Earlier this week, I attended a two-day conference on molecular gastronomy — sometimes refered to as the “science of deliciousness” — and the relationship between technique, technology, and science.

It was a free and public session, organized by the INRA, the French institute for agricultural research, and the engineering school AgroParisTech. Our lecturer was none other than Hervé This*, co-creator of this scientific discipline that studies the physical and chemical phenomenons that take place in cooking. In passing, 2008 marks the 20th anniversary of molecular gastronomy, and I hear this will be suitably celebrated in Paris around March 20.

I am no longer used to sitting for hours in a cramped classroom, and my right knee made a point of telling me that, but someone like Hervé This makes you want to unearth that satchel and do it all over again: his passion, his enthusiasm, his talent for teaching, and his facetious ways make fourteen hours of lecture go by in a blink.

You should note that Hervé This hosts monthly seminars in Paris — also free and open to the public (by email registration). These are a fantastic opportunity to witness debates and experiments during which you’ll finally get to the bottom of such vital questions as: does adding a potato to an oversalted soup have any sort of effect? Should one beat meat to tenderize it? Do hand-cut fries actually taste better than machine-cut fries? (The reports are then made available on the French society for chemistry’s website.)

I’ve learned a lot during these two days, and the contents of the lecture will soon be published in book form by the INRA, but here are a few bullet points handpicked from my notes.

* The “h” is mute here, and This’ last name is pronounced “tiss”.

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We all have our siren ingredients, those that call to us in voices of sugar from the printed page of a cookbook — or the pixelated page of a food blog — and charm us into dropping whatever we’re doing to run to the kitchen and reenact the recipe.

Cornmeal is one of my sirens, and I find it particularly beguiling in baked goods*. This is the only way I can explain such a short TTO (time to oven) for this cookie recipe, which I chanced upon last week on Ivonne’s fine blog, Cream Puffs in Venice.

Crumiri, sometimes spelled krumiri, are traditional Italian cookies that hail from the Piedmont region. The origin of the name is hazy: crumiro means strikebreaker, so that can’t be it, and while some say the cookies were named after a Tunisian liqueur called Krumiro (or Krumiria, presumably like the Maghreb region) that the baker-inventor liked to swill, the Internet knows nothing about this mysterious beverage. No matter.

These cookies can take on different shapes, but they generally wear a ridged outfit, created by the star-shaped tip of a piping bag. Alas, I am a poorly equipped baker and my flimsy piping bag did not resist the assault of such a thick dough**. After a brief but irritating struggle, I resigned myself to forming vague lumps.

Aside from this minor hurdle, these are precisely my kind of cookie: crumbly, with the teasing crunch of cornmeal between your teeth, delicately flavored, and not too sweet. And in keeping with the regional theme, I have found them to be ideal companions to a scoop of homemade Nutella ice cream***.

The recipe Ivonne posted comes from a book called Italian Baking Secrets, written by an Italian priest; I modified it to reduce the amount of butter and sugar slightly. If you want to make ridged ones, make sure you use a professional-grade piping bag and tip that won’t burst and poop out on you. I’m just saying.

* If you share my cornmeal enthusiasm, consider trying my go-to recipe for shortbread, or these violet cornmeal macarons.

** It has to be thick, otherwise the ridges will just soften and melt away in the oven.

*** Yes: before it became a world-renowned addictive substance full of transfats, Nutella was a piedmontese specialty known as pasta gianduja.

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If you keep an eye on my book list, you may have noticed I am currently reading Michael Ruhlman‘s recently published, orange book*. In The Elements of Cooking, he proposes to break down and discuss the building blocks of the cooking craft, like William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White did for writers in their classic little volume The Elements of Style, to which the title and format are a homage.

It is an engaging and educational read that retains a strong sense of the author’s voice and idiosyncrasies, unlike other reference books like, say, The Food Lover’s Companion, which I consult regularly but wouldn’t think to read from cover to cover.

The bulk of the book consists in an Acid-to-Zester lexicon of concepts, techniques, preparations, and ingredients, which Ruhlman prefaces with a section in which he lays down his founding principles, addressing such themes as salt, heat, and finesse.

In his essay on tools, he begins by asking the reader to “imagine the kitchen as a white box with nothing more than a stove, fridge, countertop, and sink — not a single other element for cooking in it — and then to pose a hypothetical question: if you were asked to outfit the kitchen with as few items as possible, the absolute minimum you could possibly get away with and still be able to cook most things, what would those items be?”

This question is of particular interest to me as it conjoins two topics I find endlessly stimulating: the desert island question (if you could only bring along five books/CDs/articles of toiletry, what would they be?**) and the neverending battle one has to wage to keep one’s home and life clutter-free.

So I’d like to submit the question to you: if you could only have five tools (pots, utensils, cutlery, and let’s add appliances) in your kitchen, what would they be? Note that we are considering your cooking needs only, setting aside the question of baking equipment. (If you’re the playful type, I suggest you come up with your own list before scrolling down to see Ruhlman’s and mine.)

* The book was sent to me as a review copy.
** Great car game, too!

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It has been far too long since last I wrote about soup. Have I stopped making soup? This is like asking if I’ve stopped breathing, and the answer — as I type this, at least — is no.

The reason for this soup drought is that I’ve mostly been making variations of soups already featured on this blog, or über-simple combinations of whatever vegetables cried for salvation in my refrigerator.

Today’s recipe is also very simple, I’ll grant you that, but it is a deceptive kind of simple. The leek and potato soup is among the greatest classics of French homemade soups — an inexpensive, filling, and becalming concoction that is particularly welcome on a Sunday night when you’ve been feeling under the otherwise balmy weather.

It is a soup I am very fond of, in fact it was the very first one I tackled as a budding soup maker in my Californian kitchen. It was a sobering failure — I muffled the leeks’ flavor by using too many potatoes, burned my hand with the spluttering soup, naively assumed my food processor to be watertight, and repainted my kitchen cabinets in pale green — that took years of therapy to get over, but just one recipe.

It comes from my friend Sophie‘s admirable book La Table végétale, in which she organizes her vegetable-centric recipes according to the life cycle of the plant — I can’t get over how clever, how poetic that is.

She writes her way onward and upward from what lies below the ground (potatoes, beets, garlic), to what hovers just above (mushrooms, asparagus, leeks), to leaves (nettles, lettuce, vine leaves), flowers (artichokes, zucchini blossoms, borage), fruits (hokkaido squash, cucumbers, peppers), and back to the seeds (pink beans, chestnuts, corn) that will ultimately return to the earth.

It is a brilliant book, wherein Sophie distills her encyclopedic knowledge of the cuisines and ingredients of this world, broadening the reader’s horizon, teaching and explaining without ever sounding superior or academic.

Among the well-traveled recipes that propose to elope with your tastebuds to Budapest, Athens, Singapore, Colombo, Lagos, Casablanca, Bogota, or Shanghai, this one propelled me to the stove: a leek and potato soup in its simplest embodiment.

Sophie explains it is an heirloom from her family in Haute-Normandie, and what makes it special is that the most tender of the leek greens get finely sliced and briefly poached in the hot soup for texture. (If you own a miniature deep-frier — and if Maxence gets his way, I may soon have one, too — I imagine you could fry the thin strips and crown the bowls with these delicate leek tempuras.)

Because the soup doesn’t call for any artifice — it is just leeks and potatoes cooked properly –, it is of course in your best interest to use the most lovingly grown vegetables you can find. I got excellent results with sharpie-thin leeks and Monalisa potatoes from the organic farmers’ market on boulevard des Batignolles.

Post-scriptum: I just found out that the UN have declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato, to promote this hidden treasure that feeds the hungry.

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