Slide Show: Where Are Seattle’s Copies of Modernist Cuisine Stashed?
Scott Heimendinger
Blogger at seattlefoodgeek.com and, as of January, Business Development Manager for Modernist Cuisine
"There’s one in my office, but I’ve got my personal copy at home, which is perhaps my most coveted possession. When I first got it I kept it on a shelf near the dining room…it was pretty much visible from anywhere in the downstairs of out house. It was there for five months or so then my wife moved it to the guest room/home office…I think it had had enough glory."
"I cook a ton out of it. In fact, I’m cooking out of it as we speak. The beef cheek pastrami, which may be the best food on earth, is brining in my fridge. But I’m careful when I’m cooking out of it—the book has to stay pristine. In fact…I was one of the first people outside the MC team to actually physically have a copy of the book . I got a review copy…and I was so excited and crazy and I literally brought the books to bed every night. After some time, the review period was up, but I made arrangements that I could buy that specific copy. That’s the one that I’ll give to my great grandchildren, that first copy from the first printing…I don’t let people touch them with dirty hands."
Photo Credit: Scott Heimendinger
The restaurant has an extensivee cookbook library, and the entire staff has access to it. Canlis also has an education fund dedicated to purchasing new books, and will buy any volume a staff member requests—as long as the employee does a book report on it in front of the class. I mean, staff.
Photo Credit: Brian Canlis
Of course, MC is part of Canlis’s collection. But because of its preciousness, it’s not kept with the rest of the lowly books. Instead, it usually lives in the office, where it’s just a little more difficult to check out. (We hope the book report was a team effort for this one…)
Photo Credit: Brian Canlis
Thierry Rautureau
Executive Chef of Rover’s and Luc
"Half is on my desk in the office, the other half is in the kitchen at Rover’s," says Rautureau, who contributed a recipe to the tome. "How many people have said they keep it in the bathroom?"
Rautureau has traveled to Spain, arguably the molecular gastronomy motherland, with Nathan Myhrvold, visiting El Bulli and El Celler de Can Roca. (In fact, Myhrvold spent two years in Rautureau’s kitchen as a stagiaire.) The chef has one of the first copies, and he and his staff have fun playing with the books in the back recesses of the Rover’s kitchen.
"I think mostly we look at ideas then, of course, we try to mess with them," he says. "We have a lot of discombobulated people in this job because you can just create without measuring anything; and true, that’s part of what makes the job attractive. But actually, to me, it’s so fascinating to understand certain things that have never before been explained…to really understand and realize ‘I can mess with this, I can change this.’"
Scott Carsberg
Chef at Bisato (formerly Lampreia)
Carsberg first met Nathan Myhrvold when he was a customer at Lampreia. He contributed three recipes to Modernist Cuisine and showed Myhrvold’s team several unusual techniques, including how to butcher a geoduck. Chefs that contributed to the book received copies of their own, and Carsberg confesses that MC coauthor Maxime Bilet recently came to dinner and ribbed him for the uncracked volumes, which sit on a sideboard in the restaurant’s dining room.
"I do enjoy the science of cooking, but I believe a carrot should be a carrot," says Carsberg. "What the book has done for me personally is taught me how to organize recipes, and how to better teach certain types of techniques."
Photo Credit: Andrew Fawcett
William Belickis
Chef and owner of MistralKitchen
Parties that reserve the restaurant’s chef’s table get to dine with Modernist Cuisine just over their shoulders. "We don’t really treat it that differently; I want it to be accessible to guests and staff," says Belickis. Well, that and the acrylic-encased volumes are too big to fit on the nearby shelves that hold the rest of MistralKitchen’s cookbook library. The books are clearly well-thumbed; Belickis says the kitchen staff uses them as references for tasks like agar base clarification (obviously, doesn’t everyone do that?), and when the chef’s table is unoccupied, other diners come by to marvel at the books.
Marc Schermerhorn
Blogger at baketard.com, Microsoft employee when not roasting suckling pig at home
As the proud owner of around 1,000 cookbooks, of course Marc Schermerhorn has a copy of MC. The self-confessed cookbook hoarder displays the art volumes in the pass-through between his kitchen and living room, but the companion kitchen manual, "the actual cookbook" lives on his nightstand. Schermerhorn, known to many Seattle food folk for his engagingly foul-mouthed Twitter presence, has done most of his Modernist cooking with his friend Scott Heimendinger, most notably a failed attempt at gin and tonic spheres. But he’s eager to try again soon, because, hey: "What’s more cool than a portable gin and tonic?"
Jason Wilson
Chef at Crush
Wilson was "a giddy school boy" when he got his copy of MC. To add to the excitement, he attended at dinner at the lab around the same time as the book came out and was thrilled by the meal. Now the set lives in his bookcase, minus whichever volume he’s working through, which gets the prime real estate of the bedside table. Wilson’s thoughts on the book: “It’s the most important piece of information on gastronomy that has been written, definitely a game changer for everyone."
Jethro Odom
Blogger at jetcitygastrophysics.com, Neuromonitoring Technician when not making liquid-center eggs
"I keep it on top of a low bookcase, where you can see it. Our kitchen and dining room are connected, so when I cook from it, I definitely leave it safely on the dining room table…I’m working through the books, I’m just about halfway through the second volume."
Odom tells a story of being over at Heimendinger’s house with fellow food nerd, Eric Rivera (who now works at Alinea in Chicago), gawking at MC just after he’d picked it up. The next day, Heimendinger realized the books were gone. "I didn’t know what happened to them—I freaked out," he recalls. "This was when they were in short supply and you couldn’t just get them." He called his wife in a panic, convinced that someone had heard he had the books, found his address, and broke in to steal them. "But of course, Jethro and Eric just put it in the other room."
Photo Credit: Jethro Odom
