Any foodie worth his salt knows that there's more to proper plating than a sprig of parsley and a radish flower, but most can't tell you how we got from shoveling down dinosaur drumsticks à la Fred Flintstone to the edible forest paintings of Noma.
Trenchers
Depending on where you dine, of course, what your dinner looks like might not be that different from what people ate a millennium ago, especially if you still yearn for the pre-Atkins bread-bowl fad (or go to Au Bon Pain every day). In the Middle Ages, plating basically consisted of ladling stews or porridge into trenchers--hollowed out "plates" cut from loaves of old bread, the staler the better. Sure, some royalty enjoyed elaborate, heavily meat-based feasts with over-the-top themes or off-the-wall twists in preparation (think turducken times 10), but for the hoi polloi? Presentation consisted of slop on a doorstop.
Marie Antoinette
Thank Catherine de Medici for changing a lot of that in the 1500s. The daughter of the powerful Florentine family brought dining innovations--forks! ballet! topless waitresses!--with her when she married Henry II of France, and her cultural influence only grew as she became the most powerful woman in Europe. A century later, Louis XIV brought the lavishness of Versailles to its apex, and sealed cuisine's place as an integral part of French culture, both for its flavor and its aesthetics. But the French court's culinary spectacles largely remained just that: spectacles. Pretty to look at, not necessarily to be repeated in your own castle kitchen.
Engraving from Le Patissier Royal Parisien by Careme
It was Marie-Antoine Careme, arguably the first celebrity chef, who brought plating into the modern world. Careme, who was born in 1784 and died in 1833, was an avid amateur student of architecture--he even considered pastry making "the principal branch" of the art. As chef de cuisine to personages all the way up to Napoleon Bonaparte, he presented dishes in the shapes of famous monuments, waterfalls and pyramids; he's believed to have invented the croquembouche.
Wild turbot, shellfish, water chestnuts, and hyacinth vapor at Alinea (Credit: Lara Kastner)
Careme didn't just revolutionize pastry. He came up with the mother sauces, reduced the size of portions (particularly since he was largely working on large banquets with plentiful courses), and emphasized complementary flavors and pairings in presentations.
"For example, today with fried fish we need a cold emulsion," says
Sergio Remolina, a professor at the Culinary Institute of America and chef of the CIA's new Bocuse Restaurant. "That's a classic flavor, and he's the one who starts to pair the flavors like that."
But it was still only the elite who got to see and taste the benefits of Careme's innovations in cooking and presentation. Bringing a new aesthetic appreciation for food to the larger masses had to wait for Auguste Escoffier, who was born two years after Careme died. The timing was no coincidence.
"The Industrial Revolution is happening, and with the Industrial Revolution we have the first millionaires, people who travel for pleasure, the railroad," Remolina says.
Arguably Escoffier's most important contribution to the history of cuisine? A la carte service.
"With Escoffier the portions are still coming in large trays, plated in multiple portions, not the individual plates we know today that are heavily decorated with a lot of work on each plate," Remolina says.
Born to an era where most of the cooking was still done over charcoal and wood in separate buildings and then carried a relatively long distance to where people ate, Escoffier tinkered with devices and methods that allowed cooks to finish meals in the dining room instead. Now smaller, more individualized plates could be served without getting cold.
"People can choose what they eat," Remolinda says. "They're not eating off a presented menu. And fine dining is born as a business."
In the early 20th century,
Fried reindeer moss with cepe at Noma (Credit: Flickr user Adelcambre)
Fernand Point introduced elements that would become signatures of nouvelle cuisine--seasonal ingredients with a focus on natural flavors, an emphasis on service and hospitality, lighter fare, and, above all, simplicity and elegance. He even made the now-ubiquitous baby vegetables a regular addition to the plate.
Point's approach was solidified by his most famous protege, Paul Bocuse, whose "neat and detailed" food presentations became the iconic images of increasingly popular nouvelle cuisine in the 1960s. The next generation of chefs, like
Charlie Trotter and
Alice Waters, took minimalism in cooking and presentation even further. Today, you get Noma's fried reindeer moss with cepe, which appears as if the kitchen had simply pulled up a square foot from a Danish forest and transferred it to a flower-pot saucer.
"In the late 1800s, the sauce is used to hide some of the defects in the meat or the smells because of the treatment of the protein, which could be a little bizarre," Remolina says. "Today, the goal is to feature the ingredient as close as possible to the source. If we have very fresh microgreens, or a fresh fish, we put it right on the plate. When we have a fresh item, we don't need to do much to it. The freshness of the ingredients guides the presentation."
With that in mind, the science-fiction foam impossibilities of El Bulli or the 28-course marathons of Alinea might seem a throwback to the elaborate feasts of Careme or the inedible intellectual noodlings of the Italian Futurists (think linguini in motor-oil sauce with steel nuts and bolts). But in the case of molecular gastronomy, the fanciful presentations are a way of emphasizing, not masking, the flavors.
"They work on extracting the essence of the ingredient, and they play with the sense and textures," Remolina says. "All the senses are involved. Now food is a show."
But don't worry that an age is coming when you won't be able to tell whether something on your table is a fanastically delicious, criminally overpriced meal--or something you forgot to throw out after an afternoon weeding the garden. Evolving presentations or no, great-tasting things will always taste great. Even if they're not served on the branch of a freshly felled birch tree tenderly raised by Greek Orthodox monks atop a mountain retreat in Arcadia.
"A good taco al pastor is going stay around forever," Remolina says reassuringly. "It won't change."
Michael Y. Park is a writer based in Brooklyn. He has eaten scorpions and maggots in Manhattan, picnicked with the king and queen in Malaysia, and traded nuts and fruits in the Khyber Pass and Afghanistan while disguised as an Hazara tribesman. He also once recreated White Castle sliders with baby food.
