Alinea Book
Go into your kitchen and open your pantry. You’re staring at a lab’s worth of chemicals. Baking soda? That’s calcium bicarbonate if you want to be technical. Cream of tartar? More accurately, it’s potassium hydrogen tartrate. Vinegar is a friendlier name for acetic acid. You can even give your salt its due and refer to it as sodium chloride. Cooking is chemistry. Even the techniques are the same: heating, cooling, purification, dilution, distillation, fermentation. The difference between a saucier and an Erlenmeyer flask, a cooktop and a Bunsen burner, is one of familiarity.
In this essay for Alinea’s cookbook, I coined the term “Postmodern Pantry” to describe the new ingredients and techniques used at Alinea in service of suprising textures and experiences.