Gray Kunz - The Elements of Taste

Copyright 2001 by Gray Kunz and Peter Kaminsky

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First eBook Edition: December 2008

Additional photography on pages 147 and 163 by Tom Aksters.

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ISBN: 978-0-316-05549-9

Design by Vertigo Design, NYC

To Nicole, Julie, Jimmy, Melinda, Lucy, and Lily

Almost all people are born unconscious of the nuances of flavour. Many die so.

M.F.K. FISHER

IN EARLY 1990 I MADE PLANS to dine at the sumptuous new dining room in the recently renovated Peninsula Hotel in midtown Manhattan. I didn't consider it an exciting prospect. In those years, hotel restaurants, for the most part, were rather perfunctory affairs that catered to road-weary hold guests and distracted power-lunchers. As restaurant critic for the New York Times, however, I was compelled to check it outfully expecting to flee after the first bite of dessert.

Surprisingly, though, the menu looked intriguingthen again, I had been ambushed by florid prose many times. At that time, so-called fusion cooking was not yet the gastronomic buzzword it is today, although a few chefs were experimenting with melding Asian ingredients with classic American and French cuisine. Yet this was the first menu I had seen that approached it with such passion and authority. To be honest, I don't recall every detail of that meal, but I clearly remember my first taste sensation. It was a dish of grilled jumbo shrimp set in a shallow pellucid pool of shrimp stock. Yet the dish itself was infused with a flavor that was new to me, the kaffir lime. These bitter aromatic leaves defined and bolstered the sweetish broth, in the same way oak tannins frame a fine old Bordeaux.

Another startling creation, for both its flavor and texture, was a triple-decker of deboned quail that was layered with sweet taro-root chips and lustrous, perfectly seasoned creamed leeks. At the conclusion of this extraordinary meal I asked our captain for the name of the chef. Gray Kunz Never heard of him.

I may not have known his name but I sure knew that this was the standard by which fusion cooking would soon be measured. After subsequently tasting the efforts of some other chefs, it was clear that one could not embrace this refined technique by cookbooks alone. The nuances of his Eastern flavors are revealed most subtly to those who have lived with them, as Gray had, from his childhood in Singapore.

In 1991 he moved to the St. Regis Hotel, literally across the street from the Peninsula, to take over its lavish restaurant, Lespinasse. For the first time I couldn't wait to get a reservation in a hotel dining room. The food at Lespinasse was even more spectacular. One dish that stood out was a Thai-influenced, steamed striped bass with fried shallots and minced lemon peel set over a heady broth redolent of citrus and mixed herbs. It was not tong before chefs from around the country were excitedly queuing at his restaurant like kids at a carnival ride.

That same year I had the opportunity to observe Gray at work when he came out to East Hampton, Long Island, to cook with my longtime writing partner Pierre Franey, the renowned chef. New York Times columnist, and cookbook author. I was astounded at how Gray used ordinary supermarket ingredients to weave dishes that were amazingly simple yet with wonderfully stratified flavors that just kept washing over the palate. One might call it contrapuntal cuisine, for its extraordinary balance and harmony.

Could I cook like this at home, or was this just too ethereal for even the skilled amateur? Another Gray admirer, food writer Peter Kaminsky, decided to give it a try. His idea was to deconstruct Gray's approach to food and, in the process, explain the principles behind great taste in a way that anyone could understand. The result is The Elements of Tasle. Instead of writing a conventional cookbook that presents recipes as an end in themselves. Peter and Gray started by identifying the elemental flavors, and showed them at play in an array of Gray's signature dishes. In essence, they discovered the way great chefs think and gave it a language.

In a way, The Elements of Taste grabs the baton from Brillat-Savarin and carries it into the home kitchen. With this approach, recipes are guidelines, not dogma. Such a cooking strategy is akin to viewing a great painting in a museum: from ten feet away you can appreciate the overall image; from one foot away you savor the brilliance. The Elements of Taste is a different kind of cookbook, one that demands a degree of engagement from the reader. It also is original, thought-provoking, and savoryjust like a four-star restaurant.

BRYAN MILLER

CHEFS DON'T CREATE FROM RECIPES. They create from tastes. They create in the same way that a composer hears notes in the concert hall of the mind before anyone plays them on the keyboard. Kitchen artists draw on the knowledge acquired through years of study, long practice, and a generous dollop of intuition. If chefs are like composers in general, they are very like one composer in particularAntonio Vivaldi. As a teacher in a foundling home for girls in Venice, his task each year was like that of a chef at the market: he could concoct his musical stew only with the materials at hand. If his star students played flute, oboe, and bassoon, he would write a piece for what was then an unusual combination of instruments. If the young ladies were more adept at guitar, he would dash off a slew of guitar pieces. Presumably if there had been a powerhouse conga drummer in the class, his oeuvre would certainly have included a concerto for harpsichord, lute, and conga.

Chefs work the same way: they start with the best of what is available and then turn to their intuition and their memories to figure out what might be done with those ingredients. A recipe may spring from a survey of the pantry, a trip to the refrigerator, a walk through the market, the memory of the smell of bacon on Sunday morning or of sage after a morning rain. As any fen of Hemingway or Proust knows, taste memories are among our strongest and most evocative. It was the memory of the taste of one little madeleine dissolved in a cup of tea that sent Proust careening through the next three thousand pages of remembrances. Had his memory been jogged by a complex dish like a bouillabaisse, he might have written his way through another foot of two of out bookshelves.

Like Proust's evocative memories, a chef's memories of taste lie at the base of any new recipe. You have a taste in your mind, an idea that it would go well cooked in a certain way or combined with a certain herb. Then you try that idea. You add ingredients and seasonings, reduced pan juices, maybe some lemon juice or wine, honey or sugar. Like a composer, you look for themes, motifs, andmost importantharmonies.

So, while this book contains recipes that you may cook as confidently as a musician can play through a score, it attempts something more important to the aspiring chef. It presents the thought process behind recipes, far that is how a chef creates. It always comes down to taste.