennell’s gastronomes, Heston’s role is to transform the creation of food into an activity of a higher order. For example, he experiments with a Victorian recipe for Mock Turtle soup. While the result is enjoyed volunteers on the street, Heston concludes that this incarnation of the soup lacks the element of the sublime he demands from his creations. In order to perfect his take on Mock Turtle Soup, Blumethal subjects it to further processes of refinement:

All I’ve done is made consommé, froze it, ice-filtered it over night… then I just froze it again, put it in a centrifuge… spun all of the clear broth from the ice, and then I froze it again in a minus 80 freezer and all I needed to do after that was pop it in the freeze-dryer and then simply add gelatine and Madeira.

However, even this does not exhaust the process: Heston makes a soup cube from this using a ‘Mad Hatter’ fob-watch shaped silicone mould before wrapping it in gold-leaf to form the basis of his Mock Turtle Soup. The ingot is places like a tea-bag in a tea-pot where the resultant brew is then poured over a turnip and swede gel ‘Mock Turtle egg’ adorned with minute enoki mushrooms, a terrine of cured pork fat and braised ox tongue served with ‘lightly-pickled’ turnip, cubes of black truffle gel, a scattering of mustard seeds and a few micro-leaves.

The original recipe for mock turtle soup that Blumenthal located in an old cookbook is merely an inspiration for the chef-artist’s creativity. Furthermore, it is not the sole inspiration as his culinary process is also infused with literary sources, scientific experimentation and historical research. Across the series, historical recipes serve as an inspiration in terms of what they signify (theatre, fun, experimentation, naughtiness) as much as their actual ingredient and techniques. Indeed, the recipes usually go through a series of versions and refinements as Blumenthal and various guinea pigs reject the ‘authentic’ recipe in favour of a series of improvements. While Heston’s Feasts seems to be an exercise in grounding his practice in tradition, the series is a demonstration of the ways in which tradition can be ‘invented’. Just as Duchamp’s intervention was necessary to create the modern artwork from found objects, so the series demonstrates how it is the production of the chef as artist and theoretician that is ‘the precondition for the production of these object [meals] as works of art’ (Bourdieu 1993: 61).