“Ripe Portions”
Nathan Barnett
14 Nov → 13 Dec 2014

"The key to a successful hot foam is to have sufficiently reduced cream, which upon aeration will yield a foam composed of millions of minute, fat-encased bubbles. Unashamedly rich, yes, but spectacular when done well…wildly aerated, loose knit bubbles, or ‘airs’, appear to have won the favour of critics.

Clumps of tasteless ‘clouds’ adorn the dishes of some of the worlds most celebrated chefs, yet they appear to me to contribute nothing to a dish." — Philip Howard

Here, influential British chef Philip Howard laments the near complete dematerialisation of the sauce in haute cuisine. We can glean from this that his gastronomic philosophy favours the modern over the contemporary. Cuisine should be innovative yet faithful to its humanist purpose. Form must follow function. Gestural elements of a dish should never belie the materials that they are composed of. His woes are not only gustatory in nature but also sculptural — they stem from a feeling of loss relating to matter, mass, density, and form.