"HauteCuisine" news and stories

What would a dinner table be without its salt and pepper? They've become so ubiquitous in everyone's kitchen. However, we rarely wonder why. Both were heavily used in cuisine for hundreds of years, but so were several other spices. What made people focus on salt and pepper?

The story begins with salt. In Ancient Rome, it gained popularity as a condiment. Italians during the Renaissance served salted dishes at the same time as sugared dishes. It was not until the 17th century that the French created a salt-sweet divide. Salted foods were eaten throughout the meal because they stimulate the appetite. Sweet plates were served at the end; they satiate the appetite and shutdown our desire to eat.

It was in France that salt met its inevitable spicy partner, pepper. 17th-century Classic French cuisine, which developed at the court of Louis XIV, considered pepper and parsley as superior to the various spices imported from the Middle East. In fact, it viewed all spices as vulgar ingredients masking the true flavor of a dish. Pepper was the only spice acceptable. And, it eventually attained the same status as fine herbs which were thought to be more wholesome and exquisite. The French heightened the importance of pepper giving it the status it has today.

The closest I ever got to dining at New York City's top-flight French restaurant La Grenouille was pressing my greasy nose against the window to envy the beau monde flitting about the exquisite floral arrangements. At the time I worked around the corner, and knew even less about French food than I do now, which is to say "practically nothing." These days I can at least pronounce the names of the mother sauces.

Nowadays I hear the motherland of haute cuisine has started transplanting flowers from the vase to the plate. French chefs are whipping up creations ranging from carnation and herb salad to veal in daisy gravy. The pretty plate above was created by three-star (Michelin, naturellement) chef Yannick Alléno, who recently declared, "France is now my garden." The dish consists of king crab with rock rose, chickweed and borage flowers.

At the risk of being gauche, this floralization begs the question: Can high-concept tiki bars where patrons with edible leis consort with the chefs be far behind?

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No, the rotund New Orleans-inflected celebrity chef will not be rocketing beyond the earth's atmosphere, but his food will.

Next week astronauts on the International Space Station will dine on a menu that Lagasse began crafting more than 18 months ago. The chef will chat with the astronauts next Thursday as they chow down on Mardi Gras Jambalaya, kicked up mashed potatoes with bacon, green beans with garlic, rice pudding, and mixed fruit. UPI's press release notes without a hint of irony that Lagasse is the first star chef to develop recipes served in outer space. It seems that's not entirely true. Alain Ducasse, one of haute cuisine's most successful chefs, has been working with the European Space Agency to give astronauts a taste of fine dining.

Perhaps we can look forward to freeze-dried meals from chefs coming to science museums sometime in the future. God knows they have to be better than Astronaut Ice Cream.

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Chef Kazuki "Kaz" Yamamoto is on the cutting edge of cuisine. And by "cutting edge," what I mean is that he cooks rare, occasionally immoral, and sometimes outright illegal, foods for those who are willing to pay for them. Based out of Arizona, he travels to homes of rich and/or famous clients and plies them with previously untasted delicacies from his traveling "restaurant, known as "Le Menu". Because his client list includes government officials and gastronomes alike, Yamamoto says he has had few problems in the past obtaining locations, including restaurants, to hold his dinners. When Stephen Lemons, the Phoenix New Times food critic joined in a dinner, he sampled foods such as Saguaro cactus salad, made from the legally protected succulent; tenderloin of Bichon Frise, endangered pygmy owl, roasted and eaten whole, with entrails and bones intact; and nigiri-style seal sushi.

Other items that Yamamoto is famed for include chimpanzee stew (protected), grilled intestines of brown bear (poached from Yosemite), rhino genitals, gila monster, giraffe tongue, monkey tartare and a dozen variations on penguin meat.

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