Molecular Gastronomy and the Masculinization of Home Cooking
When I moved into my first apartment, I could not cook for myself. I scrambled eggs, boiled rice, and globbed hot sauce onto plain ingredients in an attempt at some kind of flavor. Ultimately, I found myself at the mercy of a dwindling stash of boxed mac and cheese, hoping the alumni center at my university was giving out free bagels that day, so I could avoid the kitchen entirely.
This is a privileged ignorance, one for which I am largely at fault. I assumed that if I developed a traditionally feminine skill like cooking or baking, my life would become traditionally feminine, and I would be compelled to the kitchen to live out my wifely days.
Bratty adolescent attempt at avoiding dinnertime responsibilities aside, my rationale—that I did not want to learn to cook because I did not want to be forced to cook—is steeped in internalized sexism. I viewed the home kitchen as a feminized space, instead of understanding cooking as a complex scientific practice requiring discipline, instinct, and awareness of chemical and physical processes. As such, I presumed that women who liked cooking, who liked feeding, were brain-washed into submission.
There is a paradox here, because outside the walls of the home, cooking is understood as scientific. In the restaurant world, preparing food is artistic, entrepreneurial, and increasingly scientific. It is complex and fast-paced and, demographically speaking, male-dominated: More than 75 percent of chefs and head cooks are men, yet in the home, women spend far more time cooking than men do. And 80 percent of mothers are the primary cooks and grocery shoppers in their homes. The binary assigning greater scientific and economic value to the labor of cooking in the restaurant is artificial; it is sexist; and it erases the fact that home cooking has always required scientific knowledge, even though it has not been recognized as being difficult or academic.
“The binary assigning greater scientific and economic value to the labor of cooking in the restaurant is artificial; it is sexist; and it erases the fact that home cooking has always required scientific knowledge…”
This artificial binary is evident in the history of molecular gastronomy, a discipline of restaurant cooking that pays particular attention to the chemistry behind cooking. The term “molecular gastronomy” was coined in 1992 by physicist Nicholas Kurti as a name for his lecture on the science of traditional cooking. Only it was not just Kurti’s lecture. Kurti had been first approached by a female chef and cooking teacher named Elizabeth Thomas to develop a series of workshops in Erice, Sicily. The two worked together, although a male mentor of Thomas’s later expressed regret that her role in creating that workshop series was not fully acknowledged by attendees.
Ultimately, it was Kurti who chose to name the series “Molecular and Physical Gastronomy,” essentially as a marketing ploy to make the discussion on the chemistry of classical cooking, a precursor to contemporary molecular gastronomy, sound less “frivolous” and firmly rooted in science. Kurti wanted the lecture series to be seen as scientific and, in doing so, used science as a tool to masculinize a discussion about classical cooking.
In correspondence with food writer Harold McGee, he explained Kurti and Thomas used the term “molecular gastronomy” to refer to the scientific basis behind “traditional cooking,” acknowledging that cooking contains physical and chemical processes worthy of academic study. According to McGee, this term has been repurposed to refer to “experimental, innovative, hypermodern cooking.” Molecular gastronomy is no longer a study of classical gastronomy; rather, it has become a genre of cuisine in its own right.
The contemporary concept of molecular gastronomy has been utilized by celebrity chefs such as Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz. Founder of the Chicago-based restaurant Alinea, Achatz was featured on the second season of Netflix’s “Chef’s Table,” a show which, until recently, profiled predominantly white, male chefs. Molecular gastronomy meals often trick the senses, like this dish that looks like a clementine but is actually foie gras. Meals may include non-edible elements entirely, such as dry ice, to create an experiential meal. As it is currently understood, molecular gastronomy consists of high-end, highly technical processes and is represented in media by white, male chefs. Contemporary molecular gastronomy thrives on its exclusivity; the machinery, ingredients, and the language associated with making the cuisine are all entirely inaccessible to those outside of its elite kitchens. Yet molecular gastronomy capitalizes on traditional cooking knowledge.
Contemporary molecular gastronomy seeks to transform cooking and baking into a chemistry, but really, it seeks to masculinize the kitchen, part of a greater ongoing practice in the male-dominated restaurant space, while delegitimizing the wide collection of knowledge cultivated by home cooks for years. Cooking in its traditional sense builds on centuries of informal but extraordinary technical knowledge, generally shared between women in the kitchen. Interestingly, molecular gastronomy in its contemporary sense also builds on groundwork laid by female chefs and academics.
Belle Lowe, for example, quite literally wrote the book on experimental cooking in 1937. In Experimental cookery, from the chemical and physical standpoint, Lowe states that “inorganic, organic, physical, and plant chemistry, as well as other sciences, are necessary for an adequate understanding of many processes in food preparation.” Shortly after in 1943, University of Chicago home economics professors Evelyn Halliday and Isabel Noble wrote a book further studying the physical principles of food preparation. Both books call out cooking as distinctly scientific, yet molecular gastronomy in its contemporary understanding refers instead to supposedly futuristic cooking techniques. In doing so, contemporary molecular gastronomy ignores the complex chemical basis of traditional cooking.
Ultimately, these women worked from the collective folk knowledge of millennia of cooking, eating, observing, and sharing, because yes, molecular gastronomy requires a distinct understanding of temperature, chemistry, and taste, but so does cooking. Inside or outside of the test kitchen, with or without dry ice, or a CO2 cartridge, or a rotary evaporator, cooking is and has always been chemical.
As home cooking techniques such as fermentation and sourdough baking increase in popularity, popular depictions of cooking and baking are beginning to represent the scientific side of cooking. For example, “The Great British Bake-Off” is very specific in its depictions of contestants' steps in the baking process. “Bake-Off” contestants do far more than just follow instructions. Measurements and temperatures must be precise, or else a soufflé will not puff. Dough cannot be overworked, or else the gluten structure will seize in a tense rage. And at the same time, nothing is precise at all. Bakers who practice making the same cake 20 times before the competition sit intently in front of the oven, understanding that their timer means nothing if the cake does not feel like behaving that day. The whole process, as packaged neatly by the BBC for viewers, is a science, an art, a dance.
“Home cooking knowledge is not recognized as academic or scientific because historically, it defines an invisible industry of women’s work.”
“The Great British Bake Off” showcases baking as a science, yet this understanding has not yet been extended to the home kitchen. Sure, molecular gastronomy exudes scientific futurism. Even a quick Google image search will yield pictures of test tubes and colorful fog and other cartoonishly scientific paraphernalia. But cooking and baking are also scientific, and home cooks carry in their minds, their fingers, and their recipe books a wealth of traditional chemical and physical knowledge. Home cooking knowledge is not recognized as academic or scientific because historically, it defines an invisible industry of women’s work. The labor is feminized. It is erased. It is taken for granted.
While restaurateurs are celebrated for their gastronomic innovation and intelligence, internalized sexism delegitimizes the informational and instinctive rigor involved in making a meal, whether in a home kitchen or in a Michelin starred restaurant.
I am not a molecular gastronomist. I cannot even really bake. But as a home cook, I am practicing science in legitimate ways I did not understand as a teenage girl. I do not have test tubes, and I very rarely use the scientific manual I have on hand in the form of a cookbook. But I am facilitating chemical reactions and physical transformations in a way I never had to in my high school science lab because nothing we made in AP Chemistry had to taste good.
I mean no disrespect to Grant Achatz, but, frankly, I would argue that my mother’s matzo ball soup is a form of molecular gastronomy, so long as you own a microscope powerful enough to see how carefully she simmered the chicken bones, skimmed the schmaltz, and boiled the matzo balls.
Image credit: Advanced cooking class; Saint Augustine's School; [Raleigh, North Carolina.] ca. 1923. (New York Public Library | Public Domain)
