Love and Other Ways of Dying by Michael Paterniti Read Free Book Online

the faceless diner put fork to bird and bird to mouth, participated in the deconstruction, and actually liked it. And with that began the revolution, the alchemy, the culinary miracles. He experimentedwith gazpacho, vacuuming it into a liquidless, cold dish. When people ordered gazpacho expecting gazpacho, they suddenly did a double take at what appeared before them in a bowl: a sculpture garden of beheaded tomatoes, slivers of cucumber set like juju sticks, peeled whole onions … but where was the soup? And while other chefs certainly improvise from time to time, or as a last resort, Ferran Adrià couldn’t help himself. It was jazz, abstract painting. Dervishly, pathologically, he began changing everything.
    One day he got to thinking about ice cream, why it’s always sweet, why, when confronted with it, your entire body prepares for that great blast of sugar and cool cream—not an unpleasant sensation, especially on the hot Costa Brava, but nonetheless the same sensation triggered by the same food—and so he set out to obliterate the sameness of ice cream. And he did, mixing a batch, cream and milk and ice, but then, at the last moment, substituting salt for sugar.
Vaya!
What he tasted in his mouth felt like something cool and mineral, as if it had been scooped from the dark side of the moon.
    Now he saw the whole world in his kitchen: the autonomous march of history repeating history, the tyranny of that repetition. Chocolate: Why not add another texture, another taste to the tongue? He made some rich dark chocolate and smeared it with Japan—streaks of green wasabi that suddenly gave it a kick, a delicious burn that transformed the idea of chocolate into chocolate of some higher power. Bread: Why not make it explode? After baking bite-sized spheres of bread, he took a syringe and infiltrated the spongy interior with warm olive oil. He saw a simple croquette and injected it with seawater. People put them in their mouths expecting the expected—a little crunch, some chew, air—and were suddenly dealing with a burst and flood, victual chaos, palatal dyslexia, a tilting universe.
    The new big bang.
    Once, when Ferran Adrià was back in Barcelona for the winter, he bought a truckload of perfectly ripe tomatoes. He had no idea what he was doing. He and his brother, Albert, took the tomatoes back to their workshop, where Ferran dumped them on the floor and impulsively grabbed a bicycle pump. He stuck a tomato with it and furiously began pumping. For a moment, Albert regarded his brother quizzically, and the tomato itself seemed impervious until … it exploded everywhere! Covered in red gook, Ferran fell upon the wreckage, sifting through it, and triumphantly lifted one shard aloft. A fine, pinkish spume bubbled along the line where air had forced a fissure. He tasted it, a tomato without body—earth salt and juice, which suddenly disappeared like sparklers. After that, the brothers spent the afternoon blowing up tomatoes to see what more there was to discover.
    It was air that created this tomato foam, but then how could you make it in the kitchen? You couldn’t very well have someone in a back room blowing up tomatoes with a bicycle pump, could you? And also, the foam bubbled for a moment, but then flattened and quickly vanished. The brothers were stymied. Ferran felt that finding the key to making this foam would be like discovering a new planet.
    After some experimentation with an old whipped-cream canister, and with the addition of the perfect proportion of gelatin, they finally happened upon it: a tomato foam, straight from a metal canister, that could stand on its own! A fine, floating, airy thing that tasted like … like … some new mesospheric formation they called cloud. And the tomato was just the beginning. Soon there were curry and beet clouds, strawberry and apple clouds. Once in your mouth, they bubbled, effervesced, and evaporated, leaving a tingle of taste.
    His foam was soon being copied by