1967

Ah....  1967.

     As I stood looking at an oddly placed but somewhat inspirational mural of old Gourmet magazine covers; this one cover in particular stood out to me.  I looked at it for a long time.  It's, quite frankly, hideous.  I tried to imagine what it was.  Curious, I turned to google.  

     If you'd like to buy a copy of the June 67 copy of Gourmet in excellent condition, I now know a guy...  a few, as a matter of fact.   

     As far as I can decipher, it's a chau froid of fish.  Likely poached fish, draped in a fish aspic, coated in a mayonnaise gel.  It was, obviously, high cuisine in it's day and countless culinary aficionados likely toiled in pursuit of this ideal.  You take a fish apart, you put a fish back together in a different way.      

     Now, it's not a way that very many people want to eat these days, but people did it, and felt accomplished simply because they could.

     It seems a little silly, as you look at it.  That stupid fish, staring at you.

     And judging.

This image property of Modernist Cuisine

    You do it too...  says the chau froid fish.     

      And it would be right, most cooks do.  That's the cutting edge.  50 years ago it was a fish.  Now it's a grill, or a burger, or chicken/duck/turkey.  A whole other country's cuisine.

     We wanna take it apart and put it back together with something else from somewhere else because we're all struggling to do something new; something no one has ever seen before.  We're struggling to find our place, and in a lot of ways the US's place in a world of thousand year old food traditions.

     Nathan Myhvold and his team are leading the charge of a generation of cooks that like to take things apart and then put them back together again in new and inventive ways.

     Hopefully I'll be forgiven my use of this image, but it demonstrates what I see as today's version of the chau froid fish, executed by forward thinking chefs the world around.  Ferran Adria.  Jose Andres.  Wylie Dufrense.    We're using equipment, techniques and chemicals to make caviars, creams, airs and crisps which transform ingredients into something unexpected.  Culinary aficionados the world around likely toil in pursuit of an ideal.

     

     This idea, this Ohio Chef Collective, is meant to regionalize this drive.  Inform and encourage the use of Ohio things by Ohio people (life-time or transplanted) in Ohio ways to make Ohio food.


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